Background and Research Questions

A great deal of recent research in the field of rhetoric and composition studies has focused on the transfer of skills learned in first-year writing courses to other courses across the disciplines, but little research has been done on the knowledge of conventions that students bring to the university from their previous literacy experiences in home communities, publics, or their previous schooling. In order to understand more fully what transfers from first-year writing courses, we need to understand more fully what genre knowledge students bring with them into first-year writing courses.

At the same time as some researchers have been concerned with the question of transfer, others have recently called on teachers of first-year writing courses to become more attentive and responsive to the linguistic and cultural differences students bring with them to the university, looking for ways that students could be encouraged to utilize their discursive resources as they encounter and adapt to academic writing conventions. But research has not yet identified what these resources are and how students deploy them when they encounter academic writing tasks. This research study will fill these gaps by addressing writers’ prior discourse knowledge and experience reading and writing genres and investigating how this experience influences their ability to adapt to (and adapt) academic writing expectations.

The study addresses the following research questions: What genres (written, oral, digital) do students already know when they arrive in first-year writing courses? How do students use their prior genre knowledge when writing new genres for first-year writing courses? To what extent does this prior knowledge help or hinder the student’s ability to gain access to academic discourse? What factors contribute to how and why students transform prior genre knowledge into new genre knowledge? How do the antecedent genres that students draw on reflect and reinforce broader cultural variables such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, educational history, family literacy patterns, and to what extent do these variables play a role in students’ ability to access academic genres?