Summer 2021 Dissertation Camp Blog

Welcome to 2021 Dissertation Camp.  I'm looking forward to meeting you.  I'm Carol Severino, a Rhetoric professor and Director of the Writing Center for many years.  I love this Camp not only because I get a chance to learn about scholars and writers like yourselves, but because I also can get some work done on my research projects!  This year I first need to do a formatting check on an article I co-wrote with my dissertation advisee based on some of her dissertation data. The article was just accepted for publication (Hooray!), and this is one of the last steps.  

But on Wednesday I should be ready to launch into another project.  Last semester when I was on research leave, I took an undergraduate course called Journalistic Writing in Spanish and kept a 15,000- words learning journal. We wrote a lot inside and outside of class; we learned and wrote in all the genres: news stories, interviews, profiles, chronicles, reportage, editorials, columns, and blogs. Inside class we did a practice chronicle and a column, but we also wrote about the assigned readings, all of which were about narccotrafficking, crime, and violence in Latin America.  I want to analyse the generation and formulation stages (translating ideas into Spanish words, often through English) to see how what linguists call "comprehensive output" contributes to learning Spanish language.  I'm making charts and tables for the data and will use my journal for context. My tentative audience is the midwest regional journal of an organization for foreign language teachers.  I had queried the editor who said she would welcome first-person narratives that have pedagogical implications for language teachers.