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Dwight Atkinson
| Linda Lonon Blanton | Colleen Brice |
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Christine Pearson Casanave |
Dana Ferris | John Flowerdew |
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Richard Haswell |
Sarah Hudelson |
Ken Hyland |
| Xiaoming Li | Rosa Manchon |
Paul Kei Matsuda |
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Susan Parks | Miyuki Sasaki |
Tony Silva | Bob Weissberg |
Situated Qualitative Research and Second
Language Writing
Dwight Atkinson, Temple
University Japan
This presentation focuses on the study of L2 writing via
qualitative research (QR) on particular social scenes. First, I
argue for the role of QR methodologies in getting up-close looks
at what L2 writers do, how they do it, and how they think about
what they do. Second, I focus on potential problems encountered
while undertaking situated QR. I present video clips of interviews
conducted in the course of a recent QR project, showing how what
from one point of view can be seen as weaknesses and flaws can
from another be seen as strengths and positives.
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Mucking Around in the Lives of Others:
Reflections on Doing Qualitative Research
Linda Lonon Blanton, University of New Orleans, USA
Although qualitative research offers ways of knowing not
available to researchers using other approaches, it provides
little to no buffer between researcher and subject inherent in
quantitative work. When seeking to understand phenomena through
people’s stories--narratives, interviews, and autobiography--a
qualitative researcher is out there, mucking around in the lives
of others. This potentially dark side of qualitative research
became wrenchingly clear to me during the course of a year-long
project, just ended. A discussion of the project and the thorny
issues it raises form the core of the presentation.
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Coding Data in
Qualitative Research on L2 Writing:
Issues and Implications
Colleen Brice, Southern Illinois University, USA
In this presentation I reflect on the processes I engaged in to
code data in a case study of ESL writers' reactions to teacher
feedback. I chronicle the process by which I developed and revised
a coding instrument to analyze interview transcripts, discussing
the epistemological and methodological assumptions that guided my
work, the problems I encountered, and the manner in which I dealt
with these problems. I suggest that this self-examination raises
questions about the applicability of current goodness criteria for
qualitative research as formulated within the interpretivist,
constructivist paradigm, and I consider the implications of this
for qualitative research methodology and reporting in L2
composition.
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Uses of Narrative
in L2 Writing Research
Christine Pearson Casanave, Keio University, Japan
In this paper I explore narrative in L2 writing research from
several perspectives. Beginning with a conceptual background in
which I discuss how narrative constructs meaning in otherwise
fragmented lives, I then examine narrative from five angles:
metadisciplinary
narratives (or how we construct the stories of our field);
research reports as narratives; narrative inquiry as a research
method; narratives as data; and pedagogical narratives (our
stories of teaching and learning). I conclude by suggesting that
narrative approaches can help break down narrow stereotypes of
what L2 writing research consists of and thus contribute to an
expanded understanding of L2 writing and writers.
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Anatomy of L2
Writing Research:
From Problem to Process to Publication
Dana Ferris, California State University, Sacramento, USA
This presentation will focus on the nuts-and-bolts of L2
writing research projects: Identifying & narrowing research
questions, selecting appropriate paradigms for analysis, obtaining
funding and other assistance, and disseminating findings. The
presenter will use examples from her own experience as a
teacher-researcher to argue that it is not only critical for an L2
writing research agenda to move forward, it is also possible, even
with limited resources.
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Writing for
Scholarly Publication in English:
A Multidimensional Study
John Flowerdew, City University of Hong Kong, China
This paper provides an account of a research project which
studied Hong Kong
academics and their writing for publication in international
journals. By
means of a large scale questionnaire survey, interviews with
writers and
journal editors, case studies of individual writers as they go
through the
writing and submission process, and textual analysis, the study
highlighted
the problems and successful strategies adopted by Hong Kong
scholarly
writers.
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Researching Teacher
Evaluation of Second-Language Writing Via Prototype Theory
Richard Haswell, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, USA
Prototype categorization theory has been helpful in
understanding how a second language is acquired (e.g., John R.
Taylor, 1995; Lynne Cameron, 1994), but prototype theory has been
little applied to the way L2 writing is evaluated. The potential
of prototype approaches to the problem of writing teachers and
their diagnostic ways with L2 writing is explored through an
experiment that used teachers with ESL, bilingual, or L1 expertise
responding along a number of rhetorical dimensions to a Korean ESL
college-freshman writer. The findings show that prototype analysis
may uncover evaluative practices missed by past inquiry following
holistic or analytical lines.
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Taking on English
Writing in a Bilingual Program:
Revisiting, Reexamining, Reconceptualizing the Data
Sarah Hudelson, Arizona State University,
USA
Several years ago a colleague and I conducted three year
longitudinal case studies to investigate the writing development
of Spanish speaking first through third graders in a
Spanish-English bilingual program. In this talk I will revisit the
study in order to examine how our research questions changed over
time and the strengths and limitations of our data collection and
analysis. I will also critique the cognitive/constructivist
framework that influenced the analyses undertaken and consider how
alternative frameworks might provide other lenses through which to
view the case study children's second language writing
development.
