"Accessing Academic Discourse: The Influence of First-Year Composition Students’ Prior Genre Knowledge" is a cross-institutional study being carried out at the University of Tennessee and University of Washington.
The purpose of this research project is to determine what types of genre knowledge student writers enter college with and the extent to which that prior knowledge helps or hinders their abilities to learn academic discourse conventions. The focus, then, is on student writers’ previous experiences with particular discourse structures, participation in rhetorically situated language use (including written, oral and digital communication), and familiarity with typical ways of responding to communicative situations.
