The apprenticeship approach to advanced academic literacy: Graduate students and their mentors

Abstract

From the perspective of legitimate peripheral participation, a theory that equates learning with increasingly greater involvement in a sociocultural community, this paper looks at the role that graduate student/advisor relationships play in normative speaker dissertation writers' participation in their research communities. This naturalistic inquiry, which focuses on three graduate students and their mentors in three fields—Chinese literature, applied mathematics, and human nutrition—is informed by the author's interaction with these three students in her L2 dissertation writing class in addition to interviews with their advisors while the course was in progress and one year afterward. Findings suggest that for the less successful students, those still far from full participation in their communities of practice, there was a mismatch between the advisors' and students' conceptualizations of their community, apparent in their very different notions of research writing goals and research reader expectations. No such mismatch was evident in the most successful dissertation writer's relationship with her advisor, who was notable for her co-participatory contributions to her student's research. This study points to close advisor/student collaboration on a research project, allowing the student major responsibility for decisionmaking, as one means of enabling L2 graduate students to confidently negotiate the demands of some of the most advanced literate practices of their fields.