This study contributes to research into genre innovation and scholarship exploring how Indigenous epistemes are disrupting dominant discourses of the academy. Using a case study approach, we investigated 31 research articles produced by Mäori scholars and published in the journal AlterNative between 2006 and 2018. We looked for linguistic features associated with self-positioning and self-identification. We found heightened ambiguous uses of “we”; a prevalence of verbs associated with personal (as opposed to discursive) uses of “I/we”; personal storytelling; and a privileging of Elders’ contributions to the existing state of knowledge. We argue these features reflect and reinforce Indigenous scholars’ social relations with particular communities of practice within and outside of the academy. They are also in keeping with Indigenous knowledge-making practices, protocols, and languages, and signal sites of negotiation and innovation in the research article. We present the implications for rhetorical genre studies and for teaching academic genres.
Does engagement with writing centre consultants in one-on-one consultations help students shift from remedial discourses toward meta-cognitive awareness more in keeping with the nature of peer review in an academic setting? This study investigates this question through looking longitudinally over a four-year period in a Canadian university writing centre. We situate this research within wider discussions of Standard English and remediation in student academic writing, as well as writing centre research that explores correlations between numbers of writing centre visits and both students’ confidence as writers and their intrinsic motivation. Using a corpus-supported genre and discourse analysis, we focus on student appointment requests, as well as summative writing centre consultant notes. Results suggest that deficit discourses are highly tenacious, which we explain in part as the result of the constraints inherent in the genre of requests for help, and also in terms of the institutional positioning of writing centres.
This paper applies genre theory to nineteenth-century deeds used to appropriate land from indigenous people in British Columbia, Canada, and in Aotearoa New Zealand. These deeds have been the subject of intense scrutiny in legal and other settings via twentieth century interpretive strategies complicated and modified by postcolonial politics and cross-cultural pragmatics. Although focusing mainly on deeds used in B.C. in the 1850s, the paper also has in its purview other deeds and treaties in NZ and Canada. The analysis of these documents’ actions in colonial and postcolonial contexts concludes with a framing of genre that is not based on the mutual recognition of form and situation by genre participants, and indeed may even preclude it. This necessitates a further discussion of Miller’s (1984[1994]) conditions for making a genre claim, and ends with the positing of a special category of genres called contact genres.
Xiao-Ming Li's study of"good writing" in China and the United States is not a book about technical writing; it is about the genre ofhigh school students' narrative essays. Nonetheless, it may be relevant to teachers of technical writing who, noticing the increasing cultural diversity in their classrooms, might appreciate Li's insights into the historical, social and cultural contexts from which their students might gain their understandings of what "good writing" is. Good Writing in Cross-cultural Context is also just plain good reading. Li outlines two contradictory positions on good writing: first the position that, although they may not be able to articulate what good writing is, good teachers universally know it when they see it; and second, with its basis in extensive comparative studies, the position that writing, and especially assessment and evaluation of writing, is so variable that there are few criteria on which to justify suggestions for improvement. Li does not attempt to define and defend a position, suggesting that to do so would only tend to halt the discussion. And, in accounting for the differences in values of good writing between her American and Chinese subjects, she makes important suggestions about how writing is embedded in social and cultural contexts, and the role that schooling and instruction play in this embededness. In his foreword, Alan Purves credits Li's study of four teachers' comments on six student essays (two teachers and three student essays from each country) with providing "careful and detailed elaboration" for some of the more broad-scale scholarly inquiries in the field of contrastive rhetoric. Li explores the roots of attitudes to writing in each culture in the chapter titled "One Researcher's Perspective", in which she includes such clever speculations as:
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