ABSTRACT

Dual Enculturation: A Comparison of Five L2 Students Writing for One General Education Course by Kara Elise Otto

This dissertation investigates five international undergraduate students writing two papers for a single disciplinary course. The course is dually classified as meeting a pre-major requirement and a general education writing requirement. Disciplinary contexts classified as general education often involve resistant students whom identify with other disciplines, but are forced into enrollment by institutional requirement. This means students must adopt sometimes-contrasting thinking and writing perspectives. In the case of large courses featuring competitive assessment, this may become especially problematic – particularly for non-native speakers of English – because rationales for disciplinary distinction may be even more obscured by other academic, institutional, linguistic, or cultural concerns. Courses of this type tend not to be researched in prior studies of second language writing.

This dissertation relies upon qualitative methods of data collection – particularly text- based interviewing - in asking: (1) How do L2 international students interpret and approach writing assignments in a general education, social science course? (2) What strategies and resources do they use in the writing process, and where do they come from? These questions are important because they lend heterogeneity to populations of international students increasing on U.S. college campuses, and because they may debunk tendencies to group students as more similar then they actually may be – particularly in disciplinary contexts where instructors lack expertise in both writing instruction and L2 student writing.

Furthermore, studies of L2 students engaged in disciplinary writing lag behind those investigating general composition classrooms, and studies that do investigate L2 students in disciplinary situations tend not to focus upon several writers in the same course. Researchers further tend to make use of their own subjects. Finally, the field of second language writing is new, developing theoretically, and still influenced by its parent fields. As such, studies tend to under-theorize and there is a need for theoretical development from within the field.

Findings from this study garner support for the use of sociohistoric theory as an emergent, analytical tool capable of explaining L2 writers’ diverse practices in disciplinary contexts; however, in stemming from this analytical frame, this study provides a new theoretical explanation called dual enculturation. This term bridges key empirical priorities for two separate but related parent fields of second language writing: composition and applied linguistics. Importantly, this term derives from students’ perspectives - whether accurate or not - that they somehow struggled additionally with assigned writing tasks because of their NNES status. Students’ reports indicated that they managed additional writing difficulties, which they presumed were otherwise absent in the experiences of their NES peers enrolled in the same course. Dual enculturation represents writing tensions reported across the five international students. Students believed that their written texts could not focus exclusively upon competence in social science writing. Instead, students reported an additional and sometimes conflicting responsibility to demonstrate competence in academic writing as a separate but equally important discipline, and one they equated with knowledge of the L2 language and culture. Finally, additional findings point toward the nature of feedback absorption as systemically acquired, rather than within a local or immediate writing context teachers might assume.

Literate activity, like all human activity, is situated in localities: points of time and space wherein individuals engage in literate acts in order to accomplish goals. But these points of time and space are situated in a history of individuals, collectives, tools, and environment, and each element in that point of time and space bring with it layered histories, meanings, and intentions. What is not yet clear from research on literacy, writing development, and classroom activity is how these points of time and space are utilized as resources for writers in new situations, and how the structure of schooling and its changes over time shape those resources. This project explores how the activity of student writing grows and changes at different points of space and time throughout the school year for ten seventh-grade students in two language arts classes in southern California, and, furthermore, how those points of space and time lead to changes in the patterns of writing activity that those students engage in.

Through a theoretical framework that examines writing activity as the individuated, intersubjective (Bazerman, 2013) establishment of structurated (Giddens, 1984) situations (Mehan & Wood, 1975a) that reinforce and perpetuate systems of activity (Engestrom, 2001) in a flat, uneven social world (Latour, 2003), this work examines literacy development as a series of literate acts of increasing complexity and specificity suspended in time and space and connected materially in a variety of ways. These literate acts serve as resources for future writing activity that can be accessed via these material connections as well as the networks of connections established in the minds of users of literacy.

By focusing on ten students in those two classrooms and tracking their writing habits throughout the course of the school year, this study shows the changes in writing that happened to these students over time. These observations of the students, which was supported by video analysis, document collection, and interviews with both students and their teacher, are analyzed through a grounded theory analysis (Saldana, 2009) through eleven different exposures (Prior, 1998) in order to bound student action within literate acts.

