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Оглавление1 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 research in this book grows out of the questions that I’ve returned to repeatedly as a teacher of writing: What writing tasks should I include in my courses? To what extent can and should I teach discipline-specific writing? What will the writers actually take away from my course, if anything? Whether my classroom was in the workplace in Asia or at universities in the United States and the Middle East, I have found the notion of genre to be useful in understanding the written communication that learners hope to master. While my workplace students needed to write within the four memo formats carefully prescribed by their multinational company, the graduate students that I have taught have had far more diverse and less predictable needs: article reviews, collaborative term projects, lab reports, proposals, conference papers, master’s theses, dissertations, and journal articles, to name only a few. In both cases, viewing these texts as genres—that is, typified responses to repeated situational exigencies—seemed to provide both me and my students with a useful heuristic for increasing their understanding of these writing demands.
Genre is of course not a new concept in writing instruction, where genre-based teaching has been both championed and critiqued for nearly two decades. Genre-centered approaches rely on the belief that an awareness of texts’ forms, functions, and social contexts will facilitate learners’ development of writing expertise (Hyland, 2003). In U.S. first-year composition instruction, genre has become a popular organizing principle for textbooks and course syllabi in which students examine and write texts like letters, reviews, profiles, and research papers. In many of these instances, genre has become merely a substitute for discourse modes and is presented as a fairly static and a-rhetorical text type. But approaches that could more aptly be called “genre-based” have been outlined by Bawarshi (2003) and Devitt (2004), who advocate the critical analysis of genres in the classroom. Textbooks that adopt this orientation (Devitt, Reiff, & Bawarshi, 2003b; Jolliffe, 1999) teach writers ways to explore genres rather than teaching students to use specific genre features.
Genre-based approaches have enjoyed considerably more favor in second language classrooms. In attempting to address the needs of students who are often culturally and/or linguistically marginalized from sociorhetorical practices in educational, academic, and workplace settings, many practitioners have turned to genre as “a way in” to the power structures of society. The genre-based pedagogy adopted in Australia in the 1980s, for example, arose out of concerns that process pedagogy failed to serve traditionally marginalized students with its less explicit approach to writing instruction. Australian educationists like James Martin, Frances Christie, and Joan Rothery drew upon Hallidayan systemic-functional linguistics to articulate a new pedagogy that aimed to make visible the underlying textual features of “genres of power.” Teaching these genres in K-12 and workplace instructional settings, practitioners in this so-called “Sydney School” see genre as a key resource for academic or workplace literacy. (See Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Martin, 1993a, 1993b; Martin & Rothery, 1993 for more detailed discussions of the history and curricular applications of this approach.)
While the Sydney School approach has evolved amidst the unique concerns of the Australian educational and workplace contexts, a separate approach to genre-based pedagogy has become popular among practitioners of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The most extensive work in this area has been found in ESL academic writing contexts (outlined most thoroughly by Flowerdew, 1993; Johns, 1997, 2002b; Martin, 1993b; Swales, 1990; and Swales & Feak, 1994b; Swales & Feak, 2000). A hallmark of the ESP approach to genre-centered pedagogy is its emphasis on rhetorical consciousness-raising. Genre analysis (an explicit sociorhetorical analysis of genres) has become central to a pedagogy that asks students to explore the relationship between texts and their social domains (that is, between generic form and generic content). Theoretically, this pedagogical approach appears to facilitate the development of genre knowledge for writers like international graduate students, scholars, and professionals faced with high-level writing demands in a second language; nevertheless, several criticisms have been raised against genre-centered teaching.
Some critics of both the Australian and ESP models have pointed to the danger that teaching genres in the classroom can serve to reify the power structures in which they are embedded; these critics advocate a more critical approach through which academic norms are challenged rather than accepted (Benesch, 1995, 2001; Pennycook, 1997). Others problematize the emphasis that genre-centered approaches place on mastery of genres as access to power, overlooking the many other forms of capital (e.g., gender, race, and class) that “may significantly preclude or enable social access” (Luke, 1996, p. 329). Canagarajah’s (1996, 2003) work has also highlighted the additional non-discursive elements that can work against writers from developing countries who are disadvantaged by virtue of a system of scholarly publication largely controlled by countries like the United States and Great Britain.
