Describing Cross-Disciplinary Analytic Moves in First-Year College Student Writing

• Published in: Research in the teaching of English Vol. 52; no. 4; pp. 382 - 403
• Main Authors: Wilder, Laura, Yagelski, Robert P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Urbana National Council of Teachers of English 01-05-2018
• Subjects: Academic discourse; College students; Corpus analysis; Curricula; Educational Change; Elementary school students; English for Special Purposes; Learning; Scholars; Secondary Education; Student writing; Teachers; Teaching; Teaching methods; Writing; Writing Ability; Writing Across the Curriculum; Writing instruction; United States > US; Illinois
• ISSN: 0034-527X; 1943-2348

College students are often expected to perform a variety of sophisticated intellectual moves in their writing, yet there is little or no evidence that such expectations are reasonable. This study contributes to a growing number of corpus-based studies of student writing through an examination of students’ use of four cross-disciplinary analytic moves that research on writing across the curriculum has identified as valued in postsecondary academic discourse in essays written for a required first-year college writing course. Results indicate that few essays in the sample showed evidence of these analytic moves; instead, essays evidenced tendencies to treat serially separate sources with little synthesis and analysis. However, those essays in which cross-disciplinary analytic moves were present received higher grades from writing instructors, suggesting that the value placed on these analytic moves by writing instructors is congruent with the value placed on them in the disciplines. One possible implication of our findings may be that many students entering college are not developmentally ready for such writing tasks and fall back on traditional “research report” strategies that circumvent analysis. However, it may instead be the case that typical first-year writing instruction inadequately prepares students for disciplinary analytic writing tasks and that research is needed to develop new instructional approaches for this purpose.