ENG 579: Theorizing and Researching Composing

UMaine Alert

Posted: April 19, 2024 - 1:32 PM

At approximately 9:24 a.m. on Friday, April 19, a student was struck by a university vehicle on Long Road at the University of Maine campus in Orono.

Emergency services responded promptly to the scene and the student has been transported to a local hospital. The student’s family has been informed.

Counseling services and support are available for students, faculty or staff who may have been affected. The Counseling Center can be reached at 207-581-1392 or you may call the Dean of Students Office at 207-581-1406.

An investigation is underway and more details will be released when they become available. Our thoughts are with the student and their family.

Long Road has been cleared and is now accessible. Any witnesses to the incident are encouraged to contact Lieutenant Noel Santiago at noel.santiago@maine.edu.

Prerequisites: Graduate standing or permission.

Recent offerings:

(Spring 2018, Dryer)

Despite the current name, which dates from the 1970’s, ENG 579 is now a researchmethods course that focuses on current unsolved problems in text-production, -circulation, and – reception. The course will thus involve immersions into some of the historical highlights and current research trends in each of these three dimensions, in particular the exceptionally interesting problems posed by the question of “validity” in research design and data-interpretation: construct-representation, consequential validity, construct-irrelevant variance, and so on. These problems are more interesting and more pressing than they may appear. For example, constructinvalid (yet dominant) models of “the writing process” do considerable social damage, particularly (though by no means exclusively) in the contexts of schooling, high-stakes testing, identity formation, and securing exchange-value for labor in the workplace.

While the course interprets “research” broadly, including critical discourse analysis and archival research as well as qualitative and quantitative approaches, projects will be driven by falsifiable hypotheses and will depend on rigorously ethical data-collection and analysis.

Course Goals:

To briefly cover some of the historical and cultural context for the emergence of Writing Studies since 1963, including the abandonment of “product” approaches to teaching and assessing writing, the rise and fall of cognitive-process approaches, the turn to qualitative methodologies and the “social turn,” and the return of quantitative analysis and the growing significance of neurophenomenological research;
to provide training in the reading, interpretation, and application of empirical research;
to introduce some theoretical frameworks commonly used in writing studies: cognitive-process, genre theory, activity theory, institutional ethnography, applied linguistics; and
to introduce and practice some basic qualitative and quantitative approaches to writing research, including survey design, coding of documents and transcripts, corpus analysis, critical discourseanalysis, ethnography or site-study, and factor analysis.

(Spring 2016, Dryer)

ENG 579 is a research-methods course that focuses on unsolved problems in text-production and text-reception. The course will thus involve immersions into some of the highlights and current research trends in both sides of this equation, in particular the exceptionally interesting problems posed by reception theory: reliability, construct-representation, consequential validity, construct-irrelevant variance, and logical-rating error among them. Our aim by the end of the term will be to try to make a contribution to some aspect of a problem in textual production or reception that is not understood as well as we would like. I will work individuals or small groups to design and refine research and make sense of findings, and possibly to target a journal, prepare a manuscript, and begin the peer-review process.

Course Goals:

-To cover some of the historical and cultural context for the emergence of Writing Studies since 1963, including the abandonment of “product” approaches to teaching and assessing writing, the rise and fall of cognitive-process approaches, the turn to qualitative methodologies and the “social turn,” and the return of quantitative analysis and the growing significance of neurophenomenological research.

-To provide training in the grounded reading of empirical research and bibliographic essays.

-To introduce some theoretical frameworks commonly used in writing studies: cognitive-process, genre theory, activity theory, institutional ethnography, applied linguistics.

-To introduce some basic qualitative and quantitative approaches to writing research, including survey design, coding of documents and transcripts, corpus analysis, critical discourse-analysis, longitudinal research, and factor analysis.

(Spring 2014, Dryer)