Second-Language Academic Literacies: The Role of Identity and Communities in Multilingual Graduate Students’ Composing Process

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring the Academic Literacy Practices of Multilingual Readers and Writers in Higher Education Contexts (Table 7)

Abstract

This presentation focuses on multilingual graduate students’ process of composing synthesis papers at a US university. Synthesis writing (Vandermeulen et al., 2020) refers to a writing task that includes comprehending, interweaving, and textualizing multiple viewpoints of reading sources. Due to the multifold process, synthesis writing has been understood as an arduous task, especially for multilingual writers (Hirvela, 2016). To find a way to provide appropriate support for multilingual students, investigating and understanding their composing processes and strategies first is important. To explore this issue, the current study, building upon Spivey’s model of discourse synthesis (1984), paid more attention to sociocultural aspects of writing such as writers’ identities and discourse communities (Schneider, 2022; Seloni, 2014).

Specifically, this research was a multiple-case study examining how international graduate students selected, synthesized, and incorporated source ideas into their literature reviews (LR) in English for academic purposes (EAP) courses. Three focal participants were selected due to their diverse patterns of composing processes shown—John, Markus, and Rashmi—who were from Guatemala, South Korea, and India respectively. John was the only PhD-level student speaking Spanish as his L1, whereas Markus and Rashmi were master’s students speaking Korean and Marathi as their L1s. In this multiple-case study, various data sources were gathered over 16 weeks and analyzed qualitatively (e.g., process logs, screen recordings, interviews, literature review drafts).

Findings suggested that Markus’s strong engineer identity with a deep sense of belonging to his automotive community greatly shaped his composing process where he utilized various multimodal tools. On the other hand, John’s identity as a scientist as well as publishing experiences made him differentiate writing conventions between EAP and his discipline where he placed more importance on following disciplinary-specific guidelines. Rashmi did not particularly express a strong identity as a writer yet her transformative understanding of the LR task—the ultimate goal being generating her own original viewpoints not to restate the viewpoints of others—was noteworthy. Furthermore, in-depth textual analysis revealed a discrepancy between the level of complexity in mental syntheses and the amounts of source integrations in writing for some participants, which indicates a struggle in expressing synthesized knowledge into writing (i.e., textualization).

These findings led to several pedagogical implications. First, instructors may need to incorporate in-depth discussions about students’ identities, target audience, and discourse communities as they could powerfully motivate and shape students’ composing processes. Second, the transformative purpose of synthesis writing may need to be taught more explicitly as not all students might have this understanding. Lastly, more step-by-step activities may need to be integrated in the EAP classroom to gradually scaffold writers’ syntheses and textualization.

Overall, this study argues that depending on multilingual writers’ idiosyncratic identities, target communities and task understandings, different composing processes and strategies could be developed and implemented. Moving forward, given the findings of learners’ processes and strategies, future studies could focus on developing specific pedagogical approaches that could allow for more successful transitions between synthesized knowledge and writing.

Author

• Juyeon Yoo, Ball State University