When examining writing for multiple purposes in the classroom--such as benchmarks, warm-ups, etc.--specific literate acts were, when analyzed in a multi-exposure manner, shown to have pathways of connections leading outward from them both forward and backward in time. These acts were then analyzed and connected through intertextual connections, genre sets and systems, activity systems, and community values to other kinds of writing that students complete throughout the school year.

This analysis shows that students engage in enduring, situated orchestration shifts (ESOS) in their use of talk, tools, and texts around and for the act of writing, and that these shifts serve as the groundwork upon which writing development builds. Implications for teacher education, the teaching of writing, and the act of writing are proposed based on these findings.

Descriptive understandings of what human learning is, and so normative expectations of what teachers can and should do as educational leaders, has shifted greatly in society over the past century. The learning metaphors have moved from mechanical transfer to organic transformation; the educational approaches have moved from behavioral response-training to social-emotional facilitating: encouraging students not merely to repeat experts but to think like members in those knowledge-based communities, not merely to mimic disciplines' methods but to participate personally in the ongoing discourse of those fields. In an immediate sense, this shift is progress.

Yet, in a larger sense, it is merely cycling back to acknowledge an old and persistent thread of practical wisdom among educators: that people learn complexly as emotional-social-intellectual creatures, and so that a teacher's work is to entice interest and effort, to foster a sense of belonging and trust, and to persuade students toward personally connecting with and valuing those same integral parts of a subject-matter that the teacher has already beneficially personalized for themselves. This longstanding rhetorical and pragmatic view of a teacher's educational role is now being supported directly by empirical research that shows the sense-bound, neurologically integrated, socially attuned, identity-and-meaning motivated character of human feelings, thoughts, and dispositions.

I introduce the term “analogous personalization” to capture this synthetic (experience-based, scientifically supported) understanding of teaching as complexly social-emotional, intellectual, persuasive work. I then focus on educational dialogs—specifically within post-secondary writing-based courses—as a means of exploring how expert teachers foster synchrony between their own and their students' personal connections to (i.e., emotional inclination toward, social affiliation with, intellectual/practical understanding of) subject-matter.

First, this dissertation offers a synthetic overview of some emergent mind-brain-body findings, and points out the fundamental educational realities that those findings substantiate. On that foundation, it next overviews insights from the field of rhetoric-and-writing about how teachers can usefully conceptualize the learner-knowledge-environment relationship from a dialogic perspective, to achieve effective (intentional, situated, synchronous) educational exchanges. Building from those scientific and practical literatures, it offers a flexible research method for studying the pragmatic arc of an educational exchange (from teacher intention to student take-away): by using the teacher's own personal, practical, principled framework of educational ideals and approaches; comparing their stated intentions with students' stated learning experiences, and tracing the arc of that educational dialog through actual classroom recordings. Finally, it enlists this radically situated research method to analyze three expert university writing teachers' practices: their idiosyncratic understandings of a teacher's role (from their own perspective); their experience-based manner of forming learning-centered relationships with students (from my observing perspective); and their apparent, persuasive self-investment in the course's subject-matter and the students' learning (from students' perspectives). It concludes with observations about the role of a teacher's sincerity (both practiced and perceived) in developing professional expertise and achieving synchrony with students in educational exchanges.

In Latin America, writing curriculum is primarily focused on freshman initiatives, emerging engineering writing initiatives across curriculum are recent (as of 2009), and there is limited amount of studies in writing development in higher education. Therefore, this dissertation describes local elements at stake in Latin America to define disciplinary writing and communication expectations of development in higher education as a phenomenon that goes well beyond freshman composition courses. Multiple sites of expectations of writing in engineering have been revealed through diverse data sources: 1) Publications on Latin-American writing initiatives in engineering from Spanish-Speaking countries; 2) Online news on engineering from the two oldest newspapers in a developing country, Colombia; and, 3) A case study within the context of a Colombian major in Industrial Engineering examined through: a) Syllabi of the major and interviews with faculty members regarding accomplishing a senior thesis; b) Submitted senior thesis reports to fulfill degree requirements; and, c) A qualitative retrospective survey of writing experiences and samples of writing assignments of undergraduate students.

