ERIC Number: EJ1417720
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023
Pages: 26
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0826-435X
EISSN: EISSN-1925-8917
Let's Talk about Writing Support for Plurilingual Graduate Students: A Collaborative Autoethnography
Antoinette Gagné; Megan Mcintosh; Sreemali Herath; Mary-Ann Fowler; Jade Kim; Victorina Baxan; Elena Danilina
TESL Canada Journal, v40 n1 p81-106 2023
Academic writing is an essential aspect of graduate school, as students' academic writing is the primary basis for assessment. The high-stakes nature of academic writing is magnified for plurilingual students, whose attendance at English-medium universities is growing exponentially. However, a small amount of research addresses how faculty support writing as an essential practice for plurilingual graduate students, particularly in English-medium universities, where English is implicated in structures of power and privilege. Employing a critical analytic collaborative autoethnography, this research uses polyvocal narratives among seven researcher/practitioners to consider how faculty members perceive and respond to the academic writing needs of plurilingual graduate students. Informed by intersectionality, these conversations illuminate how educator identities and epistemological turns in education theory impact approaches to writing support for plurilingual graduate writers. Importantly, these discussions are implicated in the sociopolitical contexts of Canadian and Australian universities, where systems of inequality act to marginalize plurilingual writers. These contextualized narratives then aim to problematize and revise existent, dominant deficit discourses and pedagogies of writing support for plurilingual students. Findings illuminate the capacity of educators, who are cognizant of their power and place, to generate alternative practices to support plurilingual graduate writers in the service of more asset-orientated and inclusive spaces that take advantage of students' plurilingual repertoires in English-dominant universities.
Descriptors: Writing (Composition), Graduate Students, Bilingual Students, Autobiographies, Ethnography, Graduate School Faculty, Teacher Attitudes, Academic Language, Multilingualism, Epistemology, Writing Instruction, Inclusion, English for Academic Purposes, Foreign Countries
TESL Canada Federation. 408-4370 Dominion Street, Burnaby, BC V5G 4L7, Canada. Tel: 604-298-0312; Fax: 604-298-0372; e-mail: admin@tesl.ca; Web site: https://teslcanadajournal.ca/index.php/tesl
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Canada
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A