The purpose of this study was to investigate comparatively the discourse patterns in written English between native English and Chinese-English speakers. Two main perspectives related to the roots of different discourse patterns were examined. One perspective, proposed by Young and others, suggests that the native Chinese speakers may transfer their culturally valued discourse patterns from Chinese into English. The other perspective, proposed by Tyler and others, suggests that the ‘unexpected’ Chinese-English discourse patterns may be due to accumulated linguistic miscues, such as grammar, syntax and lexicon errors. In this study, it is proposed that a discourse pattern may be guided by the cognitive strategies that developed from early socialization and such cognitive strategies may be independent of one's language proficiency. To test this proposal, a Native Chinese sample with advanced English proficiency was compared with a comparable highly educated Native English sample, to see if discourse pattern differences emerged despite advanced linguistic proficiency. Nine subjects, in each group, were selected from native English and Chinese-English speaking, advanced graduated students, all of whom displayed advanced English proficiency. Subjects responded in written English paragraphs to a common projective set of six ordered pictures. The written samples were analyzed in three ways: grammar and spelling check, comparison on four formal linguistic aspects, and the examination and comparison of six discourse features within and between the two groups. The results indicate no significant differences on grammar and spelling and similar linguistic competence between the two groups. All six discourse features showed a significantly consistent pattern within the Chinese-English group, while four of the six were significant within the Native-English group. The pattern of the six features, as a whole, showed a significantly consistent pattern within each group and a significant difference between the two groups. It was concluded that discourse patterns emerge independent of one's language proficiency. These contrasting discourse patterns were discussed with respect to the influence of divergent cultural values and early socialization. Further studies are needed to further identify the roots and stability of these cross cultural discourse patterns.

The purpose of this study was to show that ESL students without native-like control of English could be encouraged to write to a real reader by being engaged in pen pal writing activity. Additionally, this study was to determine the effects of the activity of writing to a real reader on the writing skills of ESL students. It was the goal to increase the sensitivity of ESL teachers to realize that their beliefs, role of others, encouragement and positive responses to ESL students' writing affected ESL students' writing development. Also, the importance of creating a social context where ESL students could use writing to communicate and have opportunities to explore uses of print and the complexity of natural communication was discussed. The literature search was centered on two major sections. The first section was the studies of the development of second language writing approaches that established the groundwork for studying ESL writing. The second was about the studies of the perspectives on ESL writing. The review focused on three perspectives from which ESL writing had been examined The study was conducted with fourteen ESL students in an elementary school, age six to twelve. Each of them wrote eight letters in total to their pen pals in a six-month period and received responses for each letter they wrote. A pre-test and a post-test were given to the participants for assessing their development of ESL writing ability (quality of writing and mechanic of writing), the tests were scored by the ESL teachers with the holistic scoring method. To determine the effect of activity of writing to a real reader, the interviews and questionnaires were designed to get information and opinions from the ESL students, pen pals and ESL teachers about this letter-writing activity. Analysis of the data revealed significant differences between the results of the pre-test and post-test. The scores showed that ESL students did much better in quality of writing and mechanic of writing. The data also showed ESL students' improvement in the other areas, which greatly supported the belief that second language learning processes in reading, writing, speaking and listening are developed simultaneously. The results indicated that when ESL students wrote to a real reader with encouragement, their willingness to write was enhanced and their ESL writing abilities improved. ESL students indicated their preference of writing to a real reader and demonstrated their enjoyment of this writing experience during the entire course of this study. This study validates the idea that the students' writing skills develop best when they interact with others and learn from their environment.

Recent research in social psychology has suggested that negative racial stereotypes can have a negative effect on student academic achievement. Although such research has provided experimental evidence on the effect of stereotypes in a variety of different testing contexts, there has been limited research on the effect of racial stereotypes in writing assessments. The purpose of this study was to understand how stereotypes about racially-ordered performance shape students' expectations about the context and consequences of a Placement Exam. The theoretical orientation for this project drew upon Claude Steele's research on stereotype threat, Norman Fairclough's approach to Critical Discourses Analysis, and rhetorical analysis. First-year college students taking a Writing Placement Exam were given a survey that included questions about racial stereotypes and audience expectations. Of the 38% of students who completed the survey (n=1,195), 38 students were finally selected to be interviewed. The results of this research suggest that racial stereotypes do have an impact on students' expectations of writing assessment contexts. Students of color, in particular, expected that their writing performance would be read along racial lines and that they might be graded according to racial expectations for performance. The results also showed that approximately 70% of students in every racial group expected readers to be white. In interviews students said that they based their expectations on racial demographics, stereotypes about college professors, and past educational experiences in English classes. An analysis of student essays was then conducted to determine if students' expectations about stereotypes and readership were evidenced in their writing. A discourse analysis revealed that the primary identity adopted in student essays on the exam prompt "patriotism" was a moderate, unraced American identity, i.e., a cohesive "us." A rhetorical analysis of three essays, written by students who strongly felt that their essays would be graded differently if the reader knew their race, revealed that students used various rhetorical moves to anticipate a potentially hostile audience. The results of this research suggest that racial stereotypes can have an effect in writing assessments and how students rhetorically approach writing assessments. The findings suggest new considerations in test design, test use, classroom interventions, and institutional change.

