had also received negative feedback from professors of his doctoral courses, particularly about grammar and sentence phrasing. While he hoped to make improvements in his writing during the WCGS course, his expectations were not high. He knew that writing development was a long-term process that took time and practice, but he still seemed quite uncomfortable with his writing. In his Writer’s Autobiography assignment for WCGS, he wrote that:
. . . I still feel very uncomfortably when I have to write no matter it is a short or long paragraph. I know myself that my writing is difficult to understand because I tend to write the awkward sentences. I think that if I do not improve the writing skill, it can cause me trouble when I write the preliminary report and dissertation, and I hope that WCGS will make my writing skill better. (Writer’s Autobiography, September 2002)
This discomfort with his writing ability was evident in most of my discussions with Chatri, though over time his conception of writing seemed to shift somewhat. In the later months of my study, Chatri began to speak of writing in a more complex way. He described it as including the articulation of thoughts into sentences, then organizing those sentences into paragraphs, and convincing the reader that the ideas are important; Chatri felt that he was weak in all of these areas.
Yoshi
A first-year master’s student in ECE, Yoshi arrived in the U.S. just days before WCGS began. Despite the major adjustments he was making—as a newcomer to the U.S. and to American graduate school education, with his wife and newborn baby back in Japan—he graciously agreed to participate in this study. During our regular discussions, Yoshi spoke slowly and articulately about his writing and his professional experiences in his field.
When asked how his research interests had developed, Yoshi explained that his first experiences using a PC in middle school had sparked his interest in computers. While completing his bachelor’s degree in Japan, he decided to study information technology as a mechanical engineering major. He continued directly through school with a master’s degree in logical designing and then began working at a major Japanese computer company. In this company, his specialty was design automation development. As part of his work there, he needed to gain additional knowledge in the fields of electromagnetics and optics, which would be his area of focus at Midwest University. Now in his early 30s, Yoshi’s long-term goal was to be a general manager at his company, so he saw English as a necessary skill. When I first met Yoshi, he explained, “At this point, I felt it difficult to study or work in English, so I have to practice English speaking and writing skills” (September 11, 2002).
His nine years as an engineer in Japan had lent him the type of valuable experience and knowledge that many graduate students lack. In addition to writing regular experimental reports, a bachelor’s thesis, and a master’s thesis, Yoshi had written internal research reports, specification documents, project proposals, and patents. Although most of his academic and professional work was conducted in Japanese, he had nevertheless been required to do a fair amount of reading in English. In our first interview and in his Writer’s Autobiography for WCGS, Yoshi distinguished between his confidence in writing in academic/professional genres versus “essay” writing, which he found particularly difficult. He owed this to “shying away from practices about writing an essay in English” (Writer’s Autobiography, September 2002). During my study, however, Yoshi seized opportunities to practice English speaking, reading, or writing. In his second semester of graduate school, Yoshi enrolled in a non-university English speaking course to improve his oral skills, and he began reading English newspapers on a daily basis, checking his comprehension by later referring to the same news reported in Japanese. As a non-thesis student, Yoshi (like John) was not a member of a research group and did not complete any major independent research projects during the study.
At the beginning of my study and the start of WCGS, Yoshi was also trying out a new process for composing, forcing himself to “think in English” when writing, rather than thinking and writing in Japanese and then translating into English. Yoshi also generally made use of multiple dictionaries because of the advice of a previous English teacher who had told him not to trust one single dictionary. In his Writer’s Autobiography for WCGS, Yoshi recounted some of the important influences on his writing development to this point:
Through research projects at my senior and graduate school years, I published two theses and three papers. In my first research project, I had to read a lot of reference papers, both written in my native language and in English, related to Discrete Fourier Transform algorithms. Through this reading experience, I had gained knowledge of not only the topic but also writing styles for technical papers. Yet once I started to write my Bachelor thesis, I realized the difficulty to express what I meant briefly and concisely. Reviewing and reviewing with my mentor, rewriting and rewriting it, I felt certain that my sentences became brief and concise. What I have learned most through this refining process is to write proper length sentences and to select transitive words logically. (Writer’s Autobiography, September 2002)
One of his goals for WCGS was that it would help him write more quickly. He commented also that the class would require him to write, giving him practice that he would not otherwise have. During his time at Midwest University, Yoshi noted that he was able to write faster and with greater confidence than he had when he first arrived.
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
