This study traces the transfer of writing-related knowledge and concepts from the composition classroom into the writing assignments composed by students within the same course. Working in a first-year-composition classroom taught through a writing-about-writing curriculum, the researcher observed students as they navigated from the initial learning of concepts such as rhetorical situations, writing processes, and discourse communities, into an application of these concepts in various writing assignments, including rhetorical analyses and discourse community profiles. By analyzing a composition instructor's objectives for her assignments and observing the interaction between students and their instructor in a single composition course for the duration of one semester, the researcher traced how students operationalized knowledge from the classroom and applied it in their own writing. After tracing this operalization through interviews with the instructor, observation of class activities and analysis of assignment sheets and student papers, the researcher proposes that instructors may encourage transfer within their composition classrooms by adequately presenting assignment objectives to students, and by allowing sufficient scaffolding of writing tasks. In this way, the researcher explains that students may be able to understand the objectives of their writing assignments in a way that may encourage them to apply the knowledge they learned in the classroom to the writing tasks assigned by their instructor.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-3080 |
| Date | 01 January 2011 |
| Creators | Martinez, Laura |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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