1988; Paltridge, 1997; Swales, 1990) do consider multidimensionality, they lack an explicit explanation of development. There is an implication in such theories that writers either hold knowledge of particular dimensions or they do not (cf. Beaufort, 1999); instead, it seems to me that writers can feasibly hold all of the requisite knowledge of a genre, yet fail to synthesize this knowledge in actual practice. In contrast then to a view of genre knowledge as simply made up various dimensions, a model that can account for increased integration of those dimensions offers a more flexible and dynamic picture of writers’ knowledge over time.
How then do multilingual writers move from relatively fragmented nascent knowledge toward more integrated expertise? This is the main question that I hope to answer through the stories of the writers in this book, and in exploring this question, I move into the social nature of language and knowledge development. Much work on writing and genre development has foregrounded the extent to which writers learn through mentoring and social support, through what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger term legitimate peripheral participation, or LPP. However, as the case studies in this book illustrate, LPP is not always available to writers—and even when it is, it does not always play a primary role in development. Rather, writers draw on a broad range of strategies and resources as they encounter genres in new contexts and tasks. The book is organized around the sociorhetorical contexts and tasks of writing that the four learners in my research engaged in as graduate students and researchers; this organization allows for a glimpse into the ways in which contexts and tasks both afford and constrain opportunities for genre learning for individuals as they move among overlapping domains of practice.
In chapter 2, I introduce the research context, the four writers, and the social and individual histories that they brought to their graduate studies. Chapters 3 and 4 move to the domain of the writing classroom, illustrating how the writers built genre knowledge in the classroom as they wrote job application cover letters and disciplinary texts as classroom assignments. These chapters trace links between classroom activities, teacher feedback, textual exposure, and the writers’ evolving understanding of specific genres, even as they engaged in these genres outside of the classroom. Chapter 5 brings together a range of learning contexts, tracing the writers’ practices with and knowledge of the multimodal genre of presentation slides. Exploring the writers’ histories and current uses of this genre in classroom and research settings, the chapter illustrates how accumulated exposure and practice can build increasingly sophisticated genre knowledge over time. Chapter 6 moves from the writing classroom into the disciplinary content classroom, showing the strategies and resources that two of the writers drew upon as they attempt to make sense of the learning-based genres of lab reports and reviews. This chapter also considers the extent to which strategies learned in the writing classroom were later adopted by the writers in their disciplinary writing tasks. Moving up through the ranks of academic genres, chapters 7 and 8 explore two of the writers’ challenging processes of learning the more prestigious genres of scholarly research—theses and research articles. It is in these chapters that we see the writers begin to integrate forms of knowledge, gradually building the kind of sophisticated and multidimensional genre knowledge characteristic of experts. As I examine these four writers’ learning processes over time and in multiples spaces, I will explore the theoretical issues raised in this chapter; in chapter 9, I return to these issues with an eye toward the nature of genre knowledge development and the role of the language and writing classroom in facilitating such knowledge.
2 The Researcher and the Writers
As Casanave (2005) notes, research is primarily told through narrative—that is, through “a complex reconstruction of many tales designed to end with a message of significance” (p. 22). In order to make meaning, narrative weaves together various stories, tidying up the details along the way to help us make sense of a larger whole. In this chapter, I share the background to the research narrative that unfolds throughout the book. I begin by sharing my own paradigm of inquiry and the research methodology I have adopted, and I then describe the context in which my research took place and the writers whom I followed.
Approach to Inquiry
Ideology and inquiry paradigms are contentious aspects of knowledge construction, serving to distinguish sciences from social sciences from humanities, and even causing friction within many disciplinary fields of study. I use the term ideology here to refer to ontology (the nature of reality), epistemology (the nature of knowledge), axiology (the nature of value), and methodology (the procedures for knowledge construction). (See Silva, 2005, for a much more in-depth treatment of ideology and paradigms of inquiry.) In line with Harklau and Williams (in press), I believe strongly in the value of researchers examining and sharing their own ideologies and inquiry paradigms with readers, so I attempt to do so here.
The paradigm of knowledge construction that underlies the research in this book is best characterized by what Silva (2005) refers to as humble pragmatic rationalism (HPR), also known as critical rationalism. Drawing on the work of Karl Popper, Silva defines HPR as follows:
. . . HPR’s ontology is that of a modified realism; that is, reality exists, but can never be fully known. It is driven by natural laws that can only be incompletely or partially understood. HPR’s epistemology is interactionist—a result of the interaction between subject (researcher) and object (physical reality), wherein a human being’s perceptual, cognitive, and social filters preclude any totally objective or absolute knowledge. Regarding axiology, HPR values knowledge—knowledge that is tentative, contingent, and probabilistic. HPR’s methodology is multimodal—involving the integration of empirical study (qualitative as well as quantitative) and hermeneutic inquiry (the refinement of ideas through interpretation and dialogue, through conjecture and refutation). (p. 9)
Throughout the book, I try to stay true to this paradigm. In studying the knowledge development of individual writers, I believe that there is some physical reality involved in this process that can be partially understood through inquiry. I also acknowledge that, without doubt, my own experiences and identities (as a privileged White, native speaker of English, as an ESL/EFL teacher, as a graduate student at the time of the research, as someone who has lived and functioned in a second language) influence my understanding of this reality, and that my “meddling around” as a researcher has influenced the shape of the reality. I don’t believe that inquiry into a social phenomenon like writing can uncover an absolute truth, but I do believe it can contribute to tentative and contingent knowledge. Given these beliefs, I see value in multiple modes of inquiry, or methodologies.
In hoping to understand more closely the processes of genre knowledge building, I have turned here to situated qualitative research as a primary methodology. I wholeheartedly agree with Atkinson (2005) that “efforts to study human behavior by limiting its influence, variability, or naturalness are in this sense illusory and misguided” (p. 63). Along those lines, the writers’ stories that follow are highly variable and individualized. As a researcher, I remained more interested in following than controlling the often random and unpredictable influences that seeped into the research context, affecting the writers’ behaviors and processes in a multitude of ways. I struggled often with the question of to what extent I could or should tidy up their stories, and how doing so would affect not only my own understandings but also those of my readers. With these heavy reservations at the fore, I dove in to the study, in Atkinson’s (2005) words, “doing the impossible” (p. 63).
Research Context
This research follows four international graduate students studying at a U.S. university. While the study began in the confines of an ESL writing course, it continued by following the independent trajectories of the students through their disciplinary programs and research. My goal in following the paths of four writers was to understand better the nature of genre knowledge and how it changes over time, in different contexts. Researchers commonly distinguish a writer’s declarative knowledge (the conscious knowledge that the writer can describe) as well as more tacitly held understandings, also called procedural knowledge. In order to access both declarative and procedural knowledge
