GRApES is a group of applied linguists and rhetoricians in the
English Department at ISU who meet regularly
to discuss their various research pursuits, looking for areas of mutual interest
in terms of methodology and theory. As you will see below, the group is quite
diverse in interests and expertise. Our goal is to collaborate on joint research
projects. Feel free to contact any of us about our research.
Rebecca Burnett
Rebecca E. Burnett teaches
rhetoric and professional communication courses to undergraduate, master's,
and PhD students. Her research focuses primarily on investigating the nature
of the interaction and decision-making among team members and collaborators,
both in both the classroom and the workplace. She is also interested in international
and intercultural communication. She is currently collaborating on a communication-across-the-curriculum
program in agriculture, partially funded by a USDA grant. As part of this
work, she is investigating corporate communication patterns in agribusiness.
She has just assumed the editorship of the Journal of Business & Technical
Communication.
Carol Chapelle
Carol Chapelle investigates
issues related to the use of computer technology in second language acquisition.
She is particularly interested in interpretation of interactions in computer
mediated contexts (i.e., human-computer, and human-human interactions) from
the perspective of second language classroom research and attempts to elaborate
the conceptual underpinnings for this work through application of systemic-functional
linguistic theory. Working toward computer-assisted second language testing,
her work focuses on strengthening the definition of "vocabulary in context"
to increase its utility for test construction and interpretation. Carol's Homepage
Dan Douglas
Dan Douglas is interested in
the assessment of communicative language ability in professional and academic
contexts. He is currently working on a book with Carol Chapelle on Computer
Assisted Language Testing. He is editor of Language Testing journal,
and his book, Assessing Languges for Specific Purposes, was
published by Cambridge University Press in 2000. Dan's Homepage
David R. Russell
David R. Russell teaches in
the Ph.D. program in Rhetoric and Professional Communication. His book Writing
in the Academic Disciplines, 1970-1990: A Curricular History examines the
history of American writing instruction outside of composition courses. He
has published many articles on WAC and co-edited (with Charles Bazerman) Landmark
Essays in Writing Across the Curriculum. He is currently collaborating on
communication-across-the-curriculum programs in agriculture, writing a book
on Activity Theory and genre acquisition, and editing a collection of essays
describing the uses of writing in nine national education systems. David's Homepage
David Wallace
David Wallace's research has
two major foci. One strand examines how to apply the general calls for liberatory,
empowering pedagogy in feminist and Marxist work into classroom practice that
does more than give lip service to the idea of sharing authority over knowledge
with students. The other strand examines what it means for students--miniority/majority,
men/women, academically well prepared/less well prepared--to engage in academic
literacy. This work focuses primarily on first-year composition classes as
important sites for students and teachers to consider how academic literacy
changes students and should itself be changed by students.
Dorothy Winsor
Dorothy Winsor has two projects
currently underway. One is a series of ethnographic studies of writing among
engineers and their coworkers in a large manufacturer of agricultural equipment.
The second is a long-term study of four engineers writing at work that is
currently in its eighth year.
Dorothy's Homepage
