Martin Nystrand University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

Martin Nystrand (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is LOUISE DURHAM MEAD PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on the dialogic organization of discourse in both writing and classroom discourse. His writing research examines how writing-reader interaction shapes the writer’s writing process and development: The Structure of Written Communication: Studies in Reciprocity Between Writers and Readers (Academic Press, 1986). His classroom discourse research, in collaboration with Adam Gamoran, probes the role of classroom interaction in student learning and was the first empirical study to document the role of open classroom discussion in student learning: Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom (Teachers College Press, 1997). His study, “Questions in Time: Investigating the Structure and Dynamics of Unfolding Classroom Discourse” (with L. Wu, A. Gamoran, S. Zeiser, D. Long, Discourse Processes, 35 (2003), 135-196) is the first-ever use of event-history analysis to investigate classroom discourse. Nystrand is a former director of the National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement (CELA), editor of Written Communication, and president of both the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy (NCRLL) and the American Education Research Association (AERA) Special Interest Group (SIG) for Writing Research. At Wisconsin, he has also been a Vilas Associate and, since 1994, a member of the Teaching Academy. He teaches undergraduate courses in composition and English education and graduate courses and seminars in Composition and Rhetoric, a program he chairs. His most recent book, coedited with John Duffy, is Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life: New Directions in Research on Writing, Text, and Discourse (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). He is currently working on The Semiotics of Influence, a sociocultural history of composition studies investigating the history and social context of empirical writing research as it unfolded in North America during the 1970s & ’80s.