Crossing Through: What Threshold Concepts Can Tell Us about Disciplinary Identity Formation

This project is an exploratory study to examine how threshold concepts (TC) manifest in undergraduate student writing. TC are discipline or discourse community specific, and evolve as individuals learn discursive conventions and develop an identity as part of a specific discipline/community. Using corpus analytics and grounded theory, we will analyze reflective statements within digital portfolios composed by first-year composition students in the Writers’ Studio. The goal is to examine how discursive markers in student writing related to language use and rhetorical moves and strategies are indicative of TC in students’ passage from novice to expert writers.