Building Genre Knowledge

Book excerpt: BUILDING GENRE KNOWLEDGE traces the writing of four multilingual graduate students in engineering and computer sciences over time, offering a window into the writers' processes in developing increasingly sophisticated knowledge of academic and professional genres. These in-depth longitudinal case studies follow the writers' trajectories through the overlapping settings of writing classrooms, disciplinary content classrooms, and scholarly research. The writers' texts, interview discussions, professors' feedback, and classroom experiences together construct a rich picture of the conflicts that they encounter and the learning resources available to them in different settings over time. Through close examination of the stories of these writers, BUILDING GENRE KNOWLEDGE articulates a theory of genre knowledge development that allows for complexity across individuals, communities, and tasks. After first outlining an accessible model of genre knowledge that encompasses multiple knowledge domains, the book explores the ways in which writers develop increasingly sophisticated genre knowledge as they move through their graduate education. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, BUILDING GENRE KNOWLEDGE provides a unique look into the processes of building genre knowledge while offering a dynamic theory of those processes that is inclusive of both monolingual and multilingual writers-a necessary move in today's linguistically diverse classrooms. It will therefore be of great interest to researchers and practitioners in both first and second language writing studies. CHRISTINE M. TARDY is an Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse at DePaul University in Chicago, where she serves as Graduate Director and teaches courses in writing, teacher education, and applied linguistics. She has taught English as a second or foreign language in the U.S., Czech Republic, Japan, and Turkey. She has published extensively in the areas of genre and discourse studies, second language writing, and academic writing instruction.