Student Educational Scholarship Series

Following this semester’s Book Club, please continue to join us remotely on Wednesdays, 10:00-11:00 am MT (Oct. 30-Nov. 20) to discuss some graduate student education-based scholarship. We will spend a little time discussing a research article associated with the student’s work, followed by a discussion of their dissertation/thesis research.

Please REGISTER HERE and the CTL will follow up with a Zoom link for these sessions.

This first session will be led by Rebecca Lee (she/they), Graduate Part-Time Instructor, Program for Writing & Rhetoric, PhD Candidate, Department of Linguistics.

Paired reading: Myhill, D. (2021). Grammar as choice: Teaching students the craft of writing. Journal of Teaching Writing, 36(1), 11-36.

This dissertation project combines linguistics, writing studies, and the scholarship of teaching and learning to explore how rhetorical grammar lessons may help college writers learn to write new academic genres.  While writing instructors often frame grammar in terms of prescriptive ‘correctness,’ Myhill et al. (2012) demonstrate that students can instead benefit from discussing how specific grammatical choices affect the meaning(s) conveyed to an audience – a rhetorical approach to grammar. In this dissertation, I extend Myhill’s (2022) rhetorical grammar principles from their original context in UK K-12 education to show how they can help US first-year college students write in a new academic genre, the literature review. Specifically, I report on student uptake of a rhetorical grammar lesson in which students make choices between two different grammatical structures used for citation, an “integral” citation (e.g. Myhill (2022) demonstrates…) vs. a “non-integral citation,” in which the author’s name does not play a grammatical role in the sentence (e.g. (Myhill, 2022)). Through a scaffolded discussion of choices made in a published literature review, students connect such choices to the larger genre moves of presenting background information (e.g. with non-integral citations, “the focus is more on what he’s talking about than on himself”) vs. presenting academic argument as conversation (e.g. with integral citations, “it seems more like the author’s idea rather than like given fact”).  Following these in-class discussions, students experiment with and justify their choices to use one structure or another in specific contexts within their own literature reviews. This project thus shows how an approach to grammar that emphasizes meaning, active learning, and metacognition can be used to open up rather than restrict college writers’ choices.