Navigating Discourse Communities: Intercultural Rhetoric and Genre Pedagogy

To equip English Learner (EL) students for success in college and career, EL instructors should teach not just writing mechanics but how to understand and adapt to different discourse norms. They should also avoid minimizing the techniques of marginalized communities, which leads to this capstone's guiding question: How can EL instructors teach rhetorical conventions in ways that promotes rhetorical versatility, self-esteem in conventions most common to students' cultures, and understanding of what is expected in American academic writing assignments? Intercultural rhetoric and genre pedagogy suggest attributing varying rhetorical norms to different audiences and purposes rather than assigning inherent value. Therefore, this capstone provides a rhetorical strategies curriculum with inductive, comparative text analysis lessons. These focus on the following convention variants: personal vs. impersonal, direct vs. indirect, and front-end vs. back-end theses. In the final unit, students analyze a sample college essay to understand assignment expectations, focusing on previously explored convention variants.