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The purpose of this study was to determine how faculty members' previous writing experiences in a variety of activity systems shaped their current understanding of writing, as well as to analyze the ways in which this understanding manifests itself in the courses they teach.  Using a survey, interviews, genre analysis, and class observations, I aimed to gain an understanding of the ways that faculty members across disciplines transferred and/or recontextualized their own disciplinary writing knowledge.  Previous research on faculty writing knowledge is often limited to participants at universities with long-standing, formalized WAC programs.  Through nine case-study analyses of faculty across disciplines, this study expands the scope of previous research by focusing on a more diverse set of faculty to contribute to our knowledge of how faculty members negotiate their own understanding of writing with their goals for student writing.  The participants' ability to transfer writing knowledge was largely determined by the way they understood their own processes of learning to write. Those who understood learning to writing from a social interactive perspective transferred rhetorical knowledge among activity systems, while faculty who understood learning to write from a text-based ideology relied on their knowledge of form, grammar and/or mechanics.  Participants who shared a writer-based understanding, on the other hand, were resistant to the notion that writing can be taught.  Though not entirely inclusive, these unique understandings of how writers develop manifest themselves in the ways disciplinary faculty include writing in their courses. This study demonstrates the nuanced and complex reasons for faculty choices in relation to student writing and encourages WAC/WID writing scholars to consider the complexities of faculty understandings of writing knowledge. / Ph. D.

Engineering educators and industry professionals recognize the need for graduates to be effective communicators, yet the effective teaching of communication remains a persistent contemporary issue, with studies continuing to indicate that engineering graduates are insufficiently prepared for workplace communication. Despite compelling arguments that that writing should be treated as a situated activity, writing instruction is often separated from content instruction within engineering curricula. Even when they are integrated, it is often in a way does not optimally support improvement of students' writing skills. Writing studies scholarship identifies best practices that include treating writing as a process, with pedagogy that includes writing and revising drafts based on feedback and revision. However, writing assignments in engineering courses often not process-oriented. Challenges in addressing this problem include epistemology (i.e. instructors believe that learning to write and learning to engineer are separate skills), self-efficacy (i.e. instructors not feeling qualified to effectively provide feedback or writing instruction), and resources (i.e. inclusion of feedback and revision is unfeasible within key constraints of many engineering courses – limited instructor time and large student-faculty ratios). A potential solution is to use peer feedback, where students provide each other feedback on drafts, which can support a process approach while addressing these challenges. Research outside engineering has demonstrated that peer feedback can be as or more effective than instructor feedback; to bring that work into engineering, this study examines peer feedback in the context of a first-year engineering course through a quasi-experimental intervention in which feedback and revision were incorporated into an existing assignment using several variations of peer feedback. Interventions included two types of feedback training as well as feedback from single peers and multiple peers. Results support peer feedback in this context: it was statistically indistinguishable from instructor feedback when students were given sufficient instruction. Feedback from multiple peers, in fact was more effective than instructor feedback in improving writing quality, and in-class instruction was more effective than a handout only in helping students provide effective feedback. However, some general feedback recommendations – notably that readerly feedback should be encouraged directive feedback discouraged – were not supported. While writing studies literature encourages feedback that takes the position of the reader, readerly peer feedback reduced revision quality in this study. Directive feedback, on the other hand, caused improvements in writing quality, supporting previous hypotheses that the tightly-constrained genres in which engineers write justify more use of directive feedback. / Ph. D.

