Academic conferences are instrumental in sharing and building knowledge, as well as nurturing the next generations of researchers.Researchers in a discipline are friends with shared interests, working towards their common goals. They “speak a language” that is unique to the discipline; they act on both stated and unstated rules and expect one another to abide by those rules; and eventually they form and develop their own subculture (discourse community) to pursue scholarship.
Some professors treat their grad students (be they Americans or international students) as their future colleagues. They collaborate with the students in conferences and journal articles. Sometimes I wonder why the English department of Purdue Univ. produces so many outstanding researchers. Perhaps the way that the professors at Purdue treat their grad students has a positive and profound impact on the students' accomplishments in the long run.
A good theory, in my view, should have a set of simple guiding principles (or succinct formula) that are accessible to most people in the field. On the other hand, it should also encompass the complexities of the operations (e.g. interactions of the components and elements) of most (if not all) of the phenomena within its boundary, so that it can be used to explain patterns of the phenomena and predict their development.
I thought a hypothetical tripartite model of "text,cognition, and context" might be useful for not only second language (L2) writing and English composition (L1), but perhaps also for second language acquisition, translation, and communication, because after all, these are cognate disciplines related to written or spoken communication and cross cultural communication.
Below is the way that I view the text, the cognition, and the context of a piece of L2 writing.
The text includes language and language use, with a focus on textual, formal, linguistic features of a piece of writing (or an utterance in SLA). Text can be either spoken or written, ranging from a word, a sentence, to a full essay. As far as L2 writing is concerned, text is the product of the writer’s response to the context of writing. The focus of text is on patterns and cues of language use.
The cognition is related to thought and mind, the emphasis is on the cognitive strategies of interpreting and responding to contexts with appropriate texts. Cognition comprises the reader’s and the writer’s long term memory (schemata) of content and rhetoric patterns, the writer’s strategies of analyzing the context, and the writer’s strategies of responding to the context by using various tools .Though interests, motivation, and affective factors are psychological factors that need to be taken into account, they do not belong to cognition, unless I want to replace the dimension of cognition with psychology, which is too broad.
The context has to do with the circumstance and situation of writing , with multi layers ranging from the culture, the society, the discourse community to the participants in a specific context of situation. In the analysis of a typical writing task, context mainly includes the reader, the writer, their roles in the context, the purpose of the act of writing, the writing task, and the shared discourse community.
A hypothetical tripartite model of “text, cognition, and context” might serve as a heuristic for writing theories and pedagogies by conceptualizing the essential dimensions of writing within a tripartite (three-component) framework (or “tripartite hypothesis”) so that the constituent elements can be organized in a clearer way. That is to say, “text, cognition, and context” can be used as an overarching organizer (schema) for the knowledge structure of composition for researchers, teachers, and L2 students. It can branch out to include subcomponents and more detailed elements.
Here is the gist of how the hypothetical tripartite model works:
To function appropriately in a given context is our ultimate goal, which is achieved through creating and delivering specific texts(in spoken or written language).
To achieve that goal, we need to analyze the context and respond to it with appropriate text-- this process is our cognitive process.
For pedagogical purposes , we need to develop a repertoire of strategies for analyzing the text and the context of communication, and responding to the context with appropriate text.
The writer’s agency is to analyze the context of writing and respond to it with appropriate text and manage the interactions among the three dimensions, either consciously or subconsciously, or both. To illustrate it, let us just imagine a context of situation of a writing task that frequently occurs in graduate school: A Chinese graduate student needs to respond to the feedback he received from his professor at a university in the US via email. For this writing task, first, the student needs to analyze the context. He might identify some elements as follows: the reader (his advisor), the writer (himself), their roles in the context (the reader, i.e. has higher status), the purpose of the act of writing (to express gratitude, respond to feedback, defend himself, accept suggestions, tighten the interpersonal bond, invitation for further email exchanges…etc.), the writing task (respond to professor’s feedback via email), the shared discourse community (a discipline in a graduate school), and culture ( America). Secondly, the student needs to analyze the cognition. He would probably come up with an analysis like this: the way of thinking underling the text (from general to specific, straight forward) , the reader’s (his advisor) and the writer’s (his) long term memory (schemata) of content and rhetoric forms/patterns, his strategies of analyzing the context, and his strategies of responding to the context by using various tools ( examples, analogies, literature…etc.)) and resources (e.g. information from Internet , library, classmates, and other professors) . Finally, the student might analyze the texts like this: professor’s email and feedback, rhetorical patterns (greetings, body, closure), conventions (email etiquettes), cues of language use and linguistic features (respectful, cheerful, professional…). Of course this is by no means a linear or static process; rather, it is recursive, interactional, contextual, and dynamic. That was just a simplified illustration of how the tripartite model can be used to explain a specific writing task. Similarly, the tripartite model could be used to enrich contrastive/intercultural rhetoric and genre theory. I have provided examples of those in a manuscript of mine.
Furthermore, this hypothetical tripartite model of "Text , cognition, and context" of communication could be used in second language acquisition. It may sound quite abstract. Let me explain it with a video clip titled "How to speak fluent Japanese without saying a word":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_RM8To5mjU
I can relate this hilarious video clip to the tripartite model of "the texts, the cognition, and the context" of communication (be it written or spoken) , a hypothetical model that Prof. Beck (2009) and I (Xiao, 2008) were proposing. In the case of this video, as I understood, the "texts" would be the facial expressions,the body language, and the sounds, the "cognition" would be the shared knowledge of the meaning and of the functions of the "texts", and the "context" would be the context of conversational situation. Furthermore, I believe people who want to learn a second language (e.g. English,Chinese, Spanish, or Japanese) will be tremendously encouraged by this clip!
