Crossing differences in the disciplinary writing of plurilingual students in English medium university

• In Event: Plurilingual, translanguaging, and asset-based pedagogies across contexts

Proposal

This empirical research explores the writing experiences of plurilingual postgraduate students of different disciplines in an English medium instruction (EMI) university as they negotiate the differences in language and writing practices to achieve academic literacies in their disciplines. It investigates the nature of the disciplinary writing experience of plurilingual students with a focus on the role of plurilingual repertoires in developing academic literacies, dynamic writer identities, and the negotiations and transformations of different writing practices. Situated in the postcolonial multilingual society of Hong Kong, this research signifies the power of protest by investigating how non-native-English-speaking student writers challenge the monolingual ideology in EMI, and negotiate, balance and cross differences to legitimate their own meaning-making resources in academia.

The theoretical framework of this study consists of Academic Literacies theory (Lea & Street, 1998) as an overarching framework, with the model of Multifaceted Writer Identities (Burgess and Ivanič, 2010) at the core and a translingual lens (Horner et al., 2011; Canagarajah, 2018) to conceptualize the meaning-making practices around writing. The academic literacies theory incorporated the models of Study Skills, Academic Socialization, and pluralistic academic literacies as three embedding dimensions of academic literacies development. While Study Skills emphasize the cognitive and decontextualized skills in literacy development, Academic Socialization values how writers become legitimate members of the disciplinary communities and acquire conventionally acceptable practices, the pluralistic academic literacies center around the transformative and agentive practices of student writers in challenging and negotiating with the conventions of the disciplinary communities to legitimate their own meaning-making resources (Lillis, 2019). At the core of Academic Literacies are the Multifaceted Writer Identities which capture the dynamic selves across time and space over the development of academic literacies. The Multifaceted Writer Identities model maps identities onto the sociohistorical, ontogenetic, mesolevel, and microgenetic timescales and classifies writer identities into autobiographical, discoursal, authorial selves and the perceived writer, all of which then contribute to the fluid and dynamic socially available possibilities of selfhood (Burgess and Ivanič, 2010). The theoretical framework of this research also expands the boundaries of academic literacies by equipping a translingual lens to conceptualize the contested nature of the plurilingual writing experience.

The longitudinal multiple case study design captures the nuances and complexities of students’ writing over two semesters. The participants are plurilingual students from different postgraduate disciplines in a university in Hong Kong. Their writing experiences are tracked from students’ perspectives and then interpreted based on the triangulation of multiple data. Ongoing narrative inquiry with students, discourse-based interviews, writing assignments at different stages of studies, and student writers' reflexive journals recording their writing processes work together to form a comprehensive and multi-dimensional illustration of students’ writing experience. These data are coded and analyzed both inductively and deductively using content analysis. The data will be analyzed both within and across each individual. A profile will first be built for each participant, which combines the interpretation of themes arising from the interviews, journals, and assignments, followed by cross-case analysis comparing each case to identify themes for the whole study. Each piece of data is like a shining star across time and space in the journey of writing and they form a constellation of stories (Garvis, 2015) of plurilingual student writers. Themes and categories about writing practices, identity construction, and negotiation of differences emerge into different types of academic literacies experiences.

The finding of the research reveals the complex nature of the plurilingual students’ disciplinary writing experience. The results present the different patterns of writing journeys with stories of typical cases to illustrate the writing experiences in depth. In brief, the finding suggests that student writers’ plurilingual repertoires could both facilitate and constrain academic literacies, depending on various contextual and individual factors. The construction of writer identities is always at the core of the writing journey as students form different selves during different stages of writing and their studies. With the differences between students’ own meaning-making resources and the conventional practices being constantly challenged and the borders being crossed and re-crossed, plurilingual student writers take the initiatives to develop and transform academic literacies in their disciplinary studies.

This study contributes to language issues in education by leveraging the plurilingual repertoire of diverse students in EMI. It investigates the understudied context of postgraduate disciplinary writing and the crossing of the differences in writing practices. This study contributes to the research on writing and academic literacies in increasingly internationalized higher education. It is valuable for understanding the experience and perspectives of plurilingual students in EMI universities and has implications for supporting students of diverse backgrounds to succeed in their academic journeys.

Author

• Siqi Song