Research in the area of academic writing has demonstrated that writing varies significantly across disciplines and among genres within disciplines. Two important approaches to studying diversity in disciplinary academic writing have been the genre-based approach and the corpus-based approach. Genre studies have considered the situatedness of writing tasks, including the larger sociocultural context of the discourse community (e.g., Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Bhatia, 2004) as well as the move structure in specific genres like the research article (e.g., Swales, 1990, 2004). Corpus- based studies of disciplinary writing have focused more closely on the linguistic variation across registers, with the re-search article being the most widely studied register (e.g., Cortes, 2004; Gray, 2011). Studies of under-graduate writing in the disciplines have tended to focus on task classification (e.g., Braine, 1989; Horowitz, 1986a), literacy demands (e.g.,Carson, Chase, Gibson, & Hargrove, 1992), or student development (e.g., Carroll, 2002; Leki, 2007). The purpose of the present study is to build on these previous lines of research to explore undergraduate disciplinary writing from multiple perspectives in order to better prepare English language learners for the writing tasks they might encounter in their majors at a US university. Specifically, this exploratory study examines two disciplines: psychology and chemistry. Through writing task classification (following Horowitz, 1986), qualitative interviews with faculty and students in each discipline, and a corpus-based text analysis of course readings and upper-division student writing, the study yielded several important findings. With regard to writing tasks, psychology writing tasks showed more variety than chemistry. In addition, lower division classes had fewer writing assignments than upper division courses, particularly in psychology. The findings also showed a mismatch between the expectations of instructors in each discipline and students’ understanding of such writing expectations. The linguistic analysis of course readings and student writing demonstrated differences in language use both between registers and across disciplines.

The purpose of this study is to explore how experienced student writers in Swedish schools handle two different writing tasks, a lab report in physics and a text to be written within Swedish as a school subject. Applying a dialogical perspective on writing, the study is an attempt to explore what role subject contexts play for the students’ writing processes and to what extent the strategies used by the students are more individual. The writing tasks were solved outside of class, a frequent, but relatively unexplored way of organizing writing tasks in upper secondary school in Sweden.The results of the study indicate that different subject contexts enforce the emergence of different writing processes. The lab report was written in a certain order, from easy to difficult parts. Each part of the text was written on its own. Editing affecting the macrostructure of the text did not occur. In contrast, when writing the text within Swedish as a school subject, the paragraphs were developed at several different times during the writing process and questions concerning the global structure of the text seem constantly to have presented themselves. Extensive deletions were performed, and new angles to the subject introduced, affecting the macrostructure of the text.Writing processes are also individual. In a close-up study, three students – here called Kerstin, Paula and Sara – video filmed their work with the two texts. The texts were logged by the students, writing on Google Drive. In this material the individual strategies come out in basically two ways: in the resources chosen by the students as well as in their editing of their texts. Kerstin may be said to have used “herself” or, rather, a general writing ability. For Paula, her father functioned as an important resource. Sara was the one of the three who used digital media most frequently. In the students’ editing patterns, above all, Kerstin and Sara differed significantly. Kerstin did her editing during the formulation stage, regardless of writing task, while Sara mainly did her editing after the formulation stage.

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This dissertation brings together aspects of writing-in-the-disciplines research, reader-response theory, and empirical reading research in an investigation of literary scholars reading poems and constructing arguments. I begin with a review of literary criticism published over the past 70 years on Donne's "The Flea," Milton's "Song: On May Morning," Hopkins' "God's Grandeur," and Eliot's "Conversation Galante." This review suggests that certain New Critical interpretive conventions persist in scholarship. In particular, literary scholars continue to read lyrics as dramatic utterances and as organic wholes. I then present findings from a think-aloud study in which English professors read the aforementioned poems and planned a hypothetical conference talk about them for the MLA conference. Reader-response theorists have argued that readers activate certain text-making conventions in order to read literature as literature. In my study, participants' disciplinary reading conventions were so deeply ingrained that their initial processing of the four poems mirrored the interpretive patterns in published criticism of those poems. Next I analyze the think-aloud data and follow-up interviews from the perspective of writing-in-the-disciplines research. Previous researchers found that scholarly literary argument relies on a limited set of special topoi and is not always directed toward the accumulation of new knowledge. The scholars in my study relied more heavily on some topoi during initial interpretation of the poems, while other topoi were used more often during argument planning. The picture of literary argument that emerges is a hybrid of ceremonial rhetoric and communal knowledge building. Finally, I analyze the think-aloud data from the vantage-point of expert/novice research in cognitive psychology. Previous researchers have used the term "generic expertise" to describe expert knowledge that all members of an academic discipline possess. Despite the belief of some within literary studies that their discipline lacks a core, participants in my study demonstrated generic expertise both in their interpretations of poems and in their argument planning. I conclude by arguing that previous descriptions of scholarly literary argument need to be revised. Literary scholars relate to their objects of study in a unique way that ensures the distinctness of literary argument. / text