Martin Nystrand, a Composition & Rhetoric researcher and an education theorist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is Louise Durham Mead Professor of English Emeritus, Professor of Education 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 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 former sociology professor and director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, Adam Gamoran, 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: 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-ever use of event-history analysis to investigate classroom discourse.Nystrand has successfully elaborated several seminal concepts in current research.Writing:* discourse community (What Writers Know, 1982) and* the doctrine of autonomous text (The Structure of Written Communication, 1986)Classroom discourse and pedagogy:* authentic teacher questions (cf. Nystrand, Opening Dialogue, 1997) and* question events (cf. Nystrand et al., 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).