3 Learning through Other People’s Words

      At advanced levels of academe, classroom writing is, by and large, genred writing. Whether students are writing seminar papers, lab reports, proposals, or critiques, their written texts are guided and evaluated by certain disciplinary expectations. Classrooms therefore become important sites of knowledge building, as it is here that students encounter guidelines, feedback, models, and samples that feed into their developing understanding of writing in general and of genres in particular. Of course, not all classrooms are the same; there are, for instance, considerable differences between a course in biomedical engineering and one in academic writing. Nevertheless, both settings have the potential to influence a writer’s understanding of writing and of written texts. I will focus on such knowledge building in so-called “disciplinary content classrooms” in later chapters, but first, in chapters 3 and 4, I turn to knowledge building in the writing classroom, a site of particular interest to teachers of writing.

      My focus in the next two chapters is on the strategies and resources for genre learning that are available in the writing classroom. Certainly, the stories of the John, Yoshi, Paul, and Chatri are tied to their unique local setting. Nevertheless, their stories provide illustrations of the very specific ways that knowledge building can occur within a writing classroom. When considered alongside related literature on classroom learning, these cases add to a broader theoretical understanding of learning genres outside of the milieu in which they exist more organically.

      Interacting with Texts

      As I observed students in WCGS, both in the classroom described here and in a prior pilot study, I was struck repeatedly with the ways in which the writers looked to textual samples as important resources for knowledge building within the classroom context. Classroom activities prompted much interaction with texts, but students continued to draw on sample texts as they composed outside of the classroom. While the use of texts as “models” to be analyzed and imitated by students raises concerns of prescriptivism for instructors, students often desire models and tend to make effective use of them. Many studies have shown students to make use of sample or model texts as learning resource in their disciplinary content courses or in workplace or research settings (e.g., Angelova & Riazantseva, 1999; Beaufort, 1999, 2000; Ivanič, 1998; McCarthy, 1987; Riazi, 1997; Shaw, 1991; Smart, 2000; Winsor, 1996), but this area has been less examined within writing classroom contexts. Two studies that have looked at the use of text models as an explicit teaching strategy suggest that exposure to genre exemplars may have a positive influence on student learning.

      In an attempt to understand the role of model texts for native English speaking students, Charney and Carlson (1995) studied the effects of exposure to models in a psychology course in which students were learning to write a Methods section for a research paper. The researchers divided 95 students into different groups: (a) no models, (b) three models of Methods sections receiving “A,” labeled as such, (c) a model of an “A,” “B,” and “C” Methods section, labeled with their respective grades, (d) three “A”-graded models with no labels included, and (e) an “A,” “B,” and “C” model with no labels. Students were then given details related to a particular experiment and asked to compose their own Methods section in a one-hour time period. Exposure to models influenced both the content and the organization of the students’ texts in positive ways. Interestingly, there appeared to be no advantage to giving students only “A” models, as opposed to giving them the range of “A,” “B,” and “C” models. Exposure to models, however, did not seem to help the student-writers discriminate between relevant and irrelevant details; similarly, labeling models (as “A,” “B,” or “C”) also had no affect in this area.

      Within the context of a genre-based ESP classroom, Henry and Roseberry (1998) examined the effects of explicit genre analysis of model texts on student writers in a first-year management class in Brunei. As the students learned to write travel brochures, they were divided into two groups: one receiving six hours of genre-based instruction (in which students analyzed model texts) and a second receiving no genre-based instruction. Those students who analyzed model texts had higher “texture” scores (an index designed to measure cohesion and coherence) in a post-test, and their gain scores were significantly higher than the students who had received no genre-based instruction. Like Charney and Carlson’s (1995) research, however, this study measures only very short-term benefits of exposure to and analysis of model texts. Also important for instructors is the absence of any consideration of students’ application of genre knowledge beyond the immediate classroom context.

      If student interactions with texts—whether those texts be “models” or simply “samples”—are so influential in non-writing classroom settings (as these studies, for example, suggest), one might believe that such interactions are also important within the writing classroom. It is, after all, in this space that students are very often given samples and that such samples are explicitly discussed. As I traced student writing in WCGS, it soon became clear that the texts to which they were exposed played a very important role in developing their knowledge of an unfamiliar genre. One such example was the writers’ engagement in the writing assignment of a self-promotional genre: a job application cover letter.

      Job Application Cover Letters as a Genre

      As junior scientific researchers, Chatri, Paul, John, and Yoshi repeatedly spoke of the disciplinary value of remaining objective and impersonal in one’s writing. Through years of writing lab reports, research reports, and classroom assignments, they had become accustomed to avoiding any mention of themselves in their writing. Therefore, the job application cover letter assignment in WCGS introduced a fairly new rhetorical purpose to these writers: to promote themselves, rather explicitly, to their readers.

      Certainly, scientific texts like research articles do require authors to self-promote or market themselves, persuading readers that they are legitimate and credible members of the discipline (Hyland, 2000). In such texts, writers must illustrate their credibility through relatively subtle means such as displays of disciplinary knowledge or self-citation. Numerous other genres require writers to take more of a “hard-sell” approach, marketing themselves in addition to their work. This class of genres includes, for example, résumés, job application letters, graduate school statements of purpose, or fellowship applications. In composing these sorts of texts, writers need to know how to promote themselves effectively within a specific rhetorical context, balancing the boundary between confidence and arrogance.

      Studies of self-promotional genres in general, and job application cover letters in particular, are scarce. Swales and Feak (2000) describe these letters as supporting a research career, “primarily designed to get the ‘right’ academic people in the ‘right’ positions” (p. 257). Job application letters are also included in Swales’ (1996) list of “occluded genres,” which encompass genres that share several characteristics: they are typically formal, kept on file, written for very specific audiences, often highly evaluative, often concerned with promoting the author (and his or her scholarship), and often occluded from the public. While the cover letter meets several of these criteria, it lacks the defining feature of occlusion. Through reference