This study offered insight on the intermingling of discourse communities in the learning environment by examining experiences of composition instructors from a regional Southern university and their reflections of teaching students who struggled to navigate from home discourse to academic discourse. Merriam's basic qualitative research design…

Recent ESP research into academic writing has shown how writers convey their stance and interact with readers across different disciplines. However, little research has been carried out into the disciplinary writing practices of the pure mathematics academic community from an ESP genre analysis perspective. This study begins to address this gap by…

I see a parallel between the illiteracy I witnessed while working in the court system and the challenges facing first-year writers at the university. In both cases, problems arise due to unfamiliarity with the discourse community into which one enters. In response, because much of the language governing composition and rhetoric is rife with place…

This paper offers a narrative framework for understanding how multilingual graduate students make sense of the continuous and frequently contradictory talk they engage in as they write. It illustrates how attention to the telling, form, and content of the stories such students relate about their ongoing interactions around academic writing can…

A cross-cultural approach is taken to analyse Linguistics research articles in English and Italian in terms of 1) the use of exclusive first-person subject pronouns in English and first-person inflected verbs in Italian, and 2) the passive voice in both languages and "si" constructions in Italian. The aim is to determine whether personal and…

In this article, the author talks about the college writing center, which is a place of political confrontation, where cultural issues involving dialect and values are probed, contested, and negotiated. He suggests a post-process approach to composition--one that ushers writers into a world of exploration and social engagement--one that transcends…

"The Routledge Applied Linguistics Reader" is an essential collection of readings for students of Applied Linguistics. Divided into five sections: Language Teaching and Learning, Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, Identity and Power and Language Use in Professional Contexts, the "Reader" takes a broad…

Novice researchers are expected to participate through writing in the particular discourse community in which their research is located, yet if they come from other languages and other academic cultures and traditions than those of the education provider, they may experience the process of writing as the process of silencing their voices. Many…

Through the use of a case study, this article explores the role of talk in underprepared students' acquisition of academic discourse. Conversation analysis as a linguistic framework is used to examine the interactions of students participating in a small writing group. Tracing the progress of one student's paper, I explore how students'…

The increasing use of computers to enable or replace face-to-face tutorial discussion groups in higher education is creating a new form of academic writing. This small-scale study of 43 students and three tutors identifies ways in which students present their opinions in a forum which allows greater time for reflection, but also creates a…

Research articles (RAs) have been recognized as a distinct genre in the English-using discourse community because of their unique writing conventions. Despite the great number of studies on the analysis of the textual or phrasal aspects of abstracts of RAs, few have been transformed into actual teaching materials for EFL graduate students. The…

Argues that the college reading and learning discourse community should enlarge its support and perspective by listening to and learning from other academic communities. Explains why college composition is the perfect place to start; examines its history, associations and professional journals; discusses genre theory as an example of composition's…

Intertextuality is a term that is defined variously and, in a sense, cannot be defined categorically and should not be. The term serves as a point of departure for engaging in an academic discourse grounded in differing theoretical and institutional frames. In the wake of poststructuralism, the classical notion of a "definition," a…

The affirmation of individual creativity in writing is what sets this book apart from other process-oriented rhetorics. Conversational in tone, the book's third edition boasts a writer-to-writer perspective that will put students at ease. The book "walks" students through the main elements of writing from discovery and research to…

Several strands of research in applied linguistics have increasingly focused their attention on the application of genre theory to the classroom. In advanced academics, the genres of disciplinary communities serve gate-keeping functions that students must negotiate in order to succeed in their academic endeavors. Often without explicit…