| In recent years,research on efficacy of feedback in second language(L2)writing has taken an important turn.The focus of research has started to shift from the impact of grammatical error correction on students' second language acquisition(SLA)to the complexity of individual students' feedback processing.To explore such complexity,researchers use the notion “engagement” to describe,on the levels of individual students' cognition,affect,and behavior,whether and how the students uptake feedback and make revisions,and to explain why in terms of individual and contextual factors.Given that feedback engagement studies draw on work from multiple fields such as L2 writing,SLA,and educational psychology,and that the studies may improve student revision and their writing competence,the research topic has both theoretical and practical value.Despite rapid development in feedback engagement,limitations exist.In descriptive studies,research tends to focus on student engagement with feedback on lexical grammar,instead of content and rhetoric.Also,research explores student engagement mainly in the classroom context,and tends to ignore naturalistic writing contexts outside of the classroom.For instance,it remains to be explored,in the process of submitting manuscripts to international English-medium journals,how L2 student writers engage with reviewer comments on various possible issues,e.g.,research methods,field representation,and language.In interpretive studies,research tends to explore individual factors such as learner beliefs and L2 proficiency.Yet,no research has explored feedback engagement from the lens of genre knowledge.In international publishing,feedback engagement seems to require much academic genre knowledge,the type of knowledge beyond grammar.It is thus important to describe and explain if and how L2 writers' academic genre knowledge influences their cognitive,affective,and behavioral engagement with feedback in a naturalistic writing context.The present study aims to explore the influence of academic genre knowledge on L2 graduate students' engagement with feedback from manuscript reviewers in the international publishing context.According to the classification of feedback engagement in previous studies,this study distinguishes among three dimensions of engagement: cognitive engagement,affective engagement and behavioral engagement.The study notes that Han & Hyland(2015)proposed a three-dimensional analytic framework of feedback engagement,and yet some of the sub-categories overlapped with each other due to the lack of a unified classification criterion.To modify the framework,this study makes a division between performance and regulation when analyzing each dimension of engagement,thereby categorizing cognitive engagement into depth of processing and cognitive regulation,affective engagement into affective response and affective regulation,and behavioral engagement into textual revision behavior and behavioral regulation.Meanwhile,this study adopts the framework of genre knowledge proposed by Tardy(2009),which comprises formal knowledge,content knowledge,rhetorical knowledge and process knowledge.Among them,formal knowledge refers to knowledge of vocabulary,grammar,organizational structure,mechanism,design,etc.Content knowledge refers to subject-matter knowledge in specific subject fields.Rhetorical knowledge refers to knowledge of rhetorical context,including rhetorical functions,goals,and the social relations between the writer and the reader.Process knowledge refers to the knowledge on genre composing,revision,distribution,reading,and genre use.Drawing on a qualitative multiple-case study approach,the study answers the following three questions: 1)How does genre knowledge influence L2 graduate writers' cognitive engagement with reviewer feedback? 2)How does genre knowledge influence L2 graduate writers' affective engagement with reviewer feedback? 3)How does genre knowledge influence L2 graduate writers' behavioral engagement with reviewer feedback?Participants of the study consisted of four L2 graduate students with varying experiences of international publishing.According to Tardy(2009),writers' genre knowledge development can be identified by their familiarity with the particular genre.The participants therefore were classified into “experienced writers” and “novice writers.” Given that graduate students' genre knowledge development is a continuum,the study included three novice writers of varying academic publication experience and one experienced writer.Data were collected from multiple sources,including the student writers' multiple drafts of manuscripts submitted to the target journals,response letters to reviewers,written reflections,written feedback from anonymous reviewers,semi-structured interviews,and multiple-draft-based interviews.With a content analysis approach,the study analyzed the student writers' cognitive,emotional and behavioral engagement,and iteratively deduced the logical relationships between these elements through axial coding,and carried out inter-case analyses and cross-case comparisons.The study yields the following major findings.With respect to cognitive engagement,the writers' genre knowledge appeared to impact on their depth of their processing and cognitive regulation.1)Regarding depth of processing,the experienced writer applied multiple dimensions of genre knowledge in processing feedback.As a result,he was able to both notice the problems identified in the review comments and understood the reviewer's intentions.However,with insufficient formal knowledge and content knowledge,the novice writers seemed to encounter difficulties in feedback comprehension.With insufficient rhetorical knowledge and process knowledge,they were unable to precisely understand the reviewer's intentions,either.2)Regarding cognitive regulation,the experienced writer tended to directly use prior knowledge to monitor his cognitive strategies with accurate inferences of reviewers' expectations.The novice writers showed some complexity in their cognitive regulation.To deal with unfamiliar problems,they used prior genre knowledge and developed new knowledge.To process problems that they did not fully understand,they had to develop rhetorical and process knowledge through others' interpretation of the reviewer's intentions.They were able to formulate appropriate revision plans only after adjusting their metacognitive evaluation.With respect to affective engagement,the writers' genre knowledge appeared to impact on the writers' affective response and regulation.1)The experienced writer tended to experience a high proportion of positive and deactivating emotions,while the novice writers tended to experience a high proportion of negative and activating emotions.The writers' content knowledge and formal knowledge seemed to impact on their epistemic emotions,and that their process knowledge seemed to impact on their social emotions.Furthermore,genre knowledge was found to exert no influence on their emotions related to activities or outcome.2)Regarding affective regulation,rhetorical and process knowledge appeared to impact on student choice of strategies including situation selection and restructured cognition.No impact was found on their attentional deployment and response modulation.With respect to behavioral engagement,the writers' genre knowledge seemed to impact on their textual revision behaviors and behavioral regulation.1)In the textual revision,the writers tended to use either prior or newly developed content knowledge and formal knowledge in their revision acts.In response to reviewer feedback,the experienced writer was able to deliberately negotiate with reviewers when he disagreed,while the novice writers tended to follow all the feedback.With insufficient knowledge on content or form,the novice writers failed to respond to some feedback.2)Regarding behavioral regulation,the experienced writer made efficient choices among contextual resources and invested less time in revision,while the novice writers tended to ask for help from more experienced writers in terms of their deployment of contextual resources,and consciously managed their revision schedule.These findings suggest that: first,when the manuscript meets basic requirements of target journals in terms of form and content,what mainly influences feedback engagement would be the extent to which the writer's process knowledge and rhetorical knowledge have been developed,and the extent to which these two dimensions of knowledge integrate with their formal and content knowledge.Second,developmental levels of genre knowledge may play a role in regulation.Compared with novice writers,experienced writers would be more resilient in their conscious regulation of cognitive and behavioral acts,thereby more efficient in feedback processing.This study has some theoretical and practical value.Theoretically,the study integrates the theoretical framework of genre knowledge into research on feedback engagement,modifies the analytic framework of feedback engagement with a consistent rationale for classification,and attempts to construct a model presenting the influence of L2 writers' genre knowledge on their feedback engagement.While these theoretical attempts are yet exploratory,they are hoped to shed light on the nature of feedback engagement as well as a new direction of research.Practically,this study may enhance L2 novice writers' understanding of the complexity as well as possible strategies in reviewer feedback processing in international publishing.The study also has implications on the teaching of academic English writing and the practice of composing review comments for international journals. |
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