Freedman (1993a, 1993b, 1999) has further argued that discursive practices such as genres are impossible to teach, given the shifting nature of the disciplinary ideologies out of which genres evolve. Related criticisms come from a belief that generic staticity is implicit in any pedagogical application—“unless genres are static, why should they be, and how can they be, taught?” ask Freedman and Medway (1994b, p. 9). Yet, as Swales (2004) notes, such reasoning would discount the validity of much education, particularly in fields like computer science, where knowledge changes at a particularly rapid rate. While the dangers of staticity and prescriptivism are easily recognizable by teachers (Kay & Dudley-Evans, 1998), some have pointed out that there is nothing inherently prescriptive in genre-based approaches (Hyland, 2003; Swales, 1990). Less direct criticism of genre-centered ESP or English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is found in arguments against the teaching of discipline-specific writing in general, as such an approach may require an understanding of disciplinary content as well as disciplinary practices of knowledge construction and dissemination—an understanding that few ESP/EAP instructors could claim outside of their own discipline (Spack, 1988).
Related views argue that writers need to participate in a discipline in order to learn the discipline’s writing (Spack, 1988) and that genres can therefore only be acquired within the specific milieu in which they exist (Freedman, 1993a; Freedman, Adam, & Smart, 1994). These claims quite accurately emphasize the situatedness of genre learning and the very real distinctions between classroom and non-classroom writing; what they fail to account for, however, is the often fuzzy nature of the boundary between these two contexts. In many cases of ESP or EAP instruction, for example, the classroom is embedded within the larger disciplinary or professional world. Learners come to classrooms with writing tasks that they are completing in their content courses, at work, or in their independent research. They leave the writing classroom and go directly to their lab, to a study group, or even to a research conference. In a sense, the classroom is a part of the disciplinary domain in which genres are best learned; in workplace ESP, these boundaries may be even less distinguishable. Yet in both cases, there remain important differences between the classroom and non-classroom contexts, as I shall show throughout this book.
The lively debate over the role of writing instruction in the development of genre knowledge remains important for those who teach in contexts where mastery of specialized genres is one key to success. Over a decade ago, Aviva Freedman (1993a), in a well-known impeachment of “explicit teaching”1 of genre in the classroom, called for empirical investigations of genre teaching. In a follow-up article, she reiterated this call unequivocally, stating: “It should not be the task of the skeptics to argue against a pedagogic strategy but rather the work of the proponents to bring forward convincing research and theoretical evidence—preferably before its wholesale introduction” (Freedman, 1993b, p. 279). Despite the echoing of this need for more empirical research (Hyland, 2000; Hyon, 1996; Parks, 2001; Swales, 1990, 2000), studies of genre and instruction have so far remained primarily theoretical and anecdotal. A fairly sizable number of studies have investigated how writers develop knowledge of genres and discourses through disciplinary or workplace practice, but fewer studies have looked at this development systematically within writing classrooms. Particularly lacking is research that follows the same writers as they negotiate both of these intermingling and interacting contexts (see Tardy, 2006, for a comparison of studies in various contexts).
Practice, Task, Discourse, and Genre
Before delving into the complicated task of defining genre knowledge and its development, I need to address what underlies the theory and practice of specialized writing. I see four constructs as fundamental: practice, task, discourse, and genre. In my view, these are somewhat parallel concepts, with practice and discourse describing broad levels of interaction and communication channels, while task and genre describe more specific, typified instances of the larger categories.
Taking a social view of written communication, practice may be defined as doing, where the meaning and the structure of that doing is constructed by its social and historical context (Wenger, 1998). Examples of practice include conducting research, reading, and writing. Through practice, writers interact with the artifacts and people within the given sociohistorical contexts, making meaning and building knowledge (Prior, 1998). A related concept is that of activity, such as participation in monthly laboratory meetings, collaboration on a journal article, or presentation of a conference paper. These events are defined by their sociohistorical context, their goals, and the “tools” and “objects” (e.g., genres or technology) used to carry out those goals. The term activity is associated with Vygotskyan sociocultural perspectives on learning, in which “object-directed, tool-mediated” interactions are referred to as activity systems (Russell, 1997). Activity has served as a powerful theoretical construct for many ethnographic studies of writers and writing contexts. However, I will limit its use throughout this book—at least in its more theoretical sense as part of activity theory—for several reasons. First, the research I share in this book is not fully ethnographic, in that I did not observe extensive social interactions in most of the writers’ contexts (with the exception of the writing classroom); it is in this careful ethnographic account of social practice that I believe activity becomes such a useful concept. Additionally, while activity theory has had much to contribute to studies of genre practice, I found myself often becoming lost in its terminological web when bringing it to the overlapping domains and communities that I follow in this book. As a result, I have turned instead to the concept of task.
