Research

Professional Academic Writing in a Global Context
I am investigating, with Dr.Theresa Lillis of the Open University, UK , the efforts of non-native English-speaking scholars to publish their research in English-medium journals. Drawing on academic literacies/New Literacy Studies, we are combining ethnographic and textual approaches to understand the professional, social, and linguistic networks of participating academics, and the influence on their texts that members of these networks play. The pilot study for this research in Slovakia, Hungary, and Spain was funded by the Open University's Research Development Funding Committee, and the British Academy has awarded us travel grants to continue our fieldwork in Slovakia and Hungary. The Economics and Social Research Council has awarded us a grant to continue the project and expand it to Portugal, and the University of Rochester has also supported travel and transcription.

We have presented findings of this study at: the American Association for Applied Linguistics, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, and the Writing SIG of the European Association for Research in Learning and Instruction. We delivered a plenary lecture at the May 2003 conference of the Canadian Association of Teachers of Technical Writing. We will take part in a symposium on international scholarly publishing at the International Association of Applied Linguistics conference in July 2005. Our findings have been published in the winter 2004 issue of TESOL Quarterly. Purchase article

See http://paw.open.ac.uk for more information.

Read article published in NYS TESOL Idiom, Vol 34, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 8-9.

Read Moving out of the Shadows: Publishing from the Rest of the World at ScienceCareers.org in April 2007.

Ethnic minority students entering higher education: The role of academic literacy in Openings and beyond
The Open University's Centre for Widening Participation funded this research project examining the role of academic literacy in the Openings Programme, five short access courses designed to help students experience academic study at the tertiary level. Teaching is conducted by telephone and through the mail, thus relying heavily on written communication. The project design consists of participatory research with six teachers of these courses, three each from the courses in arts and social sciences. This work continues my interest in access to higher education for non-traditional students, particularly non-native speakers of English or bilingual/bidialectical students. Presentations about the project have been made to SCUTREA, the Standing Conference on University Teaching and Research in the Education of Adults in June 2003, the Discourse, Power and Representation conference at the University of Bristol in April 2004, and a roundtable presentation will be made at AERA 2005 in Montreal.

Read SCUTREA proceedings paper.

Competing goals, competing discourses: ESL writing at the community college
This classroom ethnographic study took place in a Midwestern community college Basic Writing/ESOL course. While I was initially interested in how adult immigrant students entering higher education grappled with learning to argue in academic writing, the focus of this ethnography shifted during the semester that I collected my data. Instead, I found that students were taught more of a “hidden curriculum” than the overt curriculum; and that the overt curriculum devolved from an academic writing focus to a skills-based ESOL pedagogy that they found boring and not helpful. The dropout rate in this course reached 75%.

Findings from this study have been published in E. Margolis (Ed.) (2001) The hidden curriculum in higher education (Routledge), Studies in the Education of Adults, and Albright and Luke (Eds.) (in press) Pierre Bourdieu and literacy education (Erlbaum). A survey article about issues of academic literacy facing English language learners in higher education appeared in Community College Review.