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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 to the extent possible, and to identify such knowledge from various perspectives, 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 this goal, Michele explained that she planned on including many activities in the class in which students would look at sample texts, discussing the subtleties of texts that might be interpreted in different ways—for example, what she called the “formal informality” of American academic discourse. She hoped to discuss examples of writing in terms of the social interactions conveyed through text. In doing so, her goal was to help students develop strategies for dealing with the situations they may encounter as graduate students:

I hope students leave the class with an approach to tackle similar situations. So, if they’re in a situation where they don’t know how they’re supposed to write something, they can have some sort of a way they can try to figure it out. So, we look at- one of the things we do is- I hope they look at lots of examples of things. So, they’re like, “OK, how do I write a research grant? I’ll look at seven other research grants in this field, and- both for large structural things and specific wording kinds of things.” And most of them do that already, but, I don’t know, “heightened rhetorical awareness” is what I’m looking for. (August 28, 2002)

One of her initial goals was to make the class flexible in addressing individual student interests. Throughout the semester, she encouraged students to bring in papers they were working on outside of the class, to practice delivering upcoming presentations, and to share their professional experiences and questions with others in class.

Michele also explained that she did not tend to view herself as a professorial figure in the classroom, but more a “native speaker friend who happens to have rhetorical training” (August 28, 2002). She explained that many of the students felt somewhat isolated at Midwest University and that this isolation was impeding their ability to succeed in many of their tasks.

Sometimes I’m not sure if they really need me. I mean, I think they need the course. I’m not so sure if they- I think maybe the greatest value of the course is to give students a chance to sit and, you know, have a couple hours a week where they talk about their writing and what they’re trying to do with their writing, and how they see their field and the written work they do in their field. It matters less, like, what specific activities you do or who’s teaching the course, in a way. It’s giving students a structured space to reflect every week about writing, and I think that’s maybe the most useful part. Because these are smart students. They can figure out some of the specific things taught in the class by themselves. But it’s more it gives students an opportunity set aside that they have to do that every week that I think is the most useful part. (August 28, 2002)

Michele saw herself, then, as a kind of native-speaker, graduate student informant, facilitating the discussion and practice of scheduled writing tasks.

The Class Members

I began attending WCGS on the first day of the semester, sitting with the students at the tables that circled the room. At the end of the first week, after the class enrollment had stabilized, I presented the details of the project to the 11 class members, explaining why I would be sitting in class with them throughout the semester. I asked for their permission to use their words in my research, and they all decided to sign the Informed Consent Form. The class demographics were representative of the overall demographic of international graduate students enrolled at Midwest University; the majority were males from the Far East studying in fields like computer science, mechanical or electrical engineering, or biological-mechanical-electrical-micro-systems (known as “bioMEMS”).

During the semester, the class members appeared to gradually become more and more accustomed to my presence, my notebook, and my small tape recorder. For the most part, I sat in the back corner of the classroom between two students, quietly taking notes. At times, however, I interacted more closely with class members. During their poster sessions, for example, I engaged them in short conversations about their work. Later in the semester, Michele on occasion asked for my ideas on a given topic that was being discussed in the class. Although these “intrusions” were minimal, I mention them because they illustrate that I was a constant presence in WCGS.

The Writers

The four writers whom I focus on in this book—Paul, John, Chatri, and Yoshi—were selected because of their willingness to participate in the research and to discuss and share their writing, and also because they together provided me with a range of backgrounds, interests, and experiences, without differing radically from one another. Paul and John were each beginning the second year of their master’s programs, while Yoshi was in his first year of a master’s program, and Chatri was beginning his fourth semester of a doctoral program. The four also differed in their professional experiences prior to my research; John and Paul had both begun their graduate work almost immediately after completing their undergraduate degrees, while Yoshi and Chatri both spent several years working before beginning their graduate studies in the United States. All four writers had completed all of their prior education in their home countries outside of the U.S. John, however, had lived in the U.S. from birth through elementary school. Their directions after completing their degrees were uncertain at the start of my study.

The length of time that the writers participated in my research varied because of their different dates of graduation (see Figure 2). As John and Paul both left Midwest University after completing their master’s degrees, their participation ended earlier than Yoshi and Chatri. Below, I describe each writer in greater detail, providing further insight into their individual writing histories.

Aug. ’02	WCGS	John	Paul	Yoshi	Chatri
Sept. ’02
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Nov. ’02
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Jan. ’03
Feb. ’03
Mar. ’03
Apr. ’03
May ’03
June ’03
July ’03
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Figure 2. Timeline of research participation for the four writers.