As an alternative to activity, task may offer a more robust construct for studying the actual practice of individuals. Swales (1990) defines task as:
One of a set of differentiated, sequenceable goal-directed activities drawing upon a range of cognitive and communicative procedures relatable to the acquisition of pre-genre and genre skills appropriate to a foreseen or emerging sociorhetorical situation. (p. 74)
Though he describes task in the context of teaching methodology, I will use the term to refer to specific goal-oriented, rhetorical literacy events in both disciplinary and classroom domains—for example, writing a master’s thesis, collaborating on a conference paper, or completing a classroom assignment. Bracewell and Witte (2003) similarly propose task as an important construct for studying workplace literacy, defining it as “the set of goals and actions that implement these goals, which are developed in order to achieve a solution to a complex problem within a specific work context” (p. 528). While this definition shares similarities with that of activity, it is more localized in time and space and may therefore foreground individualized actions; writers engage in activities through tasks. Because the writers in my study often worked independently and because my research tended to focus more on these writers’ individual actions than on group participation, task in many cases provided a more useful metaphor for understanding their writing practice at given points in time. At the same time, I acknowledge that a focus on activity has much to offer the study of writing development; indeed, I see these theoretical approaches as complementary.
Key channels of participation in academic literacy practices and tasks include discourse and genre. In contrast to practice/task, which focus on social interaction, I use these terms to emphasize a focus on the language—oral, written, and even visual—used to mediate social interactions. On one level, discourse is the language, broadly speaking, used by particular groups and/or in particular situations. Corpus-based language analysis, for example, has illustrated that academic discourse can be characterized by certain linguistic features that distinguish it from other registers, such as conversation, news, or fiction (Biber, 1988). More recent work has studied discourse variation among academic disciplines, finding linguistic differences between disciplines like history and biology (Conrad, 2001) or, more broadly, the soft sciences and the hard sciences (Hyland, 2000). While this primarily linguistic use of the term is focused on structural patterns, discourse also encompasses the ideologies and worldviews that shape and are shaped by communication. The term disciplinary discourse, for instance, captures the meaning of “thinking and talking like an engineer” (or biologist, or philosopher, and so on). Discourse is, as Gee (1999) describes it, more than language; it is an “identity kit.” Discourses shape our perceptions of the world, including how we communicate, act, interact, and understand.
When discourses become typified—that is, when the same events are carried out repeatedly through the same practices—they may be referred to as genres. Examples of written genres include dissertations, research articles, manuscript reviews, or submission letters, and each of these may be carried out uniquely by different social groups. Dissertations, for example, differ in a range of ways across institutions, disciplines, and geopolitical contexts. Becoming an accepted member of a disciplinary community (in both its local and global manifestations) is at least partially dependent on mastery of its discourse and unique use of genres, or the preferred means for arguing and evaluating within the field (McNabb, 2001; Said, 1982). Genre theory offers one means for understanding this type of conventionalized disciplinary communication.
Since the mid-1980s, many in applied linguistics, rhetoric, and education have turned to a view of genre as social action (Bazerman, 1988; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Kamberelis, 1995; Miller, 1984; Swales, 1990). Miller (1984) argues that a rhetorical view of genre must center on the action that a genre carries out, rather than on its formal features or “text type”; it is through this social action that people create the knowledge that is necessary in reproducing the generic structure (Miller, 1994). Genre is therefore a product or byproduct of repeated, specialized practice. At the same time, genres themselves may shape activities over time, providing a structure or scaffolding for practice (Bazerman, 1988; Kamberelis, 1995). More recently, Devitt (2004) has described genre as not so much a response to a recurring situation, but rather a “nexus between an individual’s action and socially defined context” (p. 31). This metaphor accounts for the structurated nature of genres as they act and are acted upon by individuals and in social contexts. In this thoroughly rhetorical view, learning to use genres requires much more than learning text types and forms; it requires learning the social contexts, actions, and goals that give genres their meaning.
