Undergraduates in a Second Language ― Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development

This is the first book-length study of bilingual, international, and immigrant college students that attempts to fully embed their academic 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 these 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?
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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 U.S. university in the 1990s.
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This study is revealing for teachers of writing to native English speakers and for those who teach ESL, bilingual, international, immigrant, L2, or non-native English speaking (NNES) students. This long list of qualifiers hints at the complexities inherent in the latter group of students’ status in English-dominant countries like the U.S. and the difficulty of finding appropriate, adequate, and non-limiting ways to refer to them as a group beyond their status in political terms or the stage of their English language proficiency. In fact the findings of this study highlight its suggestion that grouping itself is a problem.
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This is a must-read volume for present and future writing teachers, compositionists, writing researchers, and second language studies professionals.