"Embracing Digital Literacies: A Study of First-Year Students’ Digital Compositions"

Methodology Part 1

Much has been written about students’ various digital practices. Erin A. Frost (2011) suggests the power of this generation of digital natives to be “catalysts for change in the future of the web” (p. 27). Jane Mathison Fife (2010) notes the “sophisticated rhetorical analysis [students’] employ” on Facebook (p. 555). However, less has been written that explores in greater depth the rhetorical knowledge we assume students have in their digital compositions. My IRB-approved case study of seven first-year composition students investigates students’ digital, online writing practices to discover the kinds of knowledge these students employ when composing online.

I based my analysis on Anne Beaufort’s (1999) study of the five knowledge domains writers draw upon in expert acts of writing. Beaufort’s model emerged from her ethnographic study of four individuals’ transition from academic to professional writing (p. 2). In College Writing and Beyond (2007), Beaufort presents a curriculum based on this five-part schema to encourage transfer of learning for students (p. 17). Discourse community knowledge, as one part of the schema, encompasses the four remaining knowledge domains: writing process knowledge, an understanding of how to move toward the completion of a writing task; subject matter knowledge, a familiarity with some of the content important to the discourse community; genre knowledge, an awareness of the rules and norms of particular genres within a discourse community; and rhetorical knowledge, a grasp of the purposes and audiences that come into play in a particular rhetorical situation. Experienced writers draw upon these five domains -- discourse community, writing process, subject matter, genre, and rhetorical knowledge -- to write within specific and varied contexts. Beaufort (2007) concludes that through modeling curriculum and assessment after her five knowledge domains -- “teach[ing] a set of tools for analyzing and learning writing standards and practices in multiple contexts” -- students will be much more likely to transfer these writing strategies to other situations (p.11).

Beaufort’s five-part schema provides a framework for instructors and researchers to better understand what knowledge a writer utilizes when engaged in successful acts of writing. Some researchers have explicitly used Beaufort’s knowledge domains as their theoretical framework, and others have drawn on her domains to help frame their analysis. Irene L. Clark and Andrea Hernandez’s (2011) pilot study surveyed a student group to assess genre awareness and transfer. Students indicated in the survey that they found genre to be a useful approach for conceptualizing writing tasks across disciplines (p. 69). Kristine Hansen and Joyce Adams (2010) use Beaufort’s knowledge domains as a lens for analyzing “success in developing students’ writing expertise” in Brigham Young University’s social science disciplines (para. 3). In their argument for an interdisciplinary professional writing master’s program which would prepare students for career paths outside of academe, Susan M, Hunter, Elizabeth J. Giddens, and Margaret B. Walters (2009) draw on Beaufort’s knowledge domains to discuss expertise gained by graduates within their program (p. 154).

I interviewed students and collected samples of their self-sponsored, digital writings to learn whether students engage knowledge in Beaufort’s domains. Interviews and writing samples were transcribed, then coded using Beaufort’s five categories. The interview questions asked students to describe memorable digital compositions, and to reflect on the reasoning behind the text, medium, genre, and content of their digital, online writings. The writing samples collected were several months’ of public, online compositions from a broad range of digital writing mediums through which a single student may be writing: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, online forums, blogs, and other digital mediums. All of the participants wrote on multiple interfaces; many used both Twitter and Facebook, while others maintained a social media presence while also contributing to online forums or blogs. This broader look at students’ digital writing practices allowed me to examine the many purposes, audiences, and genres that are in play when a student is writing and publishing online. Since this study is concerned with rhetorical choices students make online, I collected writings produced where students had the widest array of choices, rather than samples of academic writing, or “obliged discourse,” as Doug Hesse (2005) terms it, required in school (p. 349). Youngjoo Yi and Alan Hirvela (2010) find self-sponsored forms of writing to offer promise for understanding “students’ overall engagement with literacy” with potential for “[revealing] valuable implications for school-based writing instruction” (p. 95). For this reason, I limited my analysis to students’ self-sponsored writings. Although the size of the sample is small, this study illustrates ways that digital writers manifest writing expertise; further research is needed to explore how these themes present themselves in a larger sample of students.

Participants came from a large, urban university in the Western United States. The university is a diverse campus and has students from a wide range of backgrounds. The primary participants in the study included three females and four males ranging from 18 to 20 years of age. All participants were currently enrolled or had just completed English 1A, a one-semester composition course. It is important to note that while this study focuses on self-sponsored writing, all students shared the context of this university’s first-year composition writing program, which asks students to write for multiple audiences, purposes, and genres; to be self-reflective of their writing and reading processes; to cultivate knowledge of genre conventions; and to understand and engage discourse communities including academic discourses.

Three of Beaufort’s knowledge domains-- discourse community, rhetorical, and genre knowledge-- dominated the collected data. In what follows, I present my findings of students’ genre knowledge and further divide rhetorical knowledge into two subcategories, rhetorical knowledge of audience and purpose. Discourse community knowledge, according to Beaufort’s model, encompasses and relates to each of these domains. Based on my findings, I argue that studying and appreciating students’ self-sponsored digital literacies can help build bridges to academic literacies and help students grow as writers.