To this point, a sizable body of research has analyzed genres with the aim of uncovering the rhetorical functions that give rise to certain discoursal features. Ken Hyland’s (2000) work, for example, has convincingly shown how features like generic move structure, citations, and hedges and boosters reflect the ideologies and epistemologies of their authoring communities. Genres that carry heavy weight in the academic world have been studied in the most depth, giving rise to rather detailed descriptions of research articles across disciplinary, cultural, and linguistic communities. In the early days, such work appeared to be motivated by an interest in uncovering “teachable” textual features to second language writers. More recently, this research seems to be more concerned with complicating our understanding of text types and their dynamic and social nature. In both cases, it is clear that genres act not only as channels of communication but also as barriers for novices or outsiders. Genres have a way of regulating communication among groups, and as their features become conventionalized, the values embedded in them too become assumed and often unquestioned. Given the hierarchical nature of many disciplinary communities, genres may therefore benefit the expert, who can use the genres in rhetorically effective ways, and further exclude or alienate the novice, for whom the values and conventions are more mysterious or perhaps even distasteful. This dynamic is clearly evident in academic discourse, as students struggle to play the game of academic writing, but it also exists in professional and public spheres.
Networks of Genres
While a focus on individual genres is an important step toward understanding texts—what they look like in various contexts, what ideologies and goals they index, how and why they are (re)produced—this individual focus artificially strips away much of what gives a genre its meaning. As genres are used by a social group to carry out particular social actions, they rarely—if ever—function alone; instead, they interact with layers of other genres used to accomplish other, related goals. Kamberelis (1995) depicts this fluid and interconnected nature of genres as he writes:
Any given field of practice is constituted by many related and partially overlapping genres . . . Additionally, fields of practice are themselves highly interconnected . . . Finally, individuals simultaneously belong to multiple, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory communities of practice, often moving in and out of them quite seamlessly. With all this overlap of fields, practices, texts, and people, the forms, functions, and practices of different genres leak into one another in a kind of metonymic or interdiscursive process of social semiosis. (p. 139)
In contemporary genre theory, the move toward a more integrated orientation to genre was first proposed by Amy Devitt (1991) in her exploration of the genre sets of tax accounting. Devitt (2004) has argued that viewing genres as intertextual and dialogic “allows us to see the inherent relatedness of genres within the same social group and its actions” (p. 55). In other words, studying genres as sets, systems, or clusters highlights how they respond to one another in order to accomplish a group’s goals and activity.
The notion of genre network grows out of Bakhtin’s (1986) insistence that genres are intertextual by their very nature. They are born out of prior texts and retain traces of those texts. This intertextuality not only gives a genre meaning, but also serves as a modus operandi for learning. That is, as new users of genres attempt to find the preferred ways of constructing genres and texts within a social setting, they often turn to previous texts that they have encountered (Kamberelis, 1995). They may borrow explicit textual fragments, they may draw on textual conventions or practices, or they may look to support genres like guidelines, feedback, or prior texts to learn how to communicate effectively. Learners may also draw on oral encounters surrounding texts, such as conversations with mentors, class discussions, or feedback from peers. Ivanič (1998) refers to these interactions as “intermental encounters” and illustrates through her research how such encounters may exert significant influence on writers.
It should be clear from this discussion that genres relate to one another in a variety of ways. At the most general level, genres are intertextually networked, containing traces of prior texts. Beyond this level, scholarly terminology becomes confusing and even somewhat haphazard. Genres exist in conversation, as responses and rejoinders (Bakhtin, 1986), or uptakes (Freadman, 1994). Devitt (2004) refers to these dialogical relationships as genre sets, while Swales (2004) uses the term genre chains, drawing on Räisänen’s (1999) use of the term in describing crash safety; this latter metaphor seems to best capture the chronological and essentially interlinked nature of dialogue.
