2 The Researcher and the Writers

      As Casanave (2005) notes, research is primarily told through narrative—that is, through “a complex reconstruction of many tales designed to end with a message of significance” (p. 22). In order to make meaning, narrative weaves together various stories, tidying up the details along the way to help us make sense of a larger whole. In this chapter, I share the background to the research narrative that unfolds throughout the book. I begin by sharing my own paradigm of inquiry and the research methodology I have adopted, and I then describe the context in which my research took place and the writers whom I followed.

      Approach to Inquiry

      Ideology and inquiry paradigms are contentious aspects of knowledge construction, serving to distinguish sciences from social sciences from humanities, and even causing friction within many disciplinary fields of study. I use the term ideology here to refer to ontology (the nature of reality), epistemology (the nature of knowledge), axiology (the nature of value), and methodology (the procedures for knowledge construction). (See Silva, 2005, for a much more in-depth treatment of ideology and paradigms of inquiry.) In line with Harklau and Williams (in press), I believe strongly in the value of researchers examining and sharing their own ideologies and inquiry paradigms with readers, so I attempt to do so here.

      The paradigm of knowledge construction that underlies the research in this book is best characterized by what Silva (2005) refers to as humble pragmatic rationalism (HPR), also known as critical rationalism. Drawing on the work of Karl Popper, Silva defines HPR as follows:

      . . . HPR’s ontology is that of a modified realism; that is, reality exists, but can never be fully known. It is driven by natural laws that can only be incompletely or partially understood. HPR’s epistemology is interactionist—a result of the interaction between subject (researcher) and object (physical reality), wherein a human being’s perceptual, cognitive, and social filters preclude any totally objective or absolute knowledge. Regarding axiology, HPR values knowledge—knowledge that is tentative, contingent, and probabilistic. HPR’s methodology is multimodal—involving the integration of empirical study (qualitative as well as quantitative) and hermeneutic inquiry (the refinement of ideas through interpretation and dialogue, through conjecture and refutation). (p. 9)

      Throughout the book, I try to stay true to this paradigm. In studying the knowledge development of individual writers, I believe that there is some physical reality involved in this process that can be partially understood through inquiry. I also acknowledge that, without doubt, my own experiences and identities (as a privileged White, native speaker of English, as an ESL/EFL teacher, as a graduate student at the time of the research, as someone who has lived and functioned in a second language) influence my understanding of this reality, and that my “meddling around” as a researcher has influenced the shape of the reality. I don’t believe that inquiry into a social phenomenon like writing can uncover an absolute truth, but I do believe it can contribute to tentative and contingent knowledge. Given these beliefs, I see value in multiple modes of inquiry, or methodologies.

      In hoping to understand more closely the processes of genre knowledge building, I have turned here to situated qualitative research as a primary methodology. I wholeheartedly agree with Atkinson (2005) that “efforts to study human behavior by limiting its influence, variability, or naturalness are in this sense illusory and misguided” (p. 63). Along those lines, the writers’ stories that follow are highly variable and individualized. As a researcher, I remained more interested in following than controlling the often random and unpredictable influences that seeped into the research context, affecting the writers’ behaviors and processes in a multitude of ways. I struggled often with the question of to what extent I could or should tidy up their stories, and how doing so would affect not only my own understandings but also those of my readers. With these heavy reservations at the fore, I dove in to the study, in Atkinson’s (2005) words, “doing the impossible” (p. 63).

      Research Context

      This research follows four international graduate students studying at a U.S. university. While the study began in the confines of an ESL writing course, it continued by following the independent trajectories of the students through their disciplinary programs and research. My goal in following the paths of four writers was to understand better the nature of genre knowledge and how it changes over time, in different contexts. Researchers commonly distinguish a writer’s declarative knowledge (the conscious knowledge that the writer can describe) as well as more tacitly held understandings, also called procedural knowledge. In order to access both declarative and procedural knowledge to the extent possible, and to identify such knowledge from various perspectives, I integrated multiple sources, including the writers’ texts, texts the writers drew upon or were guided by in their writing tasks, oral interviews with the writers and their writing course instructor, audiotapes of the writers’ conference with their writing course instructor, observations and field notes of their writing class sessions, and, in some cases, written feedback from the writers’ disciplinary instructors and mentors. I provide a more extensive description of the research design and methodology in Appendix A; information about collected texts, interviews, and instructor conferences are outlined in Appendices B, C, and D.

      Midwest University

      The Electrical Engineering Building at Midwest University is a three-story red-brick building with large, shiny glass windows and a towering atrium. Pictures of men in suits and gold-plated award plaques hang in the lobby. The white, tile-floor hallways are flanked by rows of closed doors bearing small nameplates, computer-generated images, and flyers for various engineering conferences. Voices at times echo through the halls, scheduling an appointment or discussing a problem encountered in the lab. The voices are usually male; you may hear the American-accented English typical to the evening news, but you are more likely to hear Chinese, Korean, or Indian accents and languages. Thousands of international students studying the sciences and engineering spend their days and evenings—for four or five years—in settings just like this.

      For two years, from 2002 through 2004, I spent much of my time trying to learn more about the disciplinary writing development of four of these students at a large, state university in the Midwestern region of the United States (referred to here as “Midwest University”). As a research university with particular strength in engineering and technology fields, Midwest University enrolled the largest number of international students at a U.S. public university at the time of the study. In the fall of 2002, the total enrollment of international students was 4,695; the overall enrollment of international graduate students was 2,670. During the 2002–2003 academic year, almost 43% of the graduate students at the university were considered international students, with the greatest number of these coming from India, People’s Republic of China, and South Korea. Many of these students were enrolled in the university’s nationally-recognized programs of Computer Sciences (CS) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). In these departments, the diversity of the student population reflects that of the faculty, many of whom are originally from Asia or Europe.

      International students in particular often come to these programs with extensive workplace experience and jobs to which they plan to return after completing their degrees. While some graduate students in these departments prepare for an academic career, many pursue work in industry;