ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a tale of a doctoral student learning the conventions and conversations of one community of practice. It examines the effects of the educational context on a graduate student's production of texts as he wrote in different courses and for different faculty members over the academic year 1984-1985. The chapter uses participant observer and case study data collecting techniques, and then analyzed the data using a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures. Although the focus of this report is on the student's texts, much of the data on the educational environment was in the form of one of the investigator's field notes, audiotaped interviews of faculty and students in the rhetoric program, and the student's written self-reports. Nate's development as a writer in the Rhetoric Program from theoretical perspectives in cognitive psychology and sociolinguistics provides two different but complimentary frameworks for two final comments.
