Data Power in Writing: Assigning Data Analysis in a General Education Linguistics Course to Change Ideologies of Language

This study examines the intellectual consequences of writing about data in relation to disciplinary concepts. We collected and studied written assignments from sixteen students in which they had to analyze data provided by the instructor in a general education linguistics course. We also surveyed them at the beginning, middle, and end of the course to determine their prior experiences with language and language studies, their processes in completing assignments, and their attitudes toward language, data, and linguistic analysis. These assignments and surveys were supplemented with course documents and interviews with the instructor and two of the TAs. This study reveals that the students in varying ways and to varying degrees came to see language use and language users in more disciplinarily sophisticated ways and to discard stereotyping, discriminatory, or stigmatizing beliefs they might have held. The students also to varying degrees came to understand the nature of linguistic data and methods. Further, there were varying interactions between the experience with data and the exposure to disciplinary concepts, based on prior academic and non-academic experiences, as well as individual dispositions toward learning. Findings suggest that students learning to select, represent, and analyze data in answering disciplinary questions and arguing for disciplinary conclusions in their writing are significant parts of their development as academic writers.