A third level of generic relationship is Devitt’s (1991) originally-labeled genre set, which she has since re-named genre repertoire (Devitt, 2004), defining it as the set of genres owned by a given group. Devitt (2004) distinguishes a repertoire as larger and less tightly knit than a genre chain:
Repertoire is an especially helpful term . . . for it connotes not only a set of interacting genres but also a set from which participants choose, a definer of the possibilities available to the group . . . The genres within a repertoire do interact, though often in less obvious ways, with less clear-cut sequencing and more indirect connections than exist in a genre system.” (p. 57)
At the risk of adding more confusion to an already murky pool of terms, it seems to me that both repertoire and set are terminologically useful. While a repertoire might refer to all of a group’s available genres, a set might best refer to the genres available for a given rhetorical goal (e.g., genres for job promotion, genres for laboratory safety). Application of these terms immediately highlights their overlapping nature, yet I believe it is at times useful to distinguish sets from a full repertoire when considering the learning process. While the ultimate goal for novices may be access to a group’s full genre repertoire, this process is likely to occur through accumulated engagement with different genre sets.
While a genre repertoire includes all of the genres owned by a given group, a genre system would include genres owned and used by multiple groups, all toward an ultimate rhetorical goal. Bazerman (1994) describes a genre system as
. . . the full set of genres that instantiate the participation of all the parties—that is the full file of letters from and to the client, from and to the government, from and to the accountant. This would be the full interaction, the full event, the set of social relations as it has been enacted. (p. 99)
For simplicity in referring to this myriad of intertextual relationships, I will use genre networks as an umbrella term. In cases where it is important to distinguish the different relationships among genres, I will use the more specified terms described above.
A growing body of research has examined genre sets, repertoires, and systems, including those of tax accounting, patent law, psychotherapy paperwork, faculty tenure files, grant funding, and electronic communities (Bazerman, 1994; Berkenkotter, 2001; Devitt, 1991; Hyon & Chen, 2004; Samraj, 2005; Tardy, 2003; Yates & Orlikowski, 2002). In this book, however, I will push the notion of genre networks a bit further to consider what it has to offer to an understanding of genre learning. A focus on genres as discrete entities, for example, masks many of the important influences on the process of genre learning and on how writers’ involvement in larger social and textual systems may help or hinder that process. In the subsequent chapters, I will explore some of these influences as well as the ways in which participation in genre networks might help learners develop a more sophisticated understanding of the system’s core genres, including an understanding of how to manipulate those genres for their own purposes. In academic settings, these core genres might include research articles or proposals; in workplace settings, they might include project reports or presentations. These are the high-stakes, prestige genres.
Before turning to a discussion of genre knowledge and how such knowledge is developed, I will briefly outline relevant models of expertise. Theories of expertise are useful at this juncture because they offer a framework for understanding what it means to be an expert writer in a specific domain and how novices might develop such expertise.
Expertise
Theories of expertise have been situated mainly, though not exclusively, within the field of cognitive psychology. Notable theorists Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia define expertise as “effortfully acquired abilities . . . that carry us beyond what nature has specifically prepared us to do” (1993, p. 3). They claim that experts are better problem solvers in their own local domains because they are able to draw on knowledge that allows them to think less than non-experts. Outside of their domains of expertise, however, experts work harder and appear to work toward extending their knowledge instead of utilizing the knowledge they already possess. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1993) describe how experts continually reinvest their mental resources, allowing them to address problems at increasingly higher levels. Useful to an understanding of writer expertise in particular are Bereiter and Scardamalia’s (1987) models of knowledge-telling and knowledge-transforming. Knowledge-telling is a model of text composing generally adopted by inexperienced writers who utilize only the topic, genre constraints, and text as sources of knowledge. These sources provide novices with strategies for composing without additional support, using readily available knowledge and discourse production skills that they already possess. Expert writers, according to Bereiter and Scardamalia, go beyond knowledge-telling to rework or transform their knowledge. In this knowledge-transforming model, writers actively transform their ideas as they move between developing knowledge and developing text.
This two-way interaction between content and rhetoric is termed the “dual problem space” by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987). It is this space that Geisler (1994) further explores in her model of expertise. In Geisler’s model, abstractions play a key role; it is in the domain-content space where experts develop abstractions that lead them to go beyond lay knowledge, and it is in the rhetorical-process space where experts “develop the reasoning structures that enable them to bring those abstractions to bear upon the contexts in which they work” (Geisler, 1994, p. 84). Geisler suggests that it is the shifting between these two spaces that leads experts to go beyond knowledge-telling and into knowledge-transforming. Applied to disciplinary writing, this model would suggest that experts build disciplinary knowledge and develop discursive and rhetorical skills simultaneously, with each process interacting and building upon one another.
