This classroom-based interpretive inquiry investigates how two academic writing instructors with disciplinary backgrounds in English Literature and English Education teach writing to graduate students with other disciplinary backgrounds. The instructors' teaching practices are conceptualized within a Vygotskian socio-cultural framework. Relevant educational issues are situated within two fields of education, Second Language Education and L1 writing instruction. This inquiry challenges the polarized views of writing instruction reflected in the second language literature. The research participants were two writing instructors and two focal students in one class. Data collected and analyzed include 70 hours of classroom-based observations in two classes over a semester, 12 hours of interviews with the research participants over 16 months, and documents such as course handouts, the focal students' portfolios, teacher audio-taped and written feedback to student drafts. Findings indicate that the writing instructors provided writing instruction and writing opportunities both in the specific disciplinary discourses of their students and other discourses. The instructors' goal-directed teaching practices were informed by their own generalist and discipline-sensitive evaluative orientations toward academic writing instruction at postsecondary levels. The instructors' evolving individual beliefs, perceptions, and practices were shown to be related to embedding sets of nested institutional contexts, such as developments in composition and education theory, and the changing theoretical orientations of the instructors' teaching units. Despite the instructors' different emphases on discipline-specific and general features of writing, findings suggest that both instructors mediated the students' appropriation of disciplinary discourses.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.35334 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Gentil, Guillaume. |
| Contributors | Maguire, Mary (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of Second Language Education.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001642715, proquestno: MQ43875, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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