A Practitioner Inquiry Into the Writing Experiences of Ukrainian Immigrants

• In Event: How Do Marginalized and Minoritized Students Navigate the Writingworld's Doxa?

Abstract

Despite the longstanding traditions of promoting text authenticity in foreign language pedagogy, it remains that writing tasks assigned by teachers in said classrooms tend to target an imagined audience, wherein the writing generated by students in such contexts is not meant for authentic or meaningful purposes. In fact, writing instruction in general has been especially criticized for centralizing the teacher as the primary and ultimate reader of students’ writing and leaving teachers to make decisions as to what kinds of writing students produce, why they are produced and for whom. In response to this, several scholars have called for educators across all levels to consider how they can engage students in authentic writing activities in the L2 (Cummins, 2000; Kalan, 2021) and L1 classroom (Lindblom, 2004; Purcell‐Gates et al., 2002).

In this paper, I firstly explore what it means to engage in authentic writing in foreign language pedagogy by examining how authentic writing has been mobilized in recent consequential educational research. Following this, I use an autoethnographic approach to examine the tensions between the field (Bourdieu, 2000) of the Writingworld (Kalan, 2021) and the need to engage students in authentic literacy activities. From my own experiences, I draw on institutional, pedagogical and examination practices and expectations within the context of the Anglophone Caribbean. I also focus on exploring the following question: How can an authentic writing curriculum position teachers and students in a creole speaking context to challenge the doxa of the Writingworld? I argue that a truly authentic writing curriculum within foreign language pedagogy, not only disrupts the doxa of the Writingworld by allowing student writers to take control of important decisions made about their writing, but it also positions creole speaking students as language architects (Flores, 2020) who are able to leverage their full linguistic and multimodal repertoire.



References

Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity. (Originally published 1997)

Cummins, J. (2000). Academic language learning, transformative pedagogy, and information technology: Towards a critical balance. TESOL Quarterly, 34(3), 537-548. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2307/3587742

Flores, N. (2020). From academic language to language architecture: Challenging raciolinguistic ideologies in research and practice. Theory Into Practice, 59(1), 22-31.

Kalan, A. (2021). Sociocultural and power-relational dimensions of multilingual writing : recommendations for deindustrializing writing education. Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781788927819

Lindblom, K. (2004). Writing for Real. English Journal, 94(1), 104.

Morgan, B., & Fleming, D. (2009). Critical citizenship practices in ESP and ESL programs: Canadian and global perspectives. English for specific purposes in theory and practice, 264-288.

Purcell‐Gates, V., Degener, S. C., Jacobson, E., & Soler, M. (2002). Impact of authentic adult literacy instruction on adult literacy practices. Reading Research Quarterly, 37(1), 70-92. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.37.1.3

Author

• Renee Gail Davy, McGill University
  Presenting Author