Paul

At the start of the study, Paul was beginning his second year in a master’s program in computer sciences. Paul’s interest in computer science dated back to his childhood when he loved playing computer games:

As I mentioned, I like playing games very much. I think since the first computer appeared in China, I was playing, almost. My dad is also in this area, and actually he’s an expert on computer science. When I was a child, he brought a computer home and I played games on it. So I was getting interested in computer science. (September 3, 2002)

A native of China, Paul finished his bachelor’s degree in engineering at a top Chinese university and then worked for one year at a computer company in China. He described this work as “very tiring” and decided that he wanted to continue his education instead of staying on at the company. He applied to Midwest University because of its reputation in computer science and because he had a friend at the school who had recommended it to him.

In our first meeting, Paul explained that his research interest was “to investigate operating system and compare techniques to find the solution for hand-held device. The goal is to reduce energy consumption” (September 3, 2002). In his first year in the master’s program, he began working as a Research Assistant (RA) on a research team with five other graduate students and a professor—all Chinese. Though the group all shared a native language and home country, they always spoke in English when the advisor was in the lab. The collegial atmosphere of his research group seemed to play a major role in Paul’s interest in staying on for doctoral work in the CS program:

. . . because both my colleagues and my advisor are very nice, and they also help me while I encounter some difficulty. I think I learned many things from them since I come here. And I think I will continue to make progress if I stay here. (September 3, 2002)

At the beginning of my study, Paul was already well on his way to continuing in the graduate program, having completed three of the four required qualifying exams for PhD students. However, within a few months after the start of my study—halfway through the second year of his master’s program—Paul had begun to lose interest in continuing his graduate education. He saw his own strengths and interests as more aligned with the type of work he could do in industry than with that done in academe:

. . . I think I am not an academic people. Doing research for me is difficult. Not difficult- I know how to work on the project, but the research needs more patience [laughing] and lots of time you cannot come up with any conclusions. For the purpose of writing paper, the research is good because you can read some corrections you cannot answer now. You present some work currently you have. But I think I more like to come up with very completed conclusions and a solution to put it into industry. That’s what I’m interested in. So [laughing] I think that I will not go on to PhD. (December 12, 2002)

Paul reiterated this sentiment repeatedly throughout my study.

An additional reason for completing his education at the master’s level was that Paul’s research interests no longer seemed to fit with those of his advisor. He was hesitant, however, to change advisors in order to work with someone in another area:

Also, I think that, to say the truth, I don’t very like the area I’m currently in. I think, I don’t know, maybe it’s difficult or- I don’t know. [laughing] So, I will not go on for the PhD. And I haven’t think about looking for another advisor, I haven’t think about it. I just want to finish my master’s degree. (December 12, 2002)

With or without a PhD, Paul described his long-term goal as working as a programmer for a computer game company. His true love was program analysis and experimental work.

Whether or not Paul decided to continue for a PhD, the major requirement for completing his master’s degree was to write a master’s thesis. During the first half of my research, the requirements for the thesis still seemed rather mysterious and vague to Paul, though he believed that his advisor would be playing a prominent role in terms of giving feedback. By the sixth month of my study, though, Paul had started becoming nervous about his thesis. He had hoped to conduct research on the area of inter-network security, but without any promising results in his experiments, he was unable to focus on a specific topic. Five months later, when his thesis had been completed, Paul had an increased sense of confidence in writing in English and a sense that he would be able to tackle whatever future writing tasks he encountered.

Prior to coming to the U.S., Paul had written papers in English courses, a bachelor’s thesis in Chinese, and some internal company documents in Chinese. He had also translated into English the abstract of his thesis and a peer’s short master’s thesis. The summer before my research began and at school breaks during the study, Paul worked as an intern at a local computer software company. In this position, he wrote regular progress reports and memos to document his work. At the start of WCGS, Paul described most of his English-language writing as email communication with friends. He explained that he had written homework assignments for classes, but these consisted primarily of algorithms.

Though he wrote a great deal of email—both in English and Chinese—Paul initially told me that he did not like writing very much:

Because I think reason is I was forced to do so. Writing letters is different. Letters, you are willing to write letters to your friends. Letters is, I think fine, but some formal document is not. (September 3, 2002)

He also described feeling more comfortable with workplace writing than academic writing. He particularly preferred programming documentation (a common form of writing at work), which he described as “very natural” and following a basic format.

After two years of graduate school, Paul felt that his writing had changed, though he found it difficult to identify what the changes were beyond increased confidence. He felt his English-language writing had had been influenced by readings, homework assignments, instructors, collaborative writing, and oral interactions. Despite these influences, however, Paul felt a strong ownership of his writing, and credited his very early days of literacy as contributing most significantly to his current writing style.