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Digging Up Texts and Transcripts:
Confessions of a Discourse Analyst
Ken Hyland, City University of Hong Kong
Discourse analysis, the study of situated language use, brings
together interaction and language in a single concept and reminds
us that writing involves writers making choices in social contexts
peopled by purposes, readers, prior experiences and other texts.
This paper is a reflection on one way of doing discourse analysis
by an applied linguist. It describes how corpus and interview
data, informed by an interactionist perspective, were used to
investigate how Hong Kong undergraduate’s representations of
themselves in undergraduate dissertations were shaped by their
experiences and perceptions of academic writing in English.
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Composing Culture in a
Fragmented World:
The issue of Representation in Cross-Cultural Research
in the Post-Modern Era
Xiaoming Li, Long Island University, USA
Theories of post-structuralism and post-modernism have
heightened our awareness of the opaqueness of truth as the
boundaries between perception and reality are blurred, the
rhetorical and socially constructed nature of knowledge revealed,
and categories of representation as basic as race, gender and
culture questioned. How, as we are mired in what Jane Hopkins
calls the “epistemological quandary,” do we pursue cross-cultural
studies without essentializing the culture and people we endeavor
to represent? I will discuss the issue of representation, which I
started contemplating when working on “Good Writing” in
Cross-Cultural Context and continued to the recent project in
Writing and Learning in Cross-National Perspective.
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Using Concurrent Protocols to Explore L2
Writing Processes:
Methodological Issues in the Collection, Analysis and
Interpretation of Data
Rosa M. Manchon, University of Murcia, Spain
(in collaboration with Julio Roca de Larios and Liz Murphy)
In my presentation I will reflect on the inquiry process
followed in a research project on L2 writing processes initiated
in 1995 and still in progress, with a focus on the most important
problems faced and the rationale behind the decisions adopted by
the research team regarding the collection, analysis and
interpretation of think-aloud data. Special attention will be paid
to the difficulties experienced in setting up a theoretically
grounded coding scheme of writing processes. These issues will be
analyzed in relation to some of the studies carried out within the
research project.
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A Story of One's
Own:
Historical Inquiry
in Second Language Writing
Paul Kei Matsuda, University of New Hampshire, USA
In this presentation, I will discuss the nature of historical
inquiry and its status in the field of second language writing. I
will begin by exploring various types of historical inquiry and
the evolution of historical consciousness both in relation to
composition studies and second language studies. I will then
reflect on the process of historical inquiry that resulted in my
1999 article on the disciplinary division of labor between
composition studies and second language studies.
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Stranger in a Strange
Land:
Investigating Documentation Practices in a Medical Setting
Susan Parks, Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada
(in collaboration with Diane Huot, Josiane Hamers, France H.-Lemonnier)
To date, relatively few studies have attempted to document how
non-native speakers appropriate written genres in specific
workplace settings. Drawing on her research of how Francophone
nurses were socialized into the documentation practices within an
English-medium hospital in Montreal (Quebec, Canada), the
presenter will reflect on issues related to the qualitative design
paradigm within which the project was framed. Amongst these
issues, particular attention will be given to the construct of
grounded theory and researcher stance.
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Hypothesis Generation and Hypothesis Testing:
Two Complementary Studies of EFL Writing Processes
Miyuki Sasaki, Nagoya Gakuin University, Japan
In this paper, I reflect on my inquiry processes for a
hypothesis-generating study (Sasaki, 2000) and a
hypothesis-testing study (Sasaki, 2002) of Japanese EFL learners'
writing processes using multiple data sources, including their
video-taped writing behaviors and stimulated recall protocols. In
Sasaki (2000), I explored as many aspects as possible of the
participants' writing behaviors that seemed important for building
an empirical model of their writing processes. The results made it
possible to formulate eight hypotheses, which I then statistically
tested in Sasaki (2002) using relatively large sample sizes for
the two groups (experts and novices) of participants.
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On the Philosophical
Bases of Inquiry
in Second Language Writing
Tony Silva, Purdue University, USA
The purpose of this talk will be to address the philosophical
underpinnings of inquiry into second language writing in order to
provide concepts and terminology that may be useful for discussion
of the presentations that will follow. Foci will include ideology
and its elements (ontology, epistemology, and methodology);
inquiry paradigms (positivist, critical rationalist, and
relativist); inquiry methods (hermeneutic and empirical);
empirical designs (qualitative and quantitative); the notion of
multimodal inquiry; and the relevance of postmodern thought for
inquiry into second language writing and writing instruction.
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What
Cross-Modality Studies (Don’t) Tell Us About L2 Writing
Bob Weissberg, New Mexico State University, USA, and
Universitä î°œ t Erfurt, Germany
This paper assesses the contributions of cross-modality
research (research into speaking/writing connections) to the
understanding of L2 writing processes and products. A survey of
the various research strands within this area is followed by a
critique of the methods used in and the theoretical assumptions
underlying such studies. A lack of coherence among published
cross-modality studies is noted and attributed to the lack of a
general theory of L2 oracy/literacy development. The potential
benefits of adopting a socio-cultural (Vygotskian) stance in
cross-modality L2 writing research are examined. Two of the
author’s studies are used by way of illustration.
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