Undergraduates in a Second Language

Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development

Ilona Leki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351538114
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is the first book-length study of bilingual, international, and immigrant students in English writing courses that attempts to fully embed their writing experiences within the broader frame of their personal histories, the human context of their development, and the disciplinary contexts of their majors. It addresses the questions: How useful are L2 writing courses for the students who are required to take them? What do the students carry with them from these courses to their other disciplinary courses across the curriculum? What happens to these students after they leave ESL, English, or writing classes? Drawing on data from a 5-year longitudinal study of four university students for whom English was not their strongest/primary language, it captures their literacy experiences throughout their undergraduate careers. The intensive case studies answer some questions and raise others about these students' academic development as it entwined with their social experiences and identity formation and with the ideological context of studying at a US university in the 1990s.

1
Introduction

Since the early 1990s, research into second-language (L2) academic literacy has moved increasingly toward qualitative research methodologies that allow for more detailed descriptions of student writers as people and at the same time require those descriptions to be set in a broadened context of when, where, and how their writing takes place. These studies have helped us understand something of the complex, sometimes hidden, often unpredictable processes that student writers experience as they gradually develop academic literacy, that is, membership in communities of academic readers and writers. Of particular value in this body of work is the orientation beyond 1st-year writing classes toward other academic disciplines and toward acknowledgment and examination of the role college courses other than English courses play in the initiation of students into academic disciplinary communities. Although the number of such reports is relatively small, it has been growing for both native English-speaking (NES) students (Berkenkotter, Huckin, & Ackerman, 1988; Carroll, 2002; Chiseri-Strater, 1991; Faigley & Hansen, 1985; Flower et al., 1990; Haas, 1994; Herrington, 1985; Herrington & Curtis 2000; Herrington & Moran, 1992; McCarthy, 1987; J. Nelson, 1990; Sternglass, 1997; Walvoord & McCarthy, 1990; Wolcott, 1994) and non-native English-speaking (NNES) student writers (Adamson, 1993; Casanave, 1992, 1995; Currie, 1993; Fu, 1995; Harklau, 1994, 2000; Leki, 1995a, 1999, 2001, 2003a; Leki & Carson, 1994, 1997; Losey, 1997; Prior, 1991, 1998; Riazi, 1997; Spack, 1997). Many of these reports have been an inspiration, particularly in what they reveal about student literacy life at the tertiary level and, more specifically, about how these students cope with the literacy demands they encounter in their other courses across the curriculum.

The first detailed book-length study with which I became familiar was Chiseri-Strater’s (1991) revealing exploration of the literacy experiences of two NES undergraduates in English and other classes. Then in Sternglass (1997), we saw L1 English and a few L2 students who were perhaps at risk of not succeeding in college because of their difficulties with reading and writing but who in fact did succeed eventually. Sternglass made the argument that students with literacy difficulties should nevertheless be given the chance and, especially, the time to develop these skills by not being denied access to college. This is an argument that is supported by Carroll’s (2002) research on L1 English students who were not underprepared but whose most profound development as writers took place only after their 1st-year writing classes, gradually, within the context of their majors. Carroll makes the point that even after they became successful writers within their majors, those who had had difficulty writing in English-class genres continued to have that difficulty; in other words, the link between general writing courses and writing needs across the curriculum is tenuous, a point made strongly in L1 research by Russell (1991) as well. In research focused on L2 students, Spack (1997) traced the variety of sources that fueled an L2 student’s literacy development, including her L1 literacy and reading of popular literature in her second language, English. In Prior (1991), we watch jointly constructed texts develop through complex diglossic interplay between the authors, their peers, and their teachers. Blanton’s (2005) account documents the nearly insurmountable problems created for two L2 college writers by interrupted and stunted literacy development in L1 and later in L2.

In reading reports of this extremely valuable type of research done by writing specialists, I have nevertheless come to be struck by how constricted the view of the students and of the students’ experiences has been. Even in qualitative research studies that do try to look at context, that context has often been defined rather narrowly as the context of various writing assignments (some in writing classes, some in other courses across the curriculum), the previous or current writing the students did for one course or another. Each of these studies has added tremendously to our understanding of literacy development among undergraduates, but given that they were all intended to shed light primarily on the development of writing skills, their relentless focus on writing gives the impression that between writing assignments, nothing was happening in these students’ academic lives. Furthermore, the students themselves are often portrayed as though they too had these writing assignments continuously foremost in their minds and memories.

