A STRANGER IN STRANGE LANDS : A COLLEGE STUDENT WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

McCarthy, Lucille Parkinson, 1944-

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Subjects (All):

Language arts.

0279.

Local Subjects:

0279.

Physical Description:

352 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 46-05A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

This study asks questions about the nature of writing processes in classrooms. More specifically, how do students go into a classroom setting and figure out what the writing requirements are in that discipline and for that teacher, and how do they go about producing it? As students go from one classroom to another, they are presented with new speech situations, and they must determine what constitutes appropriate ways of speaking and writing in each new territory. How do they learn the rules for successful written communication in a particular classroom, rules which include many conventions and presuppositions that are not explicitly articulated?

In order to answer these questions this study examines the writing experiences of three Loyola College students during their freshman, sophomore, and junior years. It focuses primarily on one of these students as he wrote in three consecutive semesters for Freshman Composition and his sophomore courses, Introduction to Poetry and Cell Biology. Follow-up data was collected during the fall of his junior year.

Three research methods were combined in order to get as full a picture as possible of this student writer's experiences in the various classroom contexts. These research methods are ethnographic observation and interviews, composing-aloud protocols, and text analysis.

Conclusions are drawn from the data about how this Loyola student figured out what constituted acceptable writing in each classroom and how he worked to produce it. Also presented are conclusions about what enhanced or denied his success in communicating competently in unfamiliar academic territories. Affecting his success were unarticulated social aspects of classroom contexts for writing as well as explicitly stated requirements and instructions.

Conclusions are also drawn from the data about how this student's writing experiences in the various contexts related to each other, particularly how Freshman Composition related to his sophomore academic writing experiences.

Implications from the data and conclusions are suggested (1) for students' writing development, (2) for the teaching of writing, and (3) for liberal arts education in general.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-05, Section: A, page: 1217.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1985.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.