Martin Nystrand

Interactions surrounding questions plotted in event history analysis. See Nystrand, M., Wu, L.L., Gamoran, A., Zeiser, S., and Long, D.A. (2003). Questions in time: Investigating the structure and dynamics of unfolding classroom discourse. Discourse processes 35 (2), 144.

Dialogic spells are modes of classroom discourse somewhere between recitation and discussion, characterized by engaged student questions and an absence of teacher test questions. A dialogic bid is a teacher discourse move responding to and taking up ideas and observations introduced by students; examples include student questions, uptake, and authentic questions. See Nystrand, M., Wu, L.L., Gamoran, A., Zeiser, S., and Long, D.A. (2003). Questions in time: Investigating the structure and dynamics of unfolding classroom discourse. Discourse processes 35 (2), 144-151.

Questions without "prespecified" answers. See Nystrand, M. (1997). Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom. Language and Literacy Series. Teachers College Press, p. 7.

After teaching as a professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Nystrand moved to the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he served as architect of a campus-wide reform of undergraduate writing curriculum and founded the doctoral program in Composition & Rhetoric. While also at Wisconsin, he served as a director of the National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement (CELA). Awarded more than $9 million in grants over the course of his career, he was president of the American Education Research Association Special Interest Group for Writing Research, 1991-1993, as well as the National Conference for Research on Language & Literacy (NCRLL), 2002-2003. In addition to editing Written Communication from 1994-2002, Nystrand has published nine books, 60 papers & chapters and was awarded the Distinguished Lifetime Research Award from the NCRLL in 2011.

Nystrand's research focuses on the dialogic organization of discourse in both writing and classroom discourse. His writing research examines how writing-reader interaction shapes writers' writing processes and development (Nystrand, The Structure of Written Communication: Studies in Reciprocity Between Writers and Readers (Academic Press, 1986). His classroom discourse research probes the role of classroom interaction in student learning and was the first large-scale empirical study to document the role of open classroom discussion in student learning: Nystrand, 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) was the first use of event-history analysis to investigate classroom discourse.

Written texts differ from conversational utterances in their explicitness; autonomous texts "say what they mean and mean what they say." See Nystrand, M., Himley, M., and Doyle, A. (1986). A critical examination of the doctrine of autonomous texts. In M. Nystrand, The Structure of Written Communication: Studies in Reciprocity between Writers and Readers. New York: Academic Press.

Social groups that share discourse practices. See discourse community Nystrand, M. (1982). Rhetoric's "audience" and linguistics' "speech community": Implications for understanding writing, reading, and text. What writers know: The language, process, and structure of written discourse (pp. 1–30). New York: Academic Press.

The semiotic space created by the interaction of writers and readers when texts are read: A text is a manifestation of the textual space whose parameters are defined by reader-writer interaction. See Nystrand, M. (1982). The structure of textual space. In M. Nystrand, What Writers Know: The Language, Orocess, and Structure of Written Discourse (pp. 75–86). New York: Academic Press.

Almost exactly a century later in the 1970s, composition studies benefited dramatically from the radical shifts in the demographics of American colleges. Rarely have the problems of the world impacted school and university instructional programs as fully as during the late 1960s when riots torched cities and Vietnam War protests tore at university campuses. The Johnson administration vigorously sought to increase educational opportunities as a key weapon in its War on Poverty, and by the late 1960s, a new community college opened every week. And as in eighteenth-century Britain, these non-elite institutions fueled new approaches to composition. In the fall of 1970, six months after four Kent State students were shot dead by National Guard troops, CUNY expedited its policy of open admissions, five years ahead of its planned start in 1975: Brooklyn's enrollments jumped from 14,000-34,000 students. The woeful inadequacy of freshman composition instructors to meet this challenge prompted new research, notably that of Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations, published in 1977, who, influenced by Labov's "The logic of non-standard English," published in 1969, sought to show patterns and unconventional patterns in what the critics of the schools saw as so much sloppiness and ignorance. This and much other research, e.g., Flower & Hayes, 1977, formed the basis for new doctoral programs in composition and rhetoric. Between 1980-1995, these programs grew from only a few to currently dozens generating hundreds of PhDs each year. The story of composition studies is very much fueled by demographic shifts involving the dynamics of a marginalized academic concern involving marginalized students on marginalized campuses, and what happened when they each, in their own way, strove for legitimacy.

Martin Nystrand was born in Joliet, Illinois, United States, and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. He received his B.A. in English from Northwestern University in 1965, his M.A.T. from Johns Hopkins University in 1966, and his Ph.D. in English education from Northwestern University in 1974. During 1971-72, he studied as a special student with James Britton at the University of London.

Martin Nystrand (born December 28, 1943) is an American composition and education theorist. He is Louise Durham Mead Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Professor Emeritus of Education at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

A century later after the American civil war, Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard, led the expansion and modernization of Harvard, transforming it from a college for sons of the landed gentry into a modem university dedicated to the education of middle- as well as upperclass managers in an industrial society–in short, from education serving an agrarian aristocracy to specialized professional preparation for an industrial meritocracy, or an "aristocracy of achievement," to quote Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard in 1869. In this way, the new professional classes of the industrial world were to be given "a quite direct preparation of the work habits and thought patterns that are needed to function in any of the 'varied calls of life.'"