In order to address the effects of unequal relations of power inherent in expert medical knowledge and practice that contribute to health inequities, this project defines and instantiates the concept of rhetorical economies in public health through a case study of promotora practices. As everyday experts, promotoras support medically underserved communities through health education and counseling. This project defines rhetorical economies of public health as those practices and processes which deterritorialize medical expertise in order to produce and distribute new knowledge economies related to bodies, health, and disease across everyday and expert communities. This participatory research is shaped by a community partnership with a promotora at work in public health settings. Historical analysis of the emergence of biomedical perception provides the context for a feminist rhetorical, decolonial, and critical discourse analyses of public health messaging as well as of this promotora's work stories and pedagogies. This project draws from Chela Sandoval's (2000) articulation of "differential consciousness" to identify processes where everyday and embodied practice differentially engage dominant medical discourse in order to re/appropriate, subvert, and transform "spaces of power" in medical contexts. Rhetorical economies are the means through which these transformations are possible. Narrative and rhetorical analysis of a promotora's work stories and pedagogies reveal how neoliberal and racialized medical discourse reproduce political and economic marginalizations while reinscribing medicalized understandings of the body, health and disease. Using the framework afforded by González, Moll, & Amanti's (2005) "funds of knowledge" approach, this project illuminates how rhetorical economies function to recenter community ways of knowing in order to decolonize biomedical epistemologies and practices. This project provides the foundation for future research in how rhetorical economies act to re/appropriate dominant discourses and advance transformational change. Grounded in medical, feminist, and decolonial rhetorics, this project it will find application across the disciplines, including education, rhetorical studies, cultural studies, medical anthropology, medical humanities, community action research, disability studies, health communication studies, and public health.

This dissertation, "Ban Hammer: Rhetorics of Community Management in the Computer Game Industry," argues that community management, as an emerging corporate discipline, manages community discourse to produce particular subject-consumer attitudes and behaviors. Employing a multi-perspectival, suspensionist methodology, this dissertation analyzes the discursive practices of community managers working in the computer game industry, along with the communities themselves, to discover how computer game communities and computer game development organizations employ a wide variety of rhetorical strategies as they attempt to exert power over one another. Drawing from a wide range of sources in the study of rhetoric, community management, fan studies, computer game development, psychoanalysis, new media studies, and professional communication, this project argues that community manager's inhabit a unique discursive space, one characterized by unresolved and unresolvable discursive tension, and that the work of community managers has an ever increasing importance to both the computer game development cycle and the production of fan communities.

Little attention has been paid to the rhetorical practices and implications of reality television within the field of rhetoric and composition. In fact, it is easy to argue that television as a whole has been largely ignored, leaving the research to scholars in media, communication, and cultural studies. However, the convergence of media has raised questions about the nature of the viewing practices of contemporary television audiences--specifically regarding how to reconcile the complex texts audiences produce in response to television with the passive model of consumption that has defined it. Game scholars, as well as scholars of computers and composition, have theorized the powerful rhetorical potential of play with regard to video games, but they have yet to consider the way play has been invoked in other more traditional media. Therefore, this dissertation seeks to connect old media and new by considering how television, specifically reality TV, engages audiences across platforms, how audiences extend their own experience with reality programs, and what this might mean to rhetoric and composition scholars about contemporary literacy practices. In this dissertation, I argue that reality television has successfully used rhetorics of play and new media technologies to engage audiences within, across, and between programs and their digital environments. Using Survivor as a case study, I analyze the strategies that producers use to invite audiences into the program, specifically focusing on the generic characteristics that instigate play, the program's online presence, and the ways in which viewers respond by producing their own texts such as fantasy Survivor games, blogs, discussion forums, and video mash-ups. By doing so, I demonstrate how reality TV and new media technology have renegotiated the relationship among producers, audiences, and texts. Significantly, viewers become active participants with, as well as producers of, texts. Additionally, I use this research to study how play encourages self-motivated writing, community building, and the possible uses for "serious play" within the composition classroom.

