Although community colleges are important entry points into higher education for many American students, few studies have investigated how community college students engage with different genres or develop genre knowledge. Even fewer have connected students’ genre knowledge to their academic performance. The present article discusses how 104 ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse students reported on classroom genre experiences and wrote stories about college across three narrative genres (Letter, Best Experience, Worst Experience). Findings suggest that students’ engagement with classroom genres in community college helped them develop rhetorical reading and writing skills. When students wrote about their college lives across narrative genres, they reflected on higher education in varied ways to achieve differing sociocultural goals with distinct audiences. Finally, students’ experience with classroom and narrative genres predicted their GPA, implying that students’ genre knowledge signals and influences their academic success. These findings demonstrate how diverse students attending community college can use genres as resources to further their social and academic development.

尽管社区大学是许多美国学生进入高等教育的重要切入点，但很少有研究调查社区大学学生如何与不同流派互动或发展流派知识。将学生的体裁知识与他们的学业成绩联系起来的人甚至更少。本文讨论了104个种族，文化和语言上各异的学生如何报告课堂流派的经历，并撰写了关于三种叙事流派（书信，最佳经历，最差经历）的大学故事。调查结果表明，学生对社区大学课堂风格的参与有助于他们发展修辞阅读和写作技巧。当学生跨叙事风格写自己的大学生活时，他们以不同的方式思考高等教育，以实现针对不同受众的不同社会文化目标。最后，学生在课堂和叙事体裁方面的经验预示了他们的GPA，这暗示着学生的体裁知识会发出信号并影响他们的学术成就。这些发现表明，就读社区大学的多样化学生如何利用体裁作为资源来促进他们的社会和学术发展。