The individual trajectories of English L1 and English as an additional language speakers in undergraduate and graduate programs have been traced to document students' writing experiences across courses, and socialization into dissertation writing, or publication practices (e.g., Casanave & Vandrick, 2003; Ivanič, 1998; Okuda & Anderson, 2017; Poe, 2013; Spack, 1997). However, students' socialization into "occluded genres" (Swales, 1996) of the scholarly publication process (e.g., responding to reviewer comments, journal manuscript submission letters) has remained open to investigation (Swales & Feak 2011).
This situated case study explored how Ryan (pseudonym), an international doctoral student in an engineering research team, was socialized into an occluded genre, writing a reviewer response paper to article reviewers, at a U.S. university. Data were collected over a year and included 14 article drafts, two responses to reviewer response paper drafts, video recordings of weekly research team meetings, semi-structured interviews, and extensive field notes. The data were analyzed with theme analysis (Baralt, 2012) and discourse analysis to demonstrate the role of micro-level team interactions on Ryan's socialization process and to document the team's RRP practice procedure.
Findings indicated Ryan was socialized into responding to reviewer comments through "textual interactions, oral interactions" which mostly took place in research team discussions, "and mentoring" he received from his advisors (Tardy, 2009, p. 262). When preparing an article for journal submission, the research team trained Ryan to anticipate reviewers' potential expectations regarding, for instance, content (e.g., figures, tables), research design, and academic language use (e.g., hedging) through oral and written feedback. Findings offer implications for researching RRP socialization.