Geisler goes on to outline an acquisition process of expertise that encompasses three distinct periods. In the first period, writers engage in knowledge-telling, viewing texts as autonomous. In this stage, the rhetorical domain is generally collapsed within the content domain. In the intermediate stage, writers begin to work increasingly with abstractions through tacitly acquired knowledge, yet they continue to hold relatively naïve representations of the rhetorical space. In the final stage, writers are able to reorganize and abstract the rhetorical-problem space as distinct from the domain-content space; that is, they begin to view texts as having authors, claims, credibility, and temporality. At this stage, writers work with abstractions in both the rhetorical-problem space and domain-content space, engaging in the “dynamic interplay that produces expertise” (1994, p. 87). This importance of the rhetorical-problem space is echoed in ethnographic research by Smart (2000) in which workplace writers engaged in domain-specific writing simultaneously developed an “increased awareness of the rhetorical situation and textual conventions associated with the genre” (p. 240).
An alternative pluralistic theory of expertise is offered by Carter (1990), who views performance-guiding knowledge as a continuum from general knowledge to highly contextualized local knowledge. This theory describes a complementary relationship between these two types of knowledge, acknowledging that both are important in writing expertise. According to Carter, when writing in unfamiliar domains, novices apply global strategies to guide their performance, allowing them to acquire more local knowledge, which in turn allows them to rely less on global strategies. Thus, when expert writers encounter new tasks in their local domain, they can draw on highly-contextualized strategies.
Carter applies his global-local knowledge continuum to five stages of expertise described by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986). The first level is the novice stage, then “advanced beginners,” followed by “competence.” Local knowledge becomes crucial after the level of competence, and “it is only when writers work in one or more domains for a while that they begin to develop the local knowledge of that domain” (p. 282). Carter suggests that such knowledge is gained through experience in reading and writing within a local domain, as well as through guidance from teachers. He describes a cyclical process in which “as students continue to work in a domain, their knowledge becomes more local as their experience grows and their domain becomes more specific” (p. 282).
Applying expertise theory specifically to L2 writing, Cumming (1989) examines the relationship between writing expertise and second-language proficiency in an empirical study of adult ESL writers. Cumming’s main finding is that both writing expertise and second-language proficiency contribute to writing processes and products, but to different aspects of writing. The characteristics of writing expertise that Cumming outlines for second language (L2) writers reflect characteristics of expert writers performing in their first language, such as the use of heuristics in problem-solving. An additional important finding in Cumming’s research is that L2 writers seem to improve their writing performance as their language proficiency increases. However, increased proficiency may not affect qualitative changes in the writers’ processes of thinking or decision-making as they compose. Cumming concludes that writing expertise may be an intelligence that is separate from L2 proficiency, employing cognitive skills that are applicable across languages rather than being specific to a first or second language.
These theories of expertise have illuminated an understanding of writing performance as encompassing a range of interacting domains. It appears that expert writers draw on strategies at various levels as well as domain-specific experience in their problem-solving process. While Cumming’s work suggests that expertise may not be a language-specific skill, there remain questions as to how language proficiency and expertise may interact in domain-specific writing tasks.
Genre Knowledge
In order to communicate actively, appropriately, and successfully within a specific domain or disciplinary discourse community—that is, to communicate as an expert—writers must develop2 genre knowledge. At the outset, I need to emphasize that I see genre knowledge as related but not identical to general second language (or even first language) writing skills. In a thorough and thoughtful exploration of the construct of writing, Grabe (2000) lays the groundwork for moving toward a theory of second language writing. He argues that a useful starting point for theory building is to generate a taxonomy of research on aspects of writing, or “conditions on learning to write” (Grabe, 2000, p. 52). Along with categories like knowing the language, processing factors, and social context, Grabe lists “discourse, genre, and register knowledge” as one category that needs to be fully researched in order to gain a more complete picture of L2 writing. Exploring this category is the goal of this book; the first hurdle is to define the construct of genre knowledge.
On the most salient level, genre knowledge is an understanding of text form, including elements like text organization, disciplinary terminology, or citation practices (Beaufort, 1999). But genre knowledge extends beyond form to less visible knowledge such as an understanding of a discourse community’s ideologies and discursive practices, or even domain-specific content knowledge (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Bhatia, 1999). Knowledge of genre also requires writers to understand a text’s rhetorical timing, surprise value, or kairos, including a sense of how a text may be received at a given time within a given community. In addition, expert writers share an understanding of genre membership, knowing the in-group generic label (Johns, 1997) or recognizing prototypes or exemplars of the genre (Paltridge, 1997; Swales, 1990).
