Diverse, Unforeseen, and Quaint Difficulties: The Sensible Responses of Novices Learning to Follow Instructions in Academic Writing
Karen P. Macbeth
While academic discourse communities have been extensively studied as social contexts of forms/functions, and teachers, lessons, and students have been researched from every imaginable angle, the prevailing view of academic writing conventions is still quite normative. The conventions of the academy are often regarded as a stable collection of formal rules and objects that can be taught explicitly. For novices, however, learning such conventions constitutes a curriculum in the use of cultural objects. And while there might be general agreement that all curricula are cultural, how they are has not been so closely considered in the literature. Few studies of teaching and learning academic writing consider the unspoken, taken-for-granted assumptions and competencies that underlie conventional objects (e.g., thesis statements, main ideas, evidence, etc.). Using naturalistic inquiry, this study describes the efforts of a group of international undergraduate students and their teacher (the researcher) as they undertake the first assignment—writing a summary—in an introductory college-level writing class. Findings suggest that when faced with following instructions for writing tasks that are riddled with cultural assumptions, some novices may need to write their way into making sense of their lessons before they can recognize the curriculum of judgments that underlie them.
RTE, Volume 41, Number 2, November 2006
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