2018-2019 Faculty Research Grants

Christian Stuart and Ivan Davis (English)

Teaching for Transfer in the First Year: Writing About Writing at Andrews University

Our project is designed to examine how students transfer and/or fail to transfer knowledge about writing gained in one of two first-year writing classes (ENGL 115 or ENGL 117) to other academic courses requiring writing during their first year at Andrews University. Writing transfer is currently the focus of much research in the field of writing studies and reflects significant new thinking about the nature of writing and writing pedagogy. Moving away from seeing writing ability as the result of learning particular skills that can be applied to all writing situations, writing transfer scholarship focuses on how knowledge about writing can transfer from one writing situation to another. This perspective informs an approach to teaching first-year college writing called “writing about writing” (WAW), which many college writing programs in the U.S., including Andrews, have adopted. As WAW courses, both ENGL 115 (College Writing I) and ENGL 117 (College Writing I: Writing Across Cultures) treat writing as a subject matter to be studied with the goal of having students acquire writing knowledge that can be transferred to writing contexts beyond ENGL 115 and ENGL 117. In our study, we follow six native English-speaking students and four multilingual students during the semester they take ENGL 115 or ENGL 117 and the following semester. Through multiple interviews and analysis of their writing, our objective is to learn how our student-participants acquire and transfer writing knowledge.  We are particularly interested in seeing how disposition, identity, language, and culture play a role in writing transfer.