Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone

Defining academic literacies research

“…Consonant with these myths is an interest to 'identify and induct': the emphasis is on identifying academic conventions -at one or more levels of grammar, discourse or rhetorical structure or genre -and on (or with a view to) exploring how students might be taught to become proficient or 'expert' and developing materials on that basis (for examples, see Flowerdew, 2000;Swales and Feak, 2004). A transformative approach in contrast involves an interest in such questions but in addition is concerned with: a) locating such conventions in relation to specific and contested traditions of knowledge making; b) eliciting the perspectives of writers (whether students or professionals) on the ways in which such conventions impinge on their meaning making; c) exploring alternative ways of meaning making in academia, not least by considering the resources that (student) writers bring to the academy as legitimate tools for meaning making (examples of pedagogy informed by the latter approach are to be found in Clark et al, 1990;Clark and Ivanič, 1997;Lu, 1994Lu, , 2004Canagarajah, 2002a;Archer, 2006;Lillis, 2006).…”

“…Thus research and debate in the US, where the explicit teaching of writing has a well established institutional presence, is informed by a number of key disciplinary and epistemological frameworks: for example, 'freshman composition' (compulsory writing classes for undergraduates) research writings are strongly influenced by theories from literary and rhetorical studies (see Berlin, 1988;Bizzell, 1992;Schlib, 1996;Ede, 1999); 'basic writing' (writing courses linked to open admission policies in the late 1960s and 1970s) research often draws on cultural studies and post-colonial frameworks (Lu, 1994;Horner and Lu, 1999); programmes aimed at developing writing across and within the curriculum (WAC and WID) draw on sociocultural theories, such as neoVygotskian notions (see Flower, 1994), activity theories and communities of practice (see for example Russell, 1997Russell, , 2002. In contrast, in Australia, explicit focus on student writing in higher education is a more recent phenomenon and has been powerfully influenced by one specific linguistic approach, systemic functional linguistics (see Skillen, 2006; for critical discussion see Aitcheson and Lee, 2006), and to a lesser extent New Literacy Studies (Candlin and Plum, 1998).…”

Cross-Cultural Analysis of Student Writing

“…But this kind of ethnographic work, although rich and highly valuable, has tended not to focus on textual analysis in detailed applications in the way contrastive rhetoric has done. Scholars seeking to ease the transition of students from other cultural contexts into mainstream U.S. higher education, for example J. Swales or H. Fox, or to foreground the impacts of internationalization, student and faculty mobility, world Englishes, and various colonialist or ideological patterns (see Canagarajah, 2002;Donahue, 2004;Horner & Trimbur, 2002;Lu, 1994;Zawacki, Hajabbasi, Habib, Antram, & Das, 2007), have rounded out the cross-cultural attention paid to students' writing.…”

Negotiating between the Constant and the Changing: Balancing Acts in the Training of Writing Teachers

“…Generations of researchers and composition practitioners agree that writing is a social act (Bruffee, 1984;Trimber, 1989;Bizzell, 1994;Lu, 1994, Higgins, Long & Flower, 2006. Like writing, the teaching of writing, particularly the training of teachers of composition itself, is a social act, too.…”