Paul’s enrollment in WCGS was recommended by his advisor, but Paul felt that it would be helpful to him, especially when writing his thesis. Within the first few weeks of the semester, he explained that he was more accustomed to informal writing than academic writing, and he described his goals for WCGS as learning to format papers and writing them in a way that was “comfortable” for academics.

John

In his rapid, American-style speech, John, a second-year master’s student with black hair and small, rectangular glasses, described to me his unique linguistic identity during our first meeting. Twenty-five years of age at the start of my research, John was born in the United States, where he spent his first several years and one year of graduate school. He had spent the rest of his life in South Korea, his parents’ home country, where he attended middle school, high school, and undergraduate schooling:

I think I have two first languages, so basically when I was born and for the first years before preschool, Korean was predominant language, because I would also speak in Korean with my parents. And then after preschool, I spent more time with my peers and spend more time speaking English, so I basically forgot all of my Korean. And then I moved back to Korea. When I moved back to Korea, I didn’t have any command of the Korean language. (September 4, 2002)

Out of necessity, John learned Korean quickly. Even after several years living in South Korea, John still felt most comfortable communicating in English. The chance to use English, paired with his feeling that the top electrical engineering schools were located in the U.S., led John to apply to several U.S. graduate programs to continue his education.

John had always been interested in science, but engineering was not in fact his first love:

Well, I was interested in physics. Because when I was a little boy, my, like, dream was to get a Nobel Prize . . . in physics. Because I always loved reading science-related books, or science fiction, fantasy book, even just non-fiction books about science. So, I was just fascinated with physics. And then, after moving to Korea—it’s a pretty funny reason—but the college that I wanted to apply to didn’t have a physics course separately, but they just lumped all the sciences together. I didn’t really like that idea so I chose a different field, which is the closest to physics that I could find, and that was electrical engineering. (September 4, 2002)

Like Paul, John’s father was in the field that John himself eventually entered. From the time he began studying in the field of electrical engineering, John’s interests had changed from robotics to semi-conductor devices to his current interest in biomedical engineering—more specifically, bio-micro-electrical-mechanical systems, or “bioMEMS.” John spoke about his work with passion and intensity:

I really enjoy helping people. I mean helping people in a direct way. Like, for example, if I were to earn money and become somebody like Bill Gates and then finance all of these things, I probably wouldn’t be that happy because that’d be too indirect for me. But if I developed a robotic leg—which I was very interested in robotic prosthesis when I applied to Midwest University—so that I could change somebody’s life, even if I didn’t know that person personally, I know that the research I did would directly affect somebody in a good way. (September 4, 2002)

At the start of my study, John’s goal was to enter a PhD program after completing of his master’s degree, and eventually to go on to start his own company. Based on his brief experience in corporate culture prior to his master’s degree, John felt that he would be happier starting his own company “where it’s more free, and I have associates in that company who agree with what I think” (September 4, 2002). During the first four months of my study, however, John modified these long-term goals. At the end of WCGS, and after submitting applications to five doctoral programs in bioMEMS, John began leaning more toward an academic career, feeling that it would allow him more time for family and other interests.

In our first interview, John told me that he enjoyed writing and that, from elementary school on, it had come fairly naturally to him:

A lot of my friends suffered through writing, like don’t know what to write, but- I don’t know about my form or anything, but usually I just [gestures a whirlwind] go through it, and after recomposing what I wrote, pretty satisfied with what I wrote. (September 4, 2002)

Despite his relative confidence in his writing, John felt that he was somewhat limited to only one “tone of voice,” making it difficult to change the style of his writing for different contexts or genres. John, like Paul, felt that his writing style was rooted in his very early writing experiences:

I think it was the people who influenced my writing, who developed my style of writing. Because it was developed when I was young, and it’s more due to my reading and the guidance of other people, so I think it was a lot of the English teachers from first through fourth or fifth grade, because they did a lot of creative writing classes, so I think it’s different how you learn writing. I mean, your style differs. (May 3, 2003)

While he felt that his early English teachers had influenced his writing in general, John believed that his formal writing had also been influenced by his father, who had taught him how to think like a scientist from very early on.

