Tardy, C. M. (2009). "Press 1 for English": Textual and ideological networks in a newspaper debate on U.S. language policy. Discourse & Society, 20(2), 265-286.

This article examines 180 texts that together form a newspaper-mediated debate of language policy in reaction to U.S. Senate legislation declaring English the national language of the United States. Drawing on theories of genre networks and intertextuality, the paper examines the ways in which dominant texts and ideologies within this corpus of texts are taken up, dropped, and perpetuated through linked genres over a 37-day period. The analysis begins by describing the social backdrop in which the debate occurred and the Senate legislation and discussion. Next, the paper details the newspaper framing of the Senate legislation and the subsequent uptake of an assimilationist ideology, through a range of discursive strategies employed by both newspaper writers and readers.

 

Tardy, C. M., & Matsuda, P. K. (2009). The construction of author voice by editorial board members.Written Communication, 26(1), 32-52.

Studies of blind manuscript review have illustrated that readers often form impressions of or speculate about unknown authors’ identities in the
manuscript review task. In this article, the authors extend that work by examining the discursive and nondiscursive features that play a role in
readers’ active construction of author voice. Through a survey completed by 70 editorial board members of six journals in applied linguistics and rhetoric and composition, the authors identify quantitative and qualitative trends in reviewers’ practices regarding voice construction. Findings indicate that many readers do build impressions of an author’s identity when reviewing anonymous manuscripts and that the rhetorical nature of the review task may lead readers to attend more to some discursive features than to others.

 

Matsuda, P. K., & Tardy, C. M. (2007). Voice in academic writing: The rhetorical construction of author identity in blind manuscript review. English for Specific Purposes, 26(2), 235-249.

Some researchers have argued that voice is irrelevant to academic writing and that the importance of voice has been overstated in the professional literature [Helms-Park, R., & Stapleton, P. (2003). Questioning the importance of individualized voice in undergraduate L2 argumentative writing: an empirical study with pedagogical implications. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12(3), 245-265; Stapleton, P. (2002). Critiquing voice as a viable pedagogical tool in L2 writing: returning the spotlight to ideas. Journal of Second Language Writing, 11(3), 177-190]. To investigate whether and how a socially oriented notion of voice--defined as "the amalgamative effect of the use of discursvie and non-discursive features that language users choose, deliberately or otherwise, from socially available yet ever-changing repertoires" [Matsuda, P. K. (2001). Voice in Japanese written discourse: Implications for second language writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 10(1-2), 35-53]--plays a role in academic writing, this study examined the construction of an author's discursive identity by peer reviewers in a simulated blind manuscript review process for an academic journal in the field of rhetoric and composition. The analysis of the written reviews as well as interviews with the two reviewers and the manuscript author indicated that the reviewers' constructions of the author's voice are related to their stance toward the author. The findings suggest that voice does play a role in academic writing and that there is a need for further research into the issue of identity construction from the perspectives of both writers and readers.

 

Tardy, C. M. (2006). Researching first and second language genre learning: A comparative review and a look ahead. Journal of Second Language Writing,15 (2), 79-101.

With genre now viewed as a fundamental element of writing, both second language writing and mainstream composition studies have seen an increased focus on the question of how writers learn genres. The purpose of this paper is to review key findings from 60 empirical studies that have investigated this question. To this point, research has typically studied genre learning as it occurs either through professional or disciplinary practice or through classroom instruction; almost no studies have looked at the same writers as they traverse these multiple domains. I therefore categorize studies as taking place in either ‘‘practice-based’’ or ‘‘instructional’’ settings and identify trends in the research findings from each setting. After examining one study which takes place in multiple settings, I tease out some of the commonalities and distinctions between learning in practice-based and instructional contexts and between first language and second language genre learning. On the basis of this comparative review of research, I suggest future directions for the interdisciplinary study of genre learning.

 

Tardy, C. M. (2005). 'It's like a story': Rhetorical knowledge development in advanced academic literacy. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 4(4), 325-338.