Similarly, because the initial goal of my own study was also literacy, interviews with my research participants during the 1st year of the study were devoted almost entirely to questions on the nature of the reading and writing assignments the students were dealing with. By some time during the 2nd year, however, it became clear that their literacy experiences were so embedded in personal, social, and other academic experiences that however much I would try to draw the research participants into talking about writing, their answers to questions about writing were much less engaged than their answers to questions about other aspects of their academic experiences. That is, they themselves were much more interested in other aspects of their lives than they were in their writing.

My focus in this book, however, cannot be to try to tell these students’ complete life stories for the 3 to 5 years that I worked with them, first, because I did not have access to everything about their lives and, second, because it is obviously not possible to do such a thing in any case. My focus, then, has to be narrowed, as has the focus of other books of this type; but I came to realize that narrowing the focus solely to these students’ struggles with academic literacy tasks greatly distorted the value the students themselves placed on those experiences—overestimating their importance in their lives at the expense of other concerns, issues, and interests. Furthermore, such a narrowing would be untrue to the very social nature of some of those literacy experiences.

So the focus during the 2nd year of the study expanded to include as much about my participants’ academic experiences beyond reading and particularly beyond writing as I could manage to gather. Both the institutional nature of the students’ experiences (i.e., the course and curricular requirements they had to meet) and the social nature of these students’ literacy experiences (their relationships with their teachers and especially with other students) became increasingly evident and compelling. Prior’s (1998) research clearly demonstrates the degree to which the texts his research participants produced were heteroglossic, that is, created with and existing as strands of thought and language reflecting the contribution of teachers and peers. The studies presented here extend the view of that heteroglossia to issues beyond text and beyond language to include a still broader frame.

By academic literacy I mean the activity of interpretation and production of academic and discipline-based texts (or as Street, 1984, puts it, “shorthand for the social practices of reading and writing,” p. 1). Other kinds of literacy, such as image, sound, computer, or other literacies referenced by such researchers as the New London Group, were not particularly prominent features of these students’ academic environment during the 1990s. However, literacy as used here is not limited to the technology of reading and writing, a unitary skill, or a strictly cognitive activity but, rather, includes the interpretation and production of a variety of texts often within important social contexts, such as group-work projects or writing center assistance, and variable reliance on a wealth of previous experience with text. Furthermore, the meaning of academic literacy was not uncontested by the students themselves as they sometimes resisted literacy activities or brought competing views of literacy to academic arenas in which they sometimes struggled.

My interest in L2 students’ literacy development began in writing classrooms. I take seriously the concern that L2 writing courses not construct themselves as mere service courses, nothing more than staging areas before the real work of college literacy, striving only to train students to accommodate themselves to the demands of others in their courses and in this country. Nevertheless, like many other writing teachers, I also take seriously the responsibility heaved on us by the institutional demand that all undergraduate students take 1st-year writing courses. The students in these writing courses have the right to expect that their work in the writing courses will somehow contribute to their academic success (Silva, 1997).

Do the writing courses in fact do this? Certainly most writing teachers and researchers believe or assert that they do, despite the difficulty of showing a clear correlation between such complex concepts as writing improvement and writing instruction (see Leki, 2003a). Many students, on the other hand, often do not see the point of 1st-year writing courses, ubiquitous in U.S. higher education; others, perhaps especially visa or overseas students, do not feel they can afford the time. Most telling of all, some manage to circumvent regulations requiring that they take these writing courses in their 1st year—ostensibly to prepare them for writing they will do in their other courses—and avoid writing courses until later in their academic careers, often succeeding perfectly well in those other courses without the touted benefit of the writing course. If these writing courses are so beneficial in improving student writing and if writing is so crucial to academic success, why has this news not penetrated through to the student grapevine and resulted in students flocking to the courses rather than avoiding them?

Assuming that students do learn something about writing in our writing classes, the next question concerns the degree to which they can transfer that information or those skills or even those predispositions to courses across the curriculum or other writing contexts, because in the end whether students write well (however that may be defined by programs and individual teachers) for us in our English classes is irrelevant. This research, then, was originally intended to investigate just how the writing courses articulated with writing demands across the curriculum for students like mine, ones for whom English was a second or third or fourth language. It grew, however, as qualitative research projects tend to do, into a broader picture of what the academic side of college life was like for the four students in the study.

