ABSTRACT
Although my studies in Language Research (see chaps. 2 and 4) had already begun to make classroom walls seem a bit porous (both spatially and temporally) and had suggested the need to attend more closely to students’ goals and interpretations, the design of my next study (in Geography, American Studies, and Sociology) was still strongly grounded in the prototypical image of classroom writing and authorship described in the last chapter. 1 Asking how academic writing tasks in a seminar were cued, interpreted, negotiated, produced, and finally evaluated by both the instructor and the students, the research was, in effect, meant to capture and contextualize in a fine-grained manner the literate sequences of initiations, replies, and evaluations that in total constituted the writing tasks for the seminars. However, one site, the seminar in sociology, proved particularly difficult to fit into that conventional classroom box.
