| This two-part study provides a critical understanding of the importance of discourse in the syllabi for basic writing skills courses---courses for students who historically have been deemed as underprepared for higher education. Although the study focused on at-risk students, its implications apply to all syllabi in all courses: instructors who use a discourse of possibility in syllabi establish a more positive and productive relationship with students. The first half of the research, critical discourse analysis of 25 syllabi from a university in northeastern United States, consists of three sub-studies. The first examined how the pronouns I, you, and we and the noun variants student and instructor function either to convey a sense of community or to stress instructor power. The second examined how various combinations of formatted features signaled which information the instructor considered most important. The third examined how conditional statements were used to negotiate rules and accommodations. Findings of these analyses were used to generate sample syllabi for a subsequent field study, which involved a within-subjects experimental design employing two groups and a counterbalanced text. Ten students evaluated two versions of a syllabus and responded to six open-ended questions related to the course, the instructor, and the students. The findings from both the syllabi analysis and the field study provide insight on how the way the syllabi is worded mirrors the instructors' ideologies and how wording influences student perceptions---especially younger students and those with a lower grade point average. Practical pedagogical implications are that new graduate teaching assistants and new instructors should receive explicit training in how to align syllabi discourse with their teaching philosophies. |
