No abstract

Theoretical and pedagogical interest in writing in academic disciplines and other discourse communities has grown in the last decade, but few studies have looked at advanced levels of disciplinary enculturation. In this study, I examine the contexts for writing and response in a graduate education seminar with fifteen students, including eight nonnative speakers of English. I consider how the professor explicitly and implicitly communicated expectations for the form and content of writing assignments; how the students understood, negotiated and undertook these tasks; and how the professor evaluated and responded to students' final written texts. Finally, I argue that the students' writing tasks occur in a complex, multidimensional historical field of personal and social contexts and that advanced levels of disciplinary enculturation are marked by a specific set of issues revolving around students' emerging authority and conflicts inherent in disciplinary microsocieties.

This article reports on a genre-based needs analysis for a graduate course in English for academic purposes (EAP) at a large public U.S. university. In particular, it describes the theoretical reconceptualizations of genre analysis that the data provoked. Using ethnographic methods, an investigation of academic genres in several classrooms in three academic disciplines (civil and environmental engineering, architecture, and music) found three complexities that challenged the original premises of the needs analysis: (a) that academic genres existed in genre sets and systems that involved process and pedagogical genres as well as genres of disciplinary or academic presentation; (b) that genres were routinely multimodal in process and form; and (c) that the discursive character of particular texts was routinely quite hybrid. This article discusses and illustrates each of these findings and argues for understanding them as dimensions of multimodal genre systems.

No abstract

No abstract