I integrated multiple sources, including the writers’ texts, texts the writers drew upon or were guided by in their writing tasks, oral interviews with the writers and their writing course instructor, audiotapes of the writers’ conference with their writing course instructor, observations and field notes of their writing class sessions, and, in some cases, written feedback from the writers’ disciplinary instructors and mentors. I provide a more extensive description of the research design and methodology in Appendix A; information about collected texts, interviews, and instructor conferences are outlined in Appendices B, C, and D.
Midwest University
The Electrical Engineering Building at Midwest University is a three-story red-brick building with large, shiny glass windows and a towering atrium. Pictures of men in suits and gold-plated award plaques hang in the lobby. The white, tile-floor hallways are flanked by rows of closed doors bearing small nameplates, computer-generated images, and flyers for various engineering conferences. Voices at times echo through the halls, scheduling an appointment or discussing a problem encountered in the lab. The voices are usually male; you may hear the American-accented English typical to the evening news, but you are more likely to hear Chinese, Korean, or Indian accents and languages. Thousands of international students studying the sciences and engineering spend their days and evenings—for four or five years—in settings just like this.
For two years, from 2002 through 2004, I spent much of my time trying to learn more about the disciplinary writing development of four of these students at a large, state university in the Midwestern region of the United States (referred to here as “Midwest University”). As a research university with particular strength in engineering and technology fields, Midwest University enrolled the largest number of international students at a U.S. public university at the time of the study. In the fall of 2002, the total enrollment of international students was 4,695; the overall enrollment of international graduate students was 2,670. During the 2002–2003 academic year, almost 43% of the graduate students at the university were considered international students, with the greatest number of these coming from India, People’s Republic of China, and South Korea. Many of these students were enrolled in the university’s nationally-recognized programs of Computer Sciences (CS) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). In these departments, the diversity of the student population reflects that of the faculty, many of whom are originally from Asia or Europe.
International students in particular often come to these programs with extensive workplace experience and jobs to which they plan to return after completing their degrees. While some graduate students in these departments prepare for an academic career, many pursue work in industry; in their departmental websites, both CS and ECE stress their ties to the private sector. Because the departments do not necessarily prepare students for academic careers, as is more often the case in the humanities and social sciences, the academic environment of graduate school, and all of the norms and values of that environment, may at times conflict with some students’ experiences before and/or after their graduate study.
The Writing Classroom: WCGS
Three times a week, a small number of engineering and science graduate students from across the Midwest University campus leave the culturally and linguistically diverse hallways of the engineering and science buildings to come to the comparatively White and monolingual “Marshall Hall”—the building that houses the university’s English department. Here, the students converge for 50 minutes to participate in a course entitled Written Communication for Graduate Students (or, “WCGS,” as I’ll refer to it). WCGS is a no-credit, pass/fail writing course for graduate students for whom English is a second language. While some departments on campus (such as electrical engineering) require the course for second language students, other departments and advisors encourage individual students to enroll. While students largely appreciate the writing support that the course offers, the lack of course credit or a grade lead many students to give the course low priority in comparison with their other courses. Several sections of WCGS are offered through the English department every semester, with approximately 60 to 80 students completing the course each year. The class size is limited to ten students, who come from various departments and programs at the university but are primarily engineers. While a diverse population of students take WCGS, the majority are males from East Asian countries.
The course is regularly taught by an English department faculty member or one of a number of graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs) with an interest in second language writing. Instructors have a great degree of autonomy in course design, but they generally cover genres that are likely to be encountered in academic and professional settings, such as a curriculum vitae/résumé, conference abstract, grant proposal, or manuscript review. WCGS students are encouraged to use their current research projects as the content for these assignments. Because of the small class size, instructors can be fairly flexible in their choice of assignments and content covered in the course. Some instructors focus heavily on process and revision, while others may highlight generic aspects of texts, and still others may require assignments that incorporate interview or ethnography-like tasks that explore social aspects of writing. Although the class is scheduled to meet for three 50-minute sessions per week, many instructors choose to hold individual writing conferences with students (in lieu of class) as they work on composing and revising their writing for each assignment.
In the course section that I observed, students wrote five major assignments: a writer’s autobiography, a CV/ résumé, a cover letter, a conference poster or presentation, and a final project chosen by each individual student. The students each participated in six individual conferences with the instructor during the semester, roughly one conference for each major assignment. The course instructor saw the conferences as serving several purposes, including learning more about the students and their work, tailoring the course to individual student needs, and—with newer students—talking with them and reassuring them about graduate school more generally.
Aside from the major paper drafts, students were not assigned additional homework; given the lack of credit received for the course, the instructor hoped to make it as low-stress as possible. She strove to find paper assignments that the writers could tailor to their individual needs, and believed that students could get out of the course what they wanted to. Class materials included a coursepack designed by the instructor that included numerous sample texts for each assignment, some published examples and some written by previous WCGS students. In addition, the teacher often created handouts for classroom activities, in many cases drawing on materials from Swales and Feak’s books (1994a) Academic Writing for Graduate Students and (2000) English in Today’s Research World.
The Instructor: Michele
Prior to the semester that I began my research, the course instructor (who was also a personal friend), “Michele,” agreed early on to let me observe her section of WCGS for my research. In her 10 years of teaching writing, Michele (herself a native speaker of English) had taught students of diverse backgrounds and needs, including so-called basic writers, ESL writers, and mainstream students. During the semester that I observed her course, Michele was beginning the fourth and final year of her doctoral study in Rhetoric and Composition. This was her third time teaching WCGS, and she described the students as fairly typical in terms of their stage in their degree programs and level of writing ability.
At the start of the semester, Michele described herself to me as “a social constructivist at heart” and explained her general philosophical approach to teaching as making “invisible practices visible”:
So, it’s like, there’s all these practices that you need to be able to do to gain entry into certain groups, and if you don’t do them, sometimes people aren’t even aware that you’re not doing them, but they’ll think you’re wrong or off somehow. So, my goal I guess is, I’ll help students do what they want to do by making those practices that are hidden and no one’s gonna tell them about visible . . . Where no one’s gonna tell them until after the fact otherwise. (August 28, 2002)
Toward
