Response in Real Time: Bringing Context to a Semester's Responses to Student Writing

Within the field of Composition, research into responding to student writing has most frequently studied individual responses outside the material contexts in which those responses were produced. Advice given to teachers of writing on how best to respond to large amounts of writing -- perennially a feature within the reality of the work writing teachers do -- has tended to be similarly acontextual. However, further research into response must take into account writing teachers' material conditions and situatedness.;This dissertation analyzes all the responses that one writing teacher made during a semester teaching four different courses at a private, career-enhancing liberal arts college. Chapter 2 of the dissertation argues for a method of study grounded in phenomenology, the experienced reality of the work of responding to a full semester's writing in context. Chapter 3 documents the material conditions of that work, analyzing where and when responding to student writing took place, how many words were written to each student, and how many sets of papers were left to be responded to. Chapter 4 classifies all the comments this teacher made using the method that Straub and Lunsford developed for Twelve Readers Reading, a frequently used method, within the literature, of studying comments that assigns focus and mode to individual comments within a response. While the method is acontextual, it does provide a means of contrasting sets of data, including distribution of comment types between courses, distribution within sets of papers being responded to, and distribution across different times of the semester.;Chapter 5 applies the data from Chapters 3 and 4 and analyzes the responses made to students from each of the four classes. Using case studies of the classes and their students, the dissertation shows how greater understanding of factors like time of the semester, teachers' own internalized expectations, and rhetorical situations can lead to a broader understanding of the work of responses.;Ultimately, Chapter 6 presents a portrait of the full semester's responses, one that helps to explain one teacher's struggle with his own internalized expectations, the effects of workload upon what responses can do, and suggestions for better responding.