In the academic ranks of schooling, writing tasks move gradually from a focus on the transmission of knowledge to the transformation of knowledge. As a more complex writing task, knowledge-transforming requires writers to engage in the rhetorical act of persuading readers of their work's value, significance, and credibility. At the postgraduate level, writers may be wrestling with these issues for the first time, often discovering this more occluded rhetorical dimension only after they have become somewhat more comfortable with issues of generic form or subject-matter content. This paper explores the nature and role of rhetorical knowledge in advanced academic literacy through the writing of two multilingual writers. As these writers engage in high-stakes writing tasks, their rhetorical knowledge of disciplinary writing becomes more explicit and more sophisticated, influenced by mentoring, disciplinary participation, individual identity, and task exigency.

 

Tardy, C. M. (2005). Expressions of disciplinarity and individuality in a multimodal genre. Computers and Composition, 22(3), 319-336.

Recent research has illuminated some of the ways in which multilingual writers project multiple identities in their writing, conveying disciplinary allegiances as well as more personal expressions of individuality. Such work has focused on writers' uses of various verbal expressions, but has to this point overlooked the ways in which writers manipulate the visual mode as a means for identity expression. The present study examines expressions of identity in a corpus of multimodal texts written by four multilingual graduate student writers. I consider how the writers' uses of various verbal and visual expressions in their PowerPoint presentation slides project both disciplinarity and individuality, and how each individual's habitus has been influenced by both the discourses they have encountered and their personal reactions towards those discourses.

 

Tardy, C. M. (2004). The role of English in scientific communication: Lingua franc a or Tyrannosaurus rex ? Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 3 (3), 247-269.

The use of English as an international language of science (EILS) is by now well documented; depending on one's orientation, English may be seen as a neutral lingua franca or it may be seen more insidiously as a dominating and overpowering force. This paper explores these co-existing roles of EILS through various perspectives. It begins by outlining conversations regarding EILS found in the literature of applied linguistics and the scientific community. The paper then turns to the perspective of international graduate students studying at an American university through a small-scale questionnaire and focus group interview study that attempts to understand these students' attitudes toward English and its role in scientific communication. Findings from the study are discussed in light of published conversations of EILS and implications for an EAP classroom that aims to recognize the dual roles of English in scientific communication.

 

Tardy, C. M., & Snyder, B. (2004). 'That's why I do it': Flow and EFL teachers' practices. Co-authored with Bill Snyder. ELT Journal, 58 (2), 119-128.

Csikszentmihalyi's (1997) concept of flow describes a mental state resulting from peak experiences in which the level of challenge is high, but manageable given a person's skills. Because flow occurs at peak moments, these moments can motivate teachers, possibly shaping their classroom practices and giving them insight into their teaching beliefs. This exploratory interview study examines ten EFL teachers' flow experiences at work, and considers their implications for teacher education. The teachers all reported experiencing flow, and key categories relating to its occurrence were derived from their descriptions. Based on this study, we suggest that the concept of flow provides tools for understanding more about teachers' practices, beliefs, and values in their teaching. We conclude by considering ways in which flow may be incorporated into teacher development programmes, and investigated in future research.

 

Tardy, C. M. (2003). A genre system view of the funding of academic research. Written Communication , 20 (1), 7-36.

For many researchers, grant proposal are a high-stakes genre crucial to their work; this pivotal genre does not exist in isolation but as part of a complex reticulation of genres that interact to form a genre system. This article explores the genre system of academic reesarch funding in terms of the following questions: (a) What is the nature of the genre system of grant funding? (b) What are the roles and functions of that system? and (c) What does exploration of the system reveal about genre knowledge and how writers develop such knowledge? Findings suggest that grant writing is fundamentally a social activity, that the intertextual networks of the genre system serve to navigate writers through that system and to build the writers' knowledge of the system, and that knowledge of a genre system may differ in important ways from knowledge of an isolated genre.