In this project, I theorize public pedagogy in rhetoric and composition by examining a series of case studies within the writing programs and departments of the University of Arizona, Syracuse University, and Oberlin College. This cross-institutional study employs comparative analysis of historical, pedagogical, and institutional documents, as well as interviews I conducted with 19 faculty, administrators, and graduate teaching assistants. First, I draw on archival data to construct institutional histories that trace "town and gown" relations and institutional commitments to equality, social justice, religious and moral education, and the ideals of a land-grant mission. Then, building on these histories, I identify administrative practices that offer sustainable models for long-term public pedagogies. This research employs stakeholder theory to examine what is at stake for students and instructors engaging in public pedagogies. More specifically, I use transformative learning theory to discuss the potential rewards for students who "go public" with their writing and experiences. Finally, I examine classroom practices of instructors and argue for a theory of public pedagogy that is rhetorical, transformative, and located. I offer a model that suggests how writing program administrators might locate public pedagogies within their institution, program, and/or classrooms. I also provide instructors of rhetoric and composition with a series of questions and a graphic for usage when developing public pedagogies within their courses. This study contributes to current scholarly conversations about public writing, community outreach, and civic engagement by examining how programs and pedagogies function across different institutional contexts.

This work focuses on Chican@ identity in academia and uses CRT counterstory to address topics of cultural displacement, assimilation, the American Dream, and ethnic studies. This research considers where the field of rhetoric and composition currently stands in terms of preparedness to serve a growing Chican@ undergraduate and graduate student population. Through counterstory, I offer strategies that more effectively serve students from non-traditional backgrounds in various spaces and practices such as the composition classroom, faculty mentoring, and programmatic requirements such as second language proficiency exams. Since rhetoric and composition can confront structurally and historically specific racisms--e.g., segregation, lack of access for the racial minority to higher education, ethnocentric curricula--embedded in our field, then we, as teachers, students, and administrators, can strategize ways to achieve social justice in academia for historically marginalized groups. My dissertation is focused on Chican@ undergraduate and graduate students because this is the fastest growing population in the academy and is a group with which I feel I can draw upon my cultural intuition; however, the critical race theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological strategies I make use of in my project can be adapted to assist other historically marginalized groups in academia.

Creative Writing Joins Rhetoric and the Public Arts: A Comparative Study of Craft, Workshop, and Practice beyond English Studies analyzes the field of creative writing through the lenses of classical rhetorical scholarship, aesthetic theory, and craft criticism in the arts. Through a historical analysis of techne (craft or method) and telos (end or final cause) in the work of Aristotle and Plato, I argue that what we call "craft" often suffers from a limiting definition that privileges formal and material constraints over the more vital concerns of knowledge and consciousness reflected in artistic education. Craft knowledge is demonstrated through the processes of art-making internalized by the student apprentice. No matter the form or discipline, craft practice embodies the processes and consciousness that make art education possible. The dissertation analyzes concepts of craft as technique while revealing how artistic method illuminates the ends to which art serves. Craft consciousness, a term outlined in this dissertation, is defined as an awareness of artistic method and practice across disciplinary boundaries. If applied by teachers and students of creative writing, this consciousness will redefine writing workshop, curriculum design, programmatic elements, and the mission of creative writing as an academic discipline. By shifting the field toward the craft principles shared with the performing and fine arts, the dissertation uses rhetoric and public arts as lenses for reimagining the mission of creative writing more broadly as a discipline simultaneously engaged with democratic and occultic principles. In proposing an alternative approach to traditional writing workshop by examining author-function, this dissertation also draws from Paulo Freire's term "nuclei of contradiction" in order to argue for a pedagogy that attends to the inherent contradictions that form the foundation of creative writing culture. Freire's "critical consciousness" informs the term "craft consciousness" and the latter term forms the scaffolding in which to reimagine educational principles in creative writing. In order to reimagine craft and workshop practices in traditional and virtual spaces, this dissertation examines how theories, histories, and practices in craft will transform creative writing into a field grounded in artistic practice and intellectual inquiry.

Narrating the Writing Center: Knowledge, Crisis, and Success in Two Writing Center Stories' is year-long comparative case study of two writing centers in the US and the UK and draws upon ethnographic and textographic methodologies. Using writing center documents such as annual management reports, websites, training materials, and interviews with writing center staff and administration, I investigate historical, cultural, and political influences on writing centers and trace moments of change in writing center history in order to contextualize the changes both writing centers faced in terms of funding, location, and identity. I examine traditional and contemporary epistemological paradigms that inform writing centers' everyday practices and underlying ideology that both correspond with and resist institutionally-sanctioned ways of knowing and institutionally-embedded ideology. Using documents and interviews from both sites, I explore the ways in which writing centers find themselves in a reactive position during crises, such as the crisis of access, of literacy, and of funding, rather than a proactive position. Drawing from frame analysis, I argue for reframing the narratives surrounding writing center identity and praxis through the use of code words which have the potential to align writing center praxis with institutional values and result in increased agency for writing centers during crises. I conclude with a blending of contemporary definitions of kairos and stasis in order to create a rhetorical method of writing center communication that can serve as a potential path toward writing center sustainability, and I offer current writing center administrators a heuristic for implementation.