ABSTRACT
An academic literacy experience will be considered successful or unsuccessful depending on how more-powerful others respond to what students do, from early on in an language teacher education program or a faculty career. Textbook knowledge cannot replace first-hand and experiential knowledge of students and faculty. Such knowledge allows instructors to start where students are, and to fill in gaps in their own knowledge and experience. Discourse-based interviews with graduates and their students and content analysis of teaching materials could be used to document the design and interpretation of writing activities. Students’ private struggles with their academic writing might also remain invisible unless students are able to share them in storied form with faculty or researchers. Researchers would note changes over time in writers’ views of themselves as central or peripheral members of a disciplinary community, in their writing goals, and in changing aspects of writing itself.