As a native speaker of both English and Korean, John experienced many differences when writing in the two languages. He felt he was able to write faster in English, but found it difficult to “switch modes” when writing in one language and having a thought in another language. When he first learned to write in Korean—after having already become literate in English—it was initially awkward for him. Over time, however, John felt that “in Korean it started following my English style” (May 3, 2003). John explained that now it was easier for him to write about something in the language through which he had learned the content. He thus tended to use Korean more often for expressing personal experiences, but English for engineering-related work. Because he had chosen the non-thesis track in his master’s program, John did not have a close advisor and did not conduct any independent research outside of his disciplinary courses. All of his writing during my study was tied either to coursework or to his applications for doctoral study.

WCGS was John’s first writing class in English (beyond his early school years), though he had had some writing instruction in Korean. Despite his very strong English language skills, John was required to take the course because of his score on the Test of Writing English (TWE). Before enrolling in WCGS, John had hoped to improve his English grammar through the course; however, during the summer before WCGS, he reviewed grammar on his own. When WCGS began in the fall, John’s new goal was to link the assignments to the writing he would already be doing during the semester, such as his graduate school applications. He also told me that, while he was fairly comfortable with writing in English already, “there will probably be some topics that I’m not familiar with” (September 4, 2002). Despite his high level of English proficiency—much higher than most of the other course participants—John approached the course requirement positively and with clear goals.

Chatri

Chatri, a native of Thailand and in his early 30s, showed an enthusiasm for and positive attitude toward work that seemed to carry over into much that he did. With his straight hair falling in front of his glasses, Chatri spoke quickly and excitedly in our meetings, often laughing as he disparaged his writing and research. As a participant in my study, he eagerly provided me with a great deal of his written work, completed both before and during the time of my research.

A second-year doctoral student in ECE, Chatri was working toward a degree in computer engineering. He had begun studying computer engineering during his master’s program in Thailand, though he was unable to pinpoint any particular influences that led him to the field. After completing his master’s degree, Chatri worked for four years as a research assistant at a research center in Thailand. He described this work as having different goals than the academic work he was currently involved in:

At here, the research is about the academic research. I mean, academic research is we don’t want our research to be the product, to be the patent. But the job that I worked in Thailand, in that research, we want the product, we want something that people can use, people can see. Not the paper. (September 13, 2002)

In our first meeting, Chatri was beginning his fourth semester of doctoral work. At that time, he joked about not being able to pass his qualifier exam the first time he had taken it, and he was studying to re-take the exam in a few months. As a condition of his scholarship for graduate study, Chatri was required to return to Thailand as a professor after completing his doctoral degree.

At Midwest University, Chatri worked in a lab with a group of nine others, including a professor, two postdoctoral researchers, and several other graduate students. In the year before my study, Chatri worked on an interdisciplinary project related to American Sign Language (ASL), in which his role was to develop computer vision for ASL. When the project’s funding was not renewed, Chatri joined the others in his lab working on a project funded by a car manufacturing company. Chatri’s work in this project focused specifically on the use of robot vision in assembly lines. As an RA, Chatri was required to submit monthly reports to the project supervisor, a postdoctoral student in his lab. Reports from each research team member were then integrated into a monthly report by the project supervisor and sent to the sponsor. During the fifth month of my study, Chatri began looking for a dissertation topic in his lab work. Much of his time during his fifth semester was spent reading research reports and looking for possible approaches to apply to the research problem that he was working on.

Prior to enrolling in WCGS, Chatri had taken only one writing course—an academic writing course that was a component of an English intensive course taken just before coming to the U.S. In this course, he had learned to make rather detailed outlines before writing a complete draft, and he utilized this writing process for several of the writing tasks he engaged in during my study, both in and out of the WCGS classroom. Chatri had also had many professional writing experiences as part of his work in Thailand, co-authoring three papers in English and two in Thai. As he wrote in his first writing assignment for WCGS:

I started to use writing in the real world when I worked as a research assistant in a national research center in Thailand. I had to write electronic mail to contact many foreigners. I also wrote three publications in English submitted to international conferences. At that time, I realized that how important of English for my job. At the same time, I also realized how weak my English skill were especially the writing that I felt uncomfortably when I wrote the publication. (Writer’s Autobiography, September 2002)

Perhaps because he had had experience writing professional papers in his native language, Chatri was able to speak quite specifically about differences that he experienced. Though Thai was his first language, he explained that “somehow I think it’s more difficult to write in Thai than in English, because sometimes in English, there is only one word or one sentence to explain that idea. But in Thai, there are many” (September 13, 2002). He also felt that Thai tended to be more informal than English. He said he found it easier to write more formally in English, because “you can use another vocabulary to make it more formal” (September 13, 2002).

At the start of the study, he described grammar as posing the most difficulty for him when writing. He felt that he tended to use simple sentences and had difficulty connecting sentences in a meaningful way. He 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.