Matching Items (3)
Description
This yearlong project examines how multilingual undergraduate writers--including international visa students and U.S. permanent residents or citizens who are non-native English speakers--exercise agency in their first-year composition placement decisions. Agency is defined as the capacity to act or not to act contingent upon various conditions. The goal of the project is to demonstrate how student agency can inform the overall programmatic placement decisions, which can lead to more effective placement practices for multilingual writers. To explore the role of agency in students' placement decisions, I conducted a series of four in-depth interviews with eleven multilingual writers between Fall 2010 and Spring 2011 in the Writing Programs at Arizona State University. To triangulate these placement decisions, I interviewed some of the multilingual student participants' academic advisors and writing teachers as well as writing program administrators. Findings showed that when conditions for agency were appropriate, the multilingual student participants were able to negotiate placement, choose to accept or deny their original placement, self-assess their proficiency level as deciding to choose a writing course, plan on their placement, question about placement, and finally make decisions about a writing course they wanted to take. In the context of this study, conditions for agency include the freedom to choose writing courses and information about placement that is distributed by the following sources: advisors' recommendations, other students' past experience in taking first-year composition, the new student orientation, and other sources that provide placement related information such as an online freshman orientation and a major map. Other findings suggested that the academic advisor participants did not provide the multilingual students with complete placement information; and this affected the way the multilingual students chose which section of first-year composition to enroll in. Meanwhile, there was no formal communication about placement options and placement procedures between the Writing Programs and writing teachers. Building on these findings, I argue for improving conditions for agency by providing placement options, making placement information more readily available, and communicating placement information and options with academic advisors, writing teachers, and multilingual students.
ContributorsSaenkhum, Tanita, 1976- (Author) / Matsuda, Paul Kei (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley (Committee member) / James, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Writing centers are learning settings and communities at the intersection of multiple disciplines and boundaries, which afford opportunities for rich learning experiences. However, navigating and negotiating boundaries as part of the learning is not easy or neutral work. Helping tutors shift from fixing to facilitating language and scaffolding literacy learning requires training. This is particularly true as tutors work with second or subsequent language (L2) writers, a well-documented area of tension. This mixed methods action research study, conducted at a large university in the United States (US), centered on a tutor training intervention designed to improve writing tutors’ scaffolding with L2 learners by increasing tutors’ concrete understanding of scaffolding and shifting the ways tutors view and value L2 writers and their writing. Using a sociocultural framework, including understanding writing centers as communities of practices and sites for experiential learning, the effectiveness of the intervention was examined through pre- and post-intervention surveys and interviews with tutors, post-intervention focus groups with L2 writers, and post-intervention observations of tutorials with L2 writers. Results indicated a shift in tutors’ use of scaffolding, reflecting increased understanding of scaffolding techniques and scaffolding as participatory and multidirectional. Results also showed that post-intervention, tutors increasingly saw themselves as learners and experienced a decrease in confidence scaffolding with L2 writers. Findings also demonstrated ways in which time, common ground, and participation mediate scaffolding within tutorials. These findings provide implications for tutor education, programmatic policy, and writing center administration and scholarship, including areas for further interdisciplinary action research.
ContributorsBell, Lisa Eastmond (Author) / Bertrand, Melanie (Thesis advisor) / Moses, Lindsey (Committee member) / Eckstein, Grant (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This dissertation explores the nature of collaborative writing in an interdisciplinary research context beyond classrooms. Most of the current studies in collaborative writing in second language contexts are based on collaborative writing in classroom-based contexts such as English as a Second Language courses with undergraduate students. Collaborative writing tasks are getting its popularity both in classrooms and beyond classrooms with various purposes and objectives. Thus, it is more likely that multilingual writers encounter some kinds of collaborative writing tasks in various contexts. For writing instructors and writing curriculum developers, it is important to understand various types of collaborative writing tasks and their writing practices.
The current study investigates the nature of collaborative writing in an interdisciplinary collaborative research project. The study examines the processes of a multilingual writer’s literacy development in collaborative writing tasks. Based on a qualitative case study, the study focuses on identifying what literate activities were involved in, what effects from the writing collaboration were observed, and what factors influenced this multilingual writer’s writing development. I analyzed various sources of data such as writing samples, writing journal notes, observation fieldnotes, project documents, and the interviews from the focal participant, the graduate student, and two other co-authors as informants in the study. Based on a multilingual writer’s perspective, the findings show what the collaborative writing practices look like in an interdisciplinary research setting. The findings indicate that a multilingual writer’s writing skills were constantly evolving while interacting with collaborators through various phases of collaborative writing. Particularly tasks in collaborative revision process such as mediating the gaps between co-authors and responding to research members were crucial in developing awareness for audience and content organization. Drawing on a naturalistic qualitative study, this dissertation discusses that studies of collaborative writing in second language learning contexts needs to provide broader perspective and aspects of collaborative writing in various settings that multilingual writers engage in. The research concludes with a discussion of pedagogical implications, limitations of the study and future research.
The current study investigates the nature of collaborative writing in an interdisciplinary collaborative research project. The study examines the processes of a multilingual writer’s literacy development in collaborative writing tasks. Based on a qualitative case study, the study focuses on identifying what literate activities were involved in, what effects from the writing collaboration were observed, and what factors influenced this multilingual writer’s writing development. I analyzed various sources of data such as writing samples, writing journal notes, observation fieldnotes, project documents, and the interviews from the focal participant, the graduate student, and two other co-authors as informants in the study. Based on a multilingual writer’s perspective, the findings show what the collaborative writing practices look like in an interdisciplinary research setting. The findings indicate that a multilingual writer’s writing skills were constantly evolving while interacting with collaborators through various phases of collaborative writing. Particularly tasks in collaborative revision process such as mediating the gaps between co-authors and responding to research members were crucial in developing awareness for audience and content organization. Drawing on a naturalistic qualitative study, this dissertation discusses that studies of collaborative writing in second language learning contexts needs to provide broader perspective and aspects of collaborative writing in various settings that multilingual writers engage in. The research concludes with a discussion of pedagogical implications, limitations of the study and future research.
ContributorsKim, Junghwa (Author) / Matsuda, Paul Kei (Thesis advisor) / Matsuda, Aya (Committee member) / James, Mark A (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019