ABSTRACT
The freshman writing course I teach aims to help students draw on their prior knowledge and experience as language users in order to adapt to an academic discourse community in the college. The focus is on discovering the underlying discourse competence they have gained as insiders to a variety of discourse communities-communities where people share ways of talking or writing as well as interests, beliefs, and values. Through the coursework, students see how that competence and the strategies that underlie it can help them as they work toward functioning as members of the new academic discourse communities of their current courses. The curriculum calls for students to reflect on past experiences in discourse communities, to investigate familiar discourse communities in which they currently participate outside of the university, and to study, from the same discourse community perspective, their current ac-
ademic courses and the disciplines these represent. Whereas most students choose to focus their academic discourse community studies not on their writing course but on other courses across the curriculum, one ESOL student, Quy Houang, decided to focus on the writing course itself, which allows us to see some elements of the course design through a student participant’s eyes.
