Liminality and Transition: Text Features in Postsecondary Student Writing

Liminality and Transition: Text Features in Postsecondary Student Writing

Precis

Framed by research on liminality, transition, and knowledge adaptation across writing contexts, this longitudinal study examines defined text features of postsecondary student writers as they move between a first-year writing course (focused on developing the rhetorical flexibility students need for academic success) and a first-year seminar (intended to gesture toward disciplinary writing perspectives while still focusing on first-year needs). 

The study suggests the need for extensive ongoing empirical research on textual features to deepen our understanding of student writing in terms of noticeable rhetorical differences in defined writing features, the transitions our students make in their texts as they work with articulated learning objectives, and the reuse or adaptation of learning that occurs across disciplinary settings. 

Researchers

  • Christiane Donahue is associate professor of linguistics, director of the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and member of the Théodile-CIREL research laboratory at l’Université de Lille, France. She teaches writing and works cross-culturally and cross-disciplinarily with research groups in the United States and Europe on questions of university student writing.
  • Lynn Foster-Johnson is an assistant professor in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College. She is an accomplished statistician with expertise and publications in a variety of methodological approaches. She also has considerable experience working as an evaluator, and regularly utilizes qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods data analysis techniques in her work.

Initial submission: July 13, 2016 Final revision submitted: November 15, 2017 Accepted: November 30, 2017 

Data and Methodologies

Methodology

We seek to construct an understanding of the textual transition student writers are making from one context to another. These transitions are messy, unstable, but often-productive liminal spaces in which the learners negotiate new contexts and appropriate, reuse, and adapt some parts of writing knowledge. We wanted to know whether the texts do show any reuse and adaptation of writing knowledge, and if so, what they show, in terms of stability or change in textual variables as the writers move through liminal-transitional spaces.

In its emphasis on precise liminal spaces, our design resonates with that recommended by the National Research Council (2012) in its emphasis on a defined transfer model, tasks within a curriculum that enable student performance relative to the model, and an interpretative framework used to draw inferences about stu- dent performance. As we set out to examine whether a large number of first-year US college student texts showed reuse and adaptation of writing knowledge, we asked: In the transition within and between courses, what stability and change can be empirically documented in textual variables? 

Using a descriptive, single case study design with three replications, the sampling plan includes 156 students and 636 text samples. Texts were reliably hand-coded for the 7 text features and 38 accompanying facets (k = .78). Through use of generalized estimating equations, the design thus allows for granular analysis of the rhetorical moves that students make across courses. In terms of the text features and their facets, statistically significant differences are present in each replication as students move between the two courses and meet different writing expectations; these shifts are underscored by documented reoccurrence, or not, of the features and their facets between courses. Additionally, correlation analysis provides a relational study of rhetorical moves that students make. 

Data

  • 631 anonymized student essays.
  • Glossary
  • Statistical runs (?)
  • Reading instrument (?)
  • Full translated 2012 (?)
  • Year 3 Blind No Names (?)

Final reports and Publications

“Liminality and Transition: Text Features in Postsecondary Student Writing. Research in the Teaching of English. Vol. 52, No. 4, 2018. 359-81

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