Martin Nystrand
Credentials: Louise Durham Mead Professor Emeritus, Department of English
Email: mnystrand@ssc.wisc.edu
Links
CLASS (Classroom Language Assessment System)
Education
- Ph.D. Northwestern University (English Education), 1974
- Special Student, Research on the Teaching of English: James Britton, tutor. University of London Goldsmiths’ College, 1971-72
- M.A.T. The Johns Hopkins University (English, humanities, & education), 1966
- B.A. Northwestern University (English Departmental Honors), 1965
CAREER
Martin Nystrand is Louise Durham Mead Professor of English Emeritus and a former director of the National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA). His 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, done in collaboration with UW-Madison Professor of Sociology Emeritus Adam Gamoran, 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, 3(2) (2003), 135-196) was the first-ever use of event-history analysis to investigate classroom discourse. See Center for Research on Dialogic Instruction and the In-Class Analysis of Classroom Discourse (http://class.wceruw.org).
In recognition of his research, Taylor & Francis published Reciprocity as a Principle of Discourse: Selected Writings of Martin Nystrand (2026), a forty-year compendium of Nystrand’s research on writing and dialogic pedagogy. He was awarded the 2011 Distinguished Lifetime Research Award by the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy (NCRLL).
Recent Books
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Nystrand, Martin. Twenty Acres: Events That Transform Us. Paris: Kiwai Media, 2019. Print.
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Nystrand, Martin. Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning. New York: Teachers College Press, 1997. Print.“Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom” promises to reorient our thinking about how younger adolescents and their teachers, talking together, compose shared understandings that contribute to individual students’ learning. Presenting a new conceptual framework, Nystrand and his colleagues argue that people learn not merely by being spoken (or written) to, but by participating in communicative exchanges. Dozens of schools and thousands of students participated in the study reported here, under the auspices of the National Centre on Effective Secondary Schools. Its audience will include graduate education courses in language, literature, and literacy, teaching methods, quantitative research, teacher research, and educational psychology, as well as researchers, teachers and policymakers.
Read more -
Nystrand, Martin. The Structure of Written Communication: Studies in Reciprocity Between Writers and Readers. New York: Academic Press, 1986. Print.This book transcends current research on writing by relating written text to the cognitive and social processes that create and change it.
Key Features
Read more
* Reciprocity as a principle of discourse
* Language development as socialization
* Context, explicitness, genre, topic, and comment as concepts in discourse analysis
* Writing and reading as social processes