Working together: two qualitative approaches to researching writing support for doctoral students

The social construction of learning is a well-studied and widely accepted idea. However, students often have limited opportunities to engage in academic social outlets. This problem is exacerbated for culturally and linguistically diverse writers, who simultaneously have a steeper learning curve in terms of socializing into their disciplines and frequently are isolated from their native-English speaking counterparts. These writers are at a distinct disadvantage when they must produce high-stakes writing.

The purpose of this research is to better understand the role interaction plays in supporting culturally and linguistically diverse doctoral students in their written participation in academic culture. I pose the overarching research question: Given a discipline-specific writing center for graduate students in a College of Education, what role does interaction play in helping students to participate in academic conversations?

In the two papers included in this dissertation, I study writing as a social practice at a large research institution in the Midwest. In the first paper, I qualitatively classify interactions between myself and a peer as we negotiate discipline-specific language during writing consultations over a four year period. In the second paper, I employ discourse analysis to understand one researcher’s process of becoming an educational researcher.

Findings from this study show that peer interaction can play an important role in doctoral students’ initiation into scholarly discourse communities. In Paper 1, talk, and especially reading aloud and responding as a reader, interact with other scaffolding strategies in complex ways that cannot be considered in isolation. In Paper 2, while discourses of socialization and representation aligned with signs of legitimate peripheral participation, discourses of isolation and lack of representation aligned with barriers to learning.

Information about the ways people work together to become academic writers can inform the ways administrators, faculty members, and students work together to learn. This research also has implications for improving the ways that academic writing is taught and represented in higher education, especially for culturally and linguistically diverse students at the doctoral level.