Position Of Assistant Professor Of Rhetoric

I am writing to apply for the position of Assistant Professor of Composition-Rhetoric in the Department of English at Lehigh University. I hold a doctor of philosophy in Foreign, Second, and Multilingual Language Education (within the TESOL program) with an interdisciplinary specialization in Educational Technology. Moreover, I have experience in teaching and tutoring at the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing (CSTW) at the Ohio State University (OSU). I am confident that my educational background and teaching experience enable me to make contributions to your department and university in terms of enhancing undergraduate and graduate students’ knowledge and skills of composition. I received professional training in teaching

These approaches derive from my personal learning experience as an English Language Learner (ELL) and international student in the US, work experience at the OSU’s CSTW where I had numerous opportunities to teach and provide writing feedback to domestic and international undergraduate, Master’s, and doctoral students, post-docs, and visiting scholars. Writing genres covered college compositions, research papers, multimodal texts, conference papers and posters, Master’s theses, dissertations, academic journal articles, grant proposals, job required materials, and multimodal texts (e.g., websites, PowerPoint slides, and video clips). Types of writing consultations contained face-to-face, synchronous, and asynchronous consultations and semester-long writing groups. Knowing about students’ learning backgrounds and needs enable me to understand academic writing difficulties they encountered in the past, foresee possible writing difficulties in their present learning settings, and know their learning needs and teaching methods that I could adopt to motivate and effectively teach them. Then, teaching lessons are designed based on this information to effectively enhance their academic competence. Moreover,

One of the articles I submitted to an academic journal which is part of my dissertation investigated the influence of Chinese-speaking doctoral students’ past and present English and academic learning experiences on their English academic and discipline-specific writing challenges and development. I employed Weidman, Twale, and Stein’s (2001) graduate and professional student socialization and Lave and Wenger’s (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) communities of practice as frameworks to design this study. Data were collected through a self-designed survey, interviews, weekly journals, and field notes. The finding shows that the participants confronted difficulties in not only general English writing but also discipline-specific writing. Another result reveals that not only their former (before a Ph.D. study) but also current (during the Ph.D. study) English and academic learning experiences impacted on the development of their English academic and discipline-specific writing competence. For instance, the relationship between the participants and their advisor(s) and experienced researchers negatively or positively affected the development of their English academic and disciplinary writing abilities. When being given opportunities to write with and receive feedback