Joel Bloch

Student/teacher interaction via email: the social context of Internet discourse

Abstract While email has been used in L2 composition classrooms as a way to develop fluency, it can also be used as a means of creating and sustaining relationships, as it is often used outside the classroom. This paper examines the way students in a graduate-level ESL course used email on their own initiative to interact with their instructor. The paper examines 120 email messages received by the instructor during the course and categorizes them into four areas: (1) phatic communion, (2) asking for help, (3) making excuses, and (4) making formal requests. From these categories, representative samples were chosen to illustrate what rhetorical strategies the writers used to achieve their purpose for sending the email messages. The results show that the students were able to employ a wide variety of rhetorical strategies to interact with their instructor outside of the traditional classroom setting. For these students, email seemed to be an important means for interacting with their instructor. Moreover, the students exhibited a good ability to switch between formal and informal language, depending upon the rhetorical context of the message. In the conclusion, some of the issues regarding teaching the use of email are discussed.

Creating Materials for Teaching Evaluation in Academic Writing: Using Letters to the Editor in L2 Composition Courses.

Abstract Academic writing has often been viewed as a monolithic form stripped of all personal value and expression. This view, however, is contradicted by recent research showing that academic writing not only expresses personal viewpoints but also that the focus on the research report, the form of academic writing perhaps most often taught, does not fully account for the complexity of the entire “invisible college” in which academic knowledge is produced. As a supplement to the research report, I propose in this article that an analysis of academic letters provides an insight into the variety of language forms used both formally and informally in academic writing and into the entire process by which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and published. I analyzed a sample of letters to the editor taken from the journal Science , the publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . I examined how letters are used to both support and criticize the research published in the journal and how this analysis is useful in the teaching of academic writing. The results demonstrate how scientists can closely link their language and rhetorical purpose as they participate in the ongoing conversation about how scientific claims are presented.