Building Genre Knowledge. Christine Tardy
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do not necessarily prepare students for academic careers, as is more often the case in the humanities and social sciences, the academic environment of graduate school, and all of the norms and values of that environment, may at times conflict with some students’ experiences before and/or after their graduate study.
The Writing Classroom: WCGS
Three times a week, a small number of engineering and science graduate students from across the Midwest University campus leave the culturally and linguistically diverse hallways of the engineering and science buildings to come to the comparatively White and monolingual “Marshall Hall”—the building that houses the university’s English department. Here, the students converge for 50 minutes to participate in a course entitled Written Communication for Graduate Students (or, “WCGS,” as I’ll refer to it). WCGS is a no-credit, pass/fail writing course for graduate students for whom English is a second language. While some departments on campus (such as electrical engineering) require the course for second language students, other departments and advisors encourage individual students to enroll. While students largely appreciate the writing support that the course offers, the lack of course credit or a grade lead many students to give the course low priority in comparison with their other courses. Several sections of WCGS are offered through the English department every semester, with approximately 60 to 80 students completing the course each year. The class size is limited to ten students, who come from various departments and programs at the university but are primarily engineers. While a diverse population of students take WCGS, the majority are males from East Asian countries.
The course is regularly taught by an English department faculty member or one of a number of graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs) with an interest in second language writing. Instructors have a great degree of autonomy in course design, but they generally cover genres that are likely to be encountered in academic and professional settings, such as a curriculum vitae/résumé, conference abstract, grant proposal, or manuscript review. WCGS students are encouraged to use their current research projects as the content for these assignments. Because of the small class size, instructors can be fairly flexible in their choice of assignments and content covered in the course. Some instructors focus heavily on process and revision, while others may highlight generic aspects of texts, and still others may require assignments that incorporate interview or ethnography-like tasks that explore social aspects of writing. Although the class is scheduled to meet for three 50-minute sessions per week, many instructors choose to hold individual writing conferences with students (in lieu of class) as they work on composing and revising their writing for each assignment.
In the course section that I observed, students wrote five major assignments: a writer’s autobiography, a CV/ résumé, a cover letter, a conference poster or presentation, and a final project chosen by each individual student. The students each participated in six individual conferences with the instructor during the semester, roughly one conference for each major assignment. The course instructor saw the conferences as serving several purposes, including learning more about the students and their work, tailoring the course to individual student needs, and—with newer students—talking with them and reassuring them about graduate school more generally.
Aside from the major paper drafts, students were not assigned additional homework; given the lack of credit received for the course, the instructor hoped to make it as low-stress as possible. She strove to find paper assignments that the writers could tailor to their individual needs, and believed that students could get out of the course what they wanted to. Class materials included a coursepack designed by the instructor that included numerous sample texts for each assignment, some published examples and some written by previous WCGS students. In addition, the teacher often created handouts for classroom activities, in many cases drawing on materials from Swales and Feak’s books (1994a) Academic Writing for Graduate Students and (2000) English in Today’s Research World.
The Instructor: Michele
Prior to the semester that I began my research, the course instructor (who was also a personal friend), “Michele,” agreed early on to let me observe her section of WCGS for my research. In her 10 years of teaching writing, Michele (herself a native speaker of English) had taught students of diverse backgrounds and needs, including so-called basic writers, ESL writers, and mainstream students. During the semester that I observed her course, Michele was beginning the fourth and final year of her doctoral study in Rhetoric and Composition. This was her third time teaching WCGS, and she described the students as fairly typical in terms of their stage in their degree programs and level of writing ability.
At the start of the semester, Michele described herself to me as “a social constructivist at heart” and explained her general philosophical approach to teaching as making “invisible practices visible”:
So, it’s like, there’s all these practices that you need to be able to do to gain entry into certain groups, and if you don’t do them, sometimes people aren’t even aware that you’re not doing them, but they’ll think you’re wrong or off somehow. So, my goal I guess is, I’ll help students do what they want to do by making those practices that are hidden and no one’s gonna tell them about visible . . . Where no one’s gonna tell them until after the fact otherwise. (August 28, 2002)
Toward this goal, Michele explained that she planned on including many activities in the class in which students would look at sample texts, discussing the subtleties of texts that might be interpreted in different ways—for example, what she called the “formal informality” of American academic discourse. She hoped to discuss examples of writing in terms of the social interactions conveyed through text. In doing so, her goal was to help students develop strategies for dealing with the situations they may encounter as graduate students:
I hope students leave the class with an approach to tackle similar situations. So, if they’re in a situation where they don’t know how they’re supposed to write something, they can have some sort of a way they can try to figure it out. So, we look at- one of the things we do is- I hope they look at lots of examples of things. So, they’re like, “OK, how do I write a research grant? I’ll look at seven other research grants in this field, and- both for large structural things and specific wording kinds of things.” And most of them do that already, but, I don’t know, “heightened rhetorical awareness” is what I’m looking for. (August 28, 2002)
One of her initial goals was to make the class flexible in addressing individual student interests. Throughout the semester, she encouraged students to bring in papers they were working on outside of the class, to practice delivering upcoming presentations, and to share their professional experiences and questions with others in class.
Michele also explained that she did not tend to view herself as a professorial figure in the classroom, but more a “native speaker friend who happens to have rhetorical training” (August 28, 2002). She explained that many of the students felt somewhat isolated at Midwest University and that this isolation was impeding their ability to succeed in many of their tasks.
Sometimes I’m not sure if they really need me. I mean, I think they need the course. I’m not so sure if they- I think maybe the greatest value of the course is to give students a chance to sit and, you know, have a couple hours a week where they talk about their writing and what they’re trying to do with their writing, and how they see their field and the written work they do in their field. It matters less, like, what specific activities you do or who’s teaching the course, in a way. It’s giving students a structured space to reflect every week about writing, and I think that’s maybe the most useful part. Because these are smart students. They can figure out some of the specific things taught in the class by themselves. But it’s more it gives students an opportunity set aside that they have to do that every week that I think is the most useful part. (August 28, 2002)
Michele saw herself, then, as a kind of native-speaker, graduate student informant, facilitating the discussion and practice of scheduled writing tasks.
The Class Members
I began attending WCGS on the first day of the semester, sitting with the students at the tables that circled the room. At the end of the first week, after the class enrollment had stabilized, I presented the details of the project to the 11 class members, explaining