In her research of specialized writing in the workplace and disciplinary content classrooms, Beaufort (1999, 2004) has mapped the knowledge domains that constitute disciplinary writing expertise. Her model foregrounds “discourse community knowledge” as encompassing the overlapping domains of writing process knowledge, subject matter knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, and genre knowledge. Another model of disciplinary writing is proposed by Jolliffe and Brier (1988), who describe writer’s knowledge in academic disciplines as composed of knowledge of discourse community; subject matter and methods of investigating subject matter; organization, arrangement, form, and genre; and ways of speaking. These components correspond roughly to four of the five canons of rhetoric: audience, invention, arrangement, and style, respectively. Both of these models are intended to describe disciplinary writing knowledge, of which genre is considered one element. In these models, genre knowledge itself is represented as essentially textual knowledge that intermingles with knowledge of discourse community, rhetoric, subject matter, and writing processes. Both models aptly situate genre knowledge as embedded within broader knowledge of disciplinary discourse, but if we adopt a fully rhetorical view of genre, genre knowledge (as a category) must represent more than form.
Because of my interest in the learning and teaching of specialized genres, I focus here specifically on defining and theorizing genre knowledge. In the model I offer, genre knowledge cannot exist separately from formal, process, rhetorical, or subject-matter knowledge; instead, it is a confluence of these four dimensions. Drawing on my earlier discussion of genre theory, I see genres as social actions that are used within specialized communities; that contain traces of prior texts in their shape, content, and ideology; and that are networked with other genres in various ways that influence their production and reception. Taking this definition, expert genre knowledge must contain knowledge in all of these areas. While the architecture of this model implies distinct knowledge domains, it is important to stress that the boundaries here merely serve a heuristic purpose. Rather than representing any kind of epistemic reality, they provide a framework for understanding the writers’ knowledge at different points in time and the ways in which various practices influence knowledge development.
I use the term formal knowledge to refer to the more structural elements of genre—the genre’s prototypical form(s), discourse or lexico-grammatical conventions of the genre, the contents or structural moves that are common to the genre, and the various modes and media through which the genre may be communicated. This knowledge focuses on the textual instantiation of the genre, in either oral or written form. Knowledge of a genre’s contents or modality is used here to refer to a relatively “arhetorical” understanding based primarily on knowledge of conventionalized form rather than a focus on the rhetorical context. Formal knowledge also includes knowledge of linguistic code—an issue that is of special relevance to those writing in their second language or dialect.
Process knowledge refers to all of the procedural practices associated with the genre—that is, how a genre is carried out. Such knowledge would encompass the process(es) that users of the genre go through in order to complete their intended action, such as the oral interactions that might facilitate effective reception of a genre or the actual composing processes that aid the writer in text completion. Process knowledge also encompasses an understanding of the distribution of the genre to its audience and the reading practices of the receivers of the genre. Finally, process knowledge includes knowledge of the larger genre network and a grasp of how the networked genres work together in chains, sets, or systems.
Both formal knowledge and process knowledge have great potential to overlap with rhetorical knowledge, which captures an understanding of the genre’s intended purposes and an awareness of the dynamics of persuasion within a sociorhetorical context. Writers need, for example, a sense of what the genre is intended to do within a local context and how power is distributed within that context. They also need to anticipate the readers of the genre, in terms of their purposes for reading the text, their expectations for the text, and their values that may influence their reception of the text. Rhetorical knowledge further includes the writer’s understanding of his or her own positioning vis-à-vis the context and the specific readers. A writer’s age, professional status, and perceived linguistic abilities are just some factors that are likely to influence the writing and reception of any genre.
Finally, subject-matter knowledge is an important, yet often overlooked (Jolliffe, 1995), domain of genre knowledge. When writing a research article in biomedical engineering, for example, a writer’s knowledge of the relevant content within biomedical engineering is crucial for his or her success in writing the text. Other genres, such as résumés, require less subject-matter knowledge. However, when interacting with other knowledge domains, subject-matter knowledge is essential in pushing writers toward expertise for many genres.
