supportive of me from my days as an undergraduate to the present. And I owe special thanks to Tony Silva, who has taught me much more about research and second language writing than he knows. His careful and cutting-edge work has inspired me as a researcher, and his encouraging words and calm demeanor helped me keep my sanity while swimming in binders and files of data.
I am also very thankful for the support I’ve received at DePaul University, especially from my department chairs Bill Fahrenbach and Peter Vandenberg, and my past and present colleagues in rhetoric and composition (Pete, Darsie, David, Roger, Heather, Julie, Melinda, Matthew, Shaun, René, and Tony), who have indulged my attempts to bridge disciplinary divides. DePaul’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences also provided helpful support through a summer research grant. At Parlor Press, I am grateful to David Blakesley, who provided very helpful guidance and support along the way, and to Paul Kei Matsuda for his belief in this work from its earlier stages and his always helpful conversations in moving forward to this stage. I am also indebted to Anis Bawarshi for his thorough read and insightful suggestions on an earlier version of the manuscript. Any remaining faults in this work are mine alone. Finally, I thank Matthew for putting up with the endless anti-social evenings that have gone into this project and for engaging my obsession with seeing the world through genre.
1 Genre and Genre Knowledge
Linguistic diversity in higher education is on the rise. According to the Institute of International Education (2008), the number of international students in U.S. universities has jumped from about 34,000 in 1954 to just over 580,000 in 2007. Similarly, the international student population has continued to grow in the United Kingdom, with over 330,000 international students in the United Kingdom in 2005, making up 13% of the total student population in higher education (UK Council for International Student Affairs, 2008). In both countries, the international student enrollment is slightly higher at the graduate level than the undergraduate level, with the majority of international students studying in the fields of engineering, business and management, and physical and life sciences. Indeed, in the U.S. it is not uncommon for engineering graduate programs at research universities to enroll more international students than domestic students. In both the U.S. and the U.K., the majority of these students are multilingual English speakers, who have already completed many years of English language study.
Of course, international students are not the only multilingual students on campus. U.S. postsecondary institutions, for example, are serving a growing number of foreign-born U.S. residents as a result of an increase in immigration in recent decades. Some of these students may have moved to the U.S. as babies or young children, but many arrived in middle school or secondary school. These students, often referred to as “Generation 1.5” (not traditional first generation or traditional second generation), were usually given very limited ESL instruction in school and were instead quickly “mainstreamed” into monolingual classrooms. Although English may be these students’ dominant language, they often continue to face linguistic challenges in academic literacy, due to the limited support they have received in English language learning and in literacy development in their first language. Unfortunately, gathering data regarding this student population is rare at most universities, so their numbers, languages spoken, and fields of study are largely unknown.
The challenges of English-language academic literacy are also not limited to multilingual students in the contexts of English-dominant countries. As academic research and the global economy have increasingly adopted English as a common language, learners around the world have been forced to develop advanced English language skills, including students at English-medium universities worldwide, international scholars and researchers who have never studied outside of their home countries, and countless professionals around the globe in business, science, and other fields. With the post-World War II explosion in science and technology, access to and management of information has become vital to international scholarship, and English has, in many cases, become a common language of scholarship. Journal databases like the Science Citation Index (SCI), for example, illustrate a growing dominance of English-language publications, with English making up 95% of SCI publications in 1995; the remaining percentage was made up of French, German, Russian, and—at about 0.5 to 0.7%—all other languages (van Leeuwen, Moed, Visser, & van Raan, 2001). Now, even beyond the hard sciences, journals wishing to establish or maintain an international reputation must publish in English, putting great pressure on scholars to write in English. This preference for English-language publication trickles down to undergraduate education, where students in many countries rely on English-language textbooks or even attend English-medium universities. Overall, it is estimated that multilingual users of English will greatly outnumber native English speakers within the next few decades (Graddol, 1997), if they have not already.
This linguistic landscape is characterized by inequity. While native English speakers may take language for granted in their scholarly endeavors, numerous students around the world spend years studying English and face the challenges of academic reading, writing, and networking in a second or additional language—part of this challenge includes learning the valued genres of academic communication. Undergraduate students, for example, may need to write essays, research papers, lab reports, response papers, and project reports; graduate students engage in genres that bridge academic and professional participation, such as journal articles, conference papers, and grant proposals. Learning such genres goes beyond the learning of form. Students must learn the discursive practices of their discipline, including the preferred ways of constructing and distributing knowledge, the shared content knowledge, and the intertextual links that build and reference such knowledge (Kamberelis, 1995); they must also develop a knowledge of the labels given to commonly used genres, the communicative purposes of different genres, the sociocultural context in which genres operate, the formal text features associated with genres, and the cultural values embedded in genres (Johns, 1997). Individual success in this process is influenced by many individual, social, political, cultural, and linguistic factors—all of which may make the learning of “disciplinarity” (and thus disciplinary genres) more time-consuming, difficult, and frustrating. Factors like language proficiency, prior (perhaps conflicting) genre experiences, and the sociopolitical networks that learners are (or are not) a part of are all relevant to genre learning—and may pose barriers for linguistically diverse students. The question of how to facilitate the learning of disciplinary genres for these students has, as a result, gathered much attention by both researchers and teachers, especially within the context of higher education.
This book explores the challenges of disciplinary writing development, offering a framework for understanding how knowledge of disciplinary genres is developed over time in various settings. Specifically, the book follows the paths of four multilingual graduate students through their participation in an ESL writing course, disciplinary content courses, and disciplinary research. It describes the contexts in which the students wrote during different stages of their graduate study and the knowledge of different genres that they built over time. I focus on the genre learning of multilingual writers because these writers are increasingly the “typical writer” in a mobile world that often uses English as an academic lingua franca, and also because I believe that these writers’ experiences have much to tell us about the complexities of genre learning. Although my research is situated within the context of international graduate student learning at a U.S. university, I believe the issues examined here are relevant to a range of populations, monolingual and multilingual, in English-dominant countries and contexts in which English is a second or additional language.
In this chapter, I lay the groundwork for the subsequent chapters, outlining the debate over genre and writing pedagogy; defining the important constructs of practice, task, discourse, and genre; introducing the crucial importance of genre networks; and presenting relevant models of expertise. Building on these theoretical foundations, I present a theory of genre knowledge and a descriptive model for developing this knowledge as a multilingual writer. This model will be illustrated through the stories of four such writers in the remainder of the book and elaborated in the final chapter.
Genre and Writing Instruction
The
