| Despite increasing attention to disciplinary writing by native and nonnative students in recent writing research, questions remain as to what constitutes advanced academic literacy learning: what it means to learn to write in a discipline; what learning to write in a discipline involves; and whether the process of disciplinary writing learning is the same for native and nonnative students. To investigate these issues, this study used the concept of "genre," which is currently understood as a social construct through which a particular type of text is produced.;Focusing on the genre of graduate students' research papers for courses, the study investigated the nature and constituents of genre, students' construction of genre knowledge, and roles of culture, peers and professors in students' construction of genre knowledge. Taking a qualitative case study approach, the study examined five American and six Japanese students' writing processes in four graduate education courses. Longitudinal data included interviews, class observations and writing samples.;The findings show a dynamic, multidimensional nature of genre which transcends boundaries of physical settings and time frames. Genre involves students' simultaneous operations at different levels of discourse communities (e.g., a specific course and an academic discipline), and students' interactions with not only a present discourse community but also previous and future discourse communities. The study also reveals that the text-production process of genre is subsumed into a larger social process in which students interact with their instructors, peers, classmates and discourse communities. Furthermore, the study found that students' construction of genre knowledge involves a series of decision-making processes and negotiations with their immediate environments of writing, a process which is basically the same for American and Japanese students. Based on the findings, pedagogical implications are discussed. |