While the construct of knowledge is certainly more abstract than much of my discussion here might imply, I nevertheless find categorization of knowledge domains to be useful in tracing writers’ knowledge development in different contexts. Are certain knowledge dimensions developed more efficiently in some contexts than in others? Do strategies for developing different knowledge domains differ? Following writers and attempting to peer inside their minds and texts, I have come to see knowledge as an awareness (conscious or unconscious) that can deepen and extend as it is applied in new situations and as writers pull together various knowledge features to greater or lesser degrees. As I traced the formal, rhetorical, process, and subject-matter dimensions of genre knowledge, I saw them become increasingly integrated with growing expertise—inseparably so.
Figure 1 provides a visual metaphor for this increased integration, where writers’ knowledge of unfamiliar genres may artificially separate the genre’s form, subject matter, rhetorical goals and context, and procedures that surround its distribution and reception.
Figure 1. Integration of genre knowledge.
When first approaching the task of writing a job application letter, for example, the writers I followed tended to think of form and content as distinct from issues of the rhetorical context or procedures. They asked themselves questions like what is the proper form? or what do readers expect to find in this letter? But they did not ask what I might call more “integrated” questions like how might I modify the organization of my letter for this particular employer?—at least not in their first encounters, which took place within a classroom environment.
In early genre encounters, writers are faced with the demands of attending to multiple generic issues, and the cognitive load becomes heavier as multiple layers of requisite knowledge are added to picture, such as linguistic elements or the composing process. Furthermore, general distinctions between first and second language writing would suggest that these demands are even more complex for second language writers. But as writers re-encounter the same genre, certain dimensions of genre knowledge eventually become more or less “second nature,” so that the writer no longer needs to attend explicitly to those features (Jolliffe & Brier, 1988; Kamberelis, 1995). This process reflects very closely that of cognitive theories of language learning relating to processing and automaticity (see, for example, Segalowitz, 2003). As McLaughlin (1990) describes it, when a complex task is first approached, people attend to various features of the task; with a great deal of practice, the component skills become automatic.
With practice, boundaries between the components, or dimensions (as in Figure 1), become fuzzier. Writers integrate some dimensions but still focus on other individual elements in isolation. The extent of overlap or discreteness among dimensions depends on the situational context and task to which the writers are responding. Additionally, writers may find themselves foregrounding or backgrounding different knowledge dimensions when responding to different tasks (Prior, 1998; Tardy, 2003). In a writing classroom, for example, writers may be more apt to focus predominantly on form; on the other hand, in a disciplinary exam such as a doctoral preliminary paper, they may focus on subject-matter content. This tendency may provide some insight into the issue of whether or not different dimensions are better developed in different domains (Freedman, 1993a, 1993b; Freedman, Adam, & Smart 1994). As I’ll illustrate in later chapters, the writers in my research were able to develop some rhetorical knowledge in the writing classroom, but their primary focus in that setting tended to be on form. In their disciplinary courses, on the other hand, the writers often attended more to subject-matter and rhetorical dimensions than to formal dimensions.
Genre knowledge development, like all writing development or language development, more broadly, does not occur in simple linear fashion. Rather, learners seem to go through a process of restructuring, so that new knowledge results in qualitative changes to the internal organization of knowledge, rather than simply in the addition of new structural knowledge. In McLaughlin’s (1990) words:
Restructuring can be seen as a process in which the components of a task are coordinated, integrated, or reorganized into new units, thereby allowing the procedure involving old components to be replaced by a more efficient procedure involving new components. (p. 118)
In other words, writers do not accumulate new knowledge as something like an expanding bulleted list; rather, every new “bit” of knowledge becomes integrated with existing knowledge, resulting in a fundamental change to the learners’ larger understanding.
As the writers described in this book became more expert genre users, they spoke of texts and textual practices in a way that considered form, rhetoric, procedure, and subject matter as inseparable. In doing so, their previous understanding of dimensions like form was revised. For instance, as one writer spoke of his attempts to organize a conference paper, he drew simultaneously on his understanding of process, form, rhetoric, and subject matter. In analyzing data from this writing task, I found these categories of knowledge to be of little use as they no longer captured the delicate shades of genre knowledge that the writer held at that point. While other genre knowledge theories (e.g., Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Bhatia, 1999; Jolliffe & Brier, 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.
