International Graduate Students’ Academic Reading Experience: Reading Motivation, Self-Efficacy, and Reader Identity

• 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

Scholarly literature concerning international graduate students’ academic literacy experience has focused heavily on their writing (Ivanič, 1998; Liang & Turner, 2021). There is very little research concerning their reading (Grabe, 2009; Koda, 2005), despite the important role that reading plays in graduate level education. This study focuses on three international graduate students’ narrative reading stories and examines overall patterns, using the following three lenses as entry points— reading motivation, reading self-efficacy, and identity as L2 academic readers. The existing scholarship has proposed that these three dimensions play a role in shaping readers’ interactions with texts (Hall, 2016) and revealed significant findings regarding each dimension separately. However, the extent of their influence is still a matter of debate, and scholarly literature has not looked at the three dimensions in combination. Drawing upon a sociocognitive (Atkinson, 2002) framework, this study addressed that gap by examining whether and how motivation, self-efficacy, and identity shaped these international graduate students’ reading experience and identifying emerging themes. In addition to relying on a survey, reflection journals, recorded zoom interviews, and artifacts, this study also employed a novel tool— arts-based research practice (figure 1)— to enhance the ways in which the participants could share their narratives and to provide a richer, fuller mechanism for data triangulation.

The study revealed that L2 reading motivation played a significant role in the participants’ reading experience within two dimensions: What directly motivated them (e.g., cultural background; topics of texts), and what played a supporting role (e.g., strategies responding to heavy reading loads). The study showed that self-efficacy, as another important element in shaping the participants’ L2 reading experience, was marked by its variability and was enhanced through the participants’ critical reading and thinking and self-monitoring. The study also found that graduate level reading is not just a private and isolated event, but also a social practice and that identity as L2 academic readers played an important but complex and varied role. When encountering cultural differences regarding reading in the new graduate school context, the three participants shifted their previous identity encodings (Moje & Luke, 2009) rooted in their L1 worlds to fit into the new and sophisticated L2 reading environment, thus presenting a “becoming” reader identity across the cases.

In terms of pedagogical implications, professors could widen the range of texts they assign so that these students could read, talk, and write about what is familiar to them, thus enriching the reading experience and generating a more inclusive reading and classroom environment. Also, it would be helpful to address anxiety in reading at the initial stage of graduate-level programs and cultivate an awareness of self-regulation or self-monitoring in reading among L2 readers. Third, professors may do more to ease international graduate students into their reading, especially when significantly complex texts are being assigned. Finally, faculty could prepare these students for the social aspects of reading by discussing their expectations for interaction and offering suggestions on how to participate meaningfully in discussion of texts.

Author

• Jingyi Zhu, Columbus State Community College