As a result, this dissertation is comprised of five chapters that address separately the analysis of the prior data sources. Overall this study claims that there are specific expectations associated with the field of industrial engineering in a developing economy that did not emerge when studies or initiatives regard “engineering” as one field without contextual nuances. One of the hypothesis emerging from this study is that the size and ideological localization of the companies that are likely the contexts of professional practices might impact a) the degree of complexity of the communication practices to negotiate solutions and circulate, create, and accept genres (small companies, few stakeholders involved, less negotiation to create and accept genres and standards, which might generate more vertical and hierarchical communication), and b) the opportunity for engineering students to develop critical stances about improving entrepreneurial environments, since they might be more concerned in genre consumption and production (such as regulations and guidelines) to regulate practices under external powerful standards (which might be primarily mandated by developed economies).

Furthermore, this study confirms that within the Engineering field in general, and in Industrial Engineering in particular, writing and communication rely on verbal and non-verbal practices that embrace different functions, which in turn imply several developmental paths that might or not might overlap, such as: a) Writing for learning disciplinary and professional concepts; b) Writing for research-oriented practices; c) Writing for commercial research-oriented practices; d) Writing for business-oriented practices; and, e) Writing for conducting and accomplishing a senior thesis. This study ultimately confirms that there is no way to assess writing development in higher education through only one source of data, since there are diverse paths configured by all of the stakeholders involved (government, writing specialists, faculty members of disciplines, students, and practitioners of the fields), which means that development is multifaceted.

This study examines the experiences of five Egyptian undergraduate students at the American University in Cairo (AUC) from different educational, class and geographic backgrounds. This study finds that students from public schooling and lower socioeconomic backgrounds arrive at AUC with significant language, literacy and social deficits compared to counterparts from private schooling and high socioeconomic backgrounds. The study considers how participants, based on the backgrounds, become involved with transnational literacy practices in university writing assignments. The study draws upon scholarship in transnational literacy studies, to inflect how New Literacy Studies considers global and local literacies with concepts of capital and positionality drawn from Pierre Bourdieu. The study conceptualizes student educational and class backgrounds as forms of cultural and social capital which, when deployed at AUC, result in differing participant positionality along educational and class lines. Although this distribution creates challenges for students from public schooling backgrounds, the study also finds that a student from a public schooling background exhibited unusually adaptive qualities, resulting in novel approaches to completing a complex literacy task. The study concludes by arguing that transnational literacy studies be extended to account for intranational movements within uniquely configured embedded, hybrid and permeable transnational spaces that serve local interests.

This dissertation investigates the experiences of undergraduates who publish in university-sponsored venues classroom papers written within lower-division courses. Dating back to the early 1900s, the publication of classroom work in student anthologies has become an extended practice in U.S. writing programs (Loomis, 2006). More recently, the expansion of the undergraduate research movement has enabled undergraduate students to participate in research journal publications.Even though it is frequently considered a signature practice of student-centered writing pedagogy, the undergraduate publication has had little research value for the field, and student voices were the least explored dimension. Undergraduate publications have been predominantly explored through the lens of instructors and administrators. Although this information has been central to understanding the phenomena, particularly in terms of the benefits and challenges of carrying out such an initiative, there is limited information about the meaning of this experience for the students themselves and how it impacts their writing development. This qualitative study takes a closer look at the phenomena and examines the experiences of undergraduate students who publish in university-sponsored venues. It has been designed drawing on phenomenology and narrative analysis methods to explore the publication of classroom work in two university-sponsored venues. It focuses on students who published work written within lower-division courses, to capture the initial relationship that students establish with publication and to understand the extent that this opportunity aids their engagement and social position within the university community. Additionally, it contrasts the experience of students from two different institutional contexts, a writing program’s anthology of student writing and a national undergraduate research journal. In line with the growing research that centers on student development from an emic perspective, I seek to lift the voices of undergraduate students, the underrepresented group in the currently available literature. Therefore, the central question that guides this study is: what meaning do undergraduates who published a paper written within their first two years of college ascribe to university publication? The findings of this study provide evidence about the value of undergraduate publication for the student participants, their role as authors as well as the networks and resources that support their engagement in the process. This is relevant information for writing researchers interested in the circulation of student texts and student authorship, but also for faculty and program administrators who seek to assess and/or improve the learning experiences of undergraduate students and their disciplinary development.