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Key findings show that unanticipated obstacles in the research context present participants with “real-world” dilemmas that call forth disciplinary alignments, reinforce existing disciplinary practices, and, most importantly, generate new practices altogether. An example of this process is reflected in the research team's frequent need to adjust their research design as a result of constraints within the research environment. The team's ability to pivot in response to such constraints encouraged individual members to view the research enterprise as dynamic and fluid, leading ultimately to a heightened sense of agency and stronger awareness of the rhetorical challenges and opportunities posed by empirical research. Similarly, participants’ demonstrated an ability to recognize and resolve tensions stemming from competing demands on their time and attention during the course of their graduate study. Actively constructing resonances across various domains of their graduate worlds—coursework, teaching, and non-curricular research and professionalization activities—served to clarify purposes and increase motivation.
An additional aspect of this study is the way graduate students leverage their language resources in the collaborative process. This dissertation extends the disciplinary conversation by investigating ways in which language resources function as rhetorical tools within the research context. This focus on language, in concert with collaboration and rhetorical stances to inquiry, challenges persistent views of authorship, apprenticeship, and language norms, while simultaneously lending insight into how graduate students invent new ways of participating in their professional worlds.
This study articulates a framework of writing strategies and validates the framework by using it to examine the writing process of researchers as they write journal articles for publication. The framework advances a definition of writing strategies and a classification system for categorizing strategies that is based on strategic goals. In order to develop the framework, I first synthesize existing literature on writing strategies found in second language writing studies, composition studies, and second language acquisition. I then observe the writing process of four researchers as they write journal articles for publication and use the framework to analyze participants’ goals, their strategies for accomplishing goals, the resources they use to carry out strategies, and the variables that influence their goals and strategies. Data for the study was collected using qualitative methods, including video recordings of writing activities, stimulated-recall interviews, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews. The study shows that the framework introduced in the study is useful for analyzing writers’ strategies in a comprehensive way. An operationalizable definition of ‘writing strategies’ is the conscious and internalized agentive ideas of a writer about the best way to act, often with the use of resources, in order to reach specific writing goals embedded in a context. Writing strategies can be categorized into seven types of strategic goals: composing, coping, learning, communicating, self-representation, meta-strategies, and publishing. The framework provides a way to understand writing strategies holistically—as a unit of goal, action, and resource—and highlights variability in writers’ actions and use of resources. Some of this variability in writers’ strategies can be explained by the influence of various contextual factors, which are identified in the analysis. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of how the framework can be used to inform future research and classroom teaching on writing strategies.