Linguistic and Rhetorical Ideologies in the Transition to College Writing: A Case Study of Southern Students.

composition and rhetoric;transition to college;Southern American English;language ideologies;first-generation college students;rural students;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English and Education

Swofford, Sarah CatherineGold, David Phillip ;

University of Michigan

关键词: composition and rhetoric;    transition to college;    Southern American English;    language ideologies;    first-generation college students;    rural students;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English and Education;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/113310/scswoff_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This qualitative longitudinal study responds to recent conversations in composition studies about the role of first-year writing in the transition to college, and it suggests that writing teachers should consider the linguistic and rhetorical resources, as well as the ideologies that surround those resources, students bring into the writing classroom from their local communities.Rural Southern students are one such population who need this consideration, because of their low persistence to graduation, and the fact that many of these students are speakers of a non-standard dialect of English that is strongly associated with ideologies of low intelligence and limited education.This dissertation project offers a new perspective on the presence and (re)production of linguistic and rhetorical ideologies in the first-year writing classroom and suggests that not only are these ideologies salient for students, they are more complex than the current body of research might suggest.These ;;first generation” college students use the set of persistent ideologies associated with their home dialect to differentiate themselves from their peers they attended high school with and their family ;;back home” who did not attend college, and to set up a hierarchy of dialects as a means of distinguishing social class.The nine students in this study, all of whom came from a single high school in South Carolina, used language ideologies to distinguish themselves in their new social environments at college and attempted to leverage their understandings about what is rhetorically effective in academic writing in their first-year composition courses. These students’ voices and experiences are not well-represented in the present body of work about their transitions into college writing.Their perspectives could prove particularly useful for researchers trying to address the challenges that rural Southern students face as they leave the local high school and the linguistic and rhetorical capital valued there, especially as they make the transition into the context of the post-secondary writing classroom, which values a different kind of linguistic and rhetorical practice.