Inquiry Procedures

The research design consisted of two phases. In the first phase in fall of 1994, all new L2 undergraduates in entry-level ESL writing classes (credit bearing) were asked to respond to a survey intended in part to identify those who were concurrently enrolled in courses across the disciplines that required writing. My research assistant and I conducted qualitative interviews with all students who agreed to talk about their writing in those courses. Three sets of interviews took place in the middle of the first semester, at the end of the first semester, and at the end of the second semester of these students’ studies, and focused on writing demands and experiences across the curriculum and writing requirements and instruction in the writing courses. Partial results of this phase of the research have been reported elsewhere (Leki & Carson, 1997). From among the 30 or so students who participated in this first phase, 3 first-year and 1 sophomore NNES students who expected to continue to have writing in their disciplinary courses in subsequent years expressed interest in participating in the second phase, long-term case studies to trace their academic literacy development over the following 3 years, or until they graduated.

The data collected for this second phase of the project consists primarily of the following:

• In-depth, qualitative, semistructured interviews (Denzin, 1989; Taylor & Bogdan, 1984) with each of the four students as close to every other week as possible, focusing on their perceptions of the work they were required to do in their courses across the disciplines and on the resources they had or developed in attempting to meet those requirements. The interviews lasted between half an hour and an hour, except for end-of-term interviews, which lasted somewhat longer, up to 2 hours. Interviews were conducted by either my research assistant or me, depending on whose schedule best matched the students’, which varied from term to term. All interviews were then fully transcribed by either my research assistance or me. (See the Appendix for sample interview guides.)
• E-mail contact with the students as needed.
• Examination of documentation related to these four students’ course work, for example, syllabuses, class texts, writing assignments, drafts of papers, copies of exams, and other kinds of course and curricular announcements.
• Nonparticipant observation (by either my research assistant or me, depending on whose schedule matched) of selected classes in which the students were enrolled, particularly those that included a substantial writing component.
• Interviews with the instructors of all courses that required evaluated writing.
• Transcribed recordings of selected writing center sessions.
• End-of-term debriefing interviews with each of my research assistants, whose identities changed more or less each year.
• Collection of weekly journal entries in which participants maintained an on-going commentary on their work during the semester and their responses to it.¹

These varying sources of information, in addition to reviews of literature in both L1 and L2 writing research, reflect the qualitative researcher’s work as bricoleur (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) and are intended to ensure data source and methodological triangulation (Denzin, 1989).

Research Questions

Again, as in much qualitative research, the original primary research questions here were maximally open-ended:

1. How do NNES students experience and respond to the literacy demands of an undergraduate course of study in an English-medium university?
2. How and how well did their experiences in their English-language and writing classes help them in meeting literacy demands across the disciplines?
3. How do these students become initiated into the specific discourse of their disciplines?

Within this framework, more detailed research objectives included exploration of the following issues:

General education:

• How these students perceived the role of reading and writing within a variety of academic disciplines.
• How faculty within these academic disciplines defined the role of reading and writing.
• How writing and reading were used to initiate students into different disciplines.
• How students and faculty represented the same academic tasks.
• How much students were able to draw upon previous work in English and writing classes to accomplish literacy tasks across the disciplines.
• How the students’ academic literacy developed through exposure to a variety of disciplines.

The students’ majors:

• How the students were acculturated/initiated into their majors.
• How their perception of their majors changed over time.
• How reading and writing functioned in course work in their majors.
• How reading and writing functioned beyond the classroom within their major fields (i.e., among disciplinary professionals).

During the 1st year of the interviews, it soon became clear that a major feature of these students’ academic lives was group-work projects of two kinds: those officially assigned in their courses and spontaneous informal group work. Interacting with these people as often as we did also created curiosity about other features of their lives, which the participants talked about freely, such as their social...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 “You Need Really Understand”: An Undergraduate in Engineering
• 3 “Don’t Have Easy”: Nursing in L2
• 4 “Suddenly You Get Recognized”: The Power of Community
• 5 “Yuko Can Handle Intimidation”: Becoming a Social Worker
• 6 University Literacy
• 7 Social and Ideological Contexts of Literacy Development
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix A: Interview Guides
• Appendix B: Main Coding Categories for Student Interviews
• Endnotes
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index