Transnational identifications: Biliterate writers in a first-year humanities course

Transnational identifications: Biliterate writers

in a first-year humanities course

Susan C. Jarratt *, Elizabeth Losh, David Puente

Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA

Abstract

This essay presents the results of a study of first-year students in a California University who report

competence as speakers and writers of a language other than English. The data collected for the study

include a language questionnaire administered to over a thousand students and, from a smaller sample,

responses to focus group interviews, a research paper written at the culmination of a year-long writing-

intensive humanities course, and reflections on that paper drawn from a writer’s memo. To establish a

theoretical context, the authors review the founding assumptions of contrastive rhetoric as well as recent

critiques of CR, arriving at a framework for analysis based in transnational cultural theory. Drawing from the

data, they sketch profiles of students with home languages of Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, and Spanish,

finding that the students’ transnational linguistic experiences and identifications inform in complex and

significant ways their research and writing strategies, as well as their future educational goals.

# 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Transnational identifications; Biliterate writers; First-year composition; Contrastive rhetoric; Ethos

Increasing numbers of bilingual students in twenty-first-century U.S. composition

classrooms offer researchers rich opportunities to study first-hand the language transformations

attendant upon the unprecedented global population shifts of our era. While some of these

students can still be termed English language learners—students qualified for university study

but whose writing in academic English has been judged below a minimum level of competence

for first-year composition—many others are what Guadalupe Valdes terms ‘‘fluent functional

bilinguals’’ (1992, p. 113). As writing teachers and administrators in a California university, we

set out to expand our understanding of students whose diverse language backgrounds go

unacknowledged in first-year composition classes by virtue of their competence with academic

English. How do bilingual and biliterate students compose? What resources do they draw upon

in responding to the demands of writing English in academic settings? To what extent (if at all)

Journal of Second Language Writing 15 (2006) 24–48

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 949 824 9533.

1060-3743/$ – see front matter # 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.jslw.2006.01.001

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2006.01.001

do their language differences contribute to their academic identities? In constructing a study

of successful language minority students, we respond to Valdes’s invitation for compositionists

to ‘‘make bilingual minority students a professionwide concern’’ (p. 113), understanding

‘‘concern’’ to mean take as a subject of interest and inquiry, rather than as a problem or deficit.

We begin by reviewing available information about students’ language histories and then

describe our study. From there we turn to some theoretical considerations, and finally look more

closely at three first-year bilingual writers.

1. Background

On their application forms, students at our university check only one of three language boxes:

‘‘English Only,’’ ‘‘English and Another,’’ and ‘‘Another.’’ Beyond this minimal language

information, writing administrators are provided with data about the student’s self-identified

ethnic group and the possibly (but not necessarily) relevant information that a student was born

either inside or outside the U.S. Valdes (1992) speaks to the inadequacy of such broad categories

for research on bilingual students:

Individual bilingualism that results from real use of and experience with two languages is

highly complex and variable . . .. Factors such as language spoken in the home, age of arrival

in the U.S., first language spoken, and even language used most frequently can predict little

about a bilingual’s relative strengths in each language. Two bilinguals, for example, who

share each of the above characteristics may, nevertheless, have had experiences and contacts

that resulted in very different strengths and weaknesses (e.g., strategic proficiency, linguistic

proficiency, lexical range) in each of their languages. (p. 97)

We take seriously Valdes’ caution to honor the complexity of language use among twenty-first-

century students and emphasize that, though we posit the category ‘‘bilingual’’ as a starting point

for our study, we use it as a point of entry and do not assume that it will operate as a single,

defining feature of students’ writing or self-identification (see also Spack, 1997). To flesh out that

skeleton of language information for a group of first-year students, we designed a questionnaire

asking students where and how they learned the languages they use, what kinds of reading they do

in their home language (enumerating various kinds of genres), with whom they speak each

language, and how competent they judged themselves to be in each language they speak/write.

We included a question about the relationship between language and ethnic or cultural identity,

but phrased it so as to keep open the possibility that students may not in fact claim such identities

(see Appendix A). We administered the questionnaire in the fall of 2001 to students choosing to

satisfy their composition requirement by taking a three-quarter, 24-credit interdisciplinary

humanities course serving approximately 1200 of 4000 entering first-year students. Because this

population includes students in the campus-wide honors program, relatively few ‘‘basic writers,’’

and no writers with ESL designations, we anticipated that a large number of highly functional

biliterate students would be included in the sample.

Survey data about our students’ language backgrounds confirm the richness and variety of

linguistic experience Valdes (1992) predicts (see also Harklau, Losey, & Siegal, 1999). Overall,

63.7% of over 1000 respondents reported that a language other than English was spoken in their

home (see Appendix B for complete survey results). The most prevalent languages reported were

Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Tagalog/Filipino. But these took their place among a

range of 54 different languages and dialects, including Assyrian, Burmese, Coptic, Tamil, and

Telugu. Students recorded at least a half dozen Indian languages and an equal number of Chinese

S.C. Jarratt et al. / Journal of Second Language Writing 15 (2006) 24–48 25

spoken dialects. The languages of the Middle East were also well represented (Farsi, Arabic, and

Turkish, among others.) More importantly, students gave detailed information about the

instruction they had received and the kinds of reading they regularly did in their home language.

The questionnaire gave us a startling panorama of the language variety among a thousand of our

students and inspired us to go further in our attempts to learn about how these students negotiate

the entrance into academic writing in English.

2. Contrastive rhetoric and generation 1.5 bilingual students

The theoretical problematic at the heart of research on biliterate writers can be framed as a

question about difference. What should constitute the framework for investigating the writing of

students who, because of their often less-than-complete competence in a home language and

relative success in academic English, will produce neither the word- and sentence-level errors of

second-language learners nor the distinctive, culturally influenced patterns of organization

described by Robert Kaplan (1966) in the writing of international students? The field of contrastive

rhetoric initiated by Kaplan raises provocative questions about language and rhetorical choices in

writing: it asks how features of discourse such as modes of argument differ among various language

users, embedded as each language is within a distinctive national, geographic, and cultural context.

Recent critiques of contrastive rhetoric pose challenges to the grounding principles of CR and add

complexity and nuance to the initial impetus that launched the field (e.g., Connor, 1996; Kubota &

Lehner, 2004; Leki, 1992, 1997; Liu, 1996; Matalene, 2002; Matsuda, 1997; Panetta, 2001).

Christine Pearson Casanave’s recent review of the contributions of and controversies

surrounding contrastive rhetoric highlights the significant insights of these critics. Matsuda, for

example, points out that contrastive rhetoric has ‘‘tended to look at L2 writing . . . mainly as a

problem of negative transfer of L1 rhetorical patterns to L2 writing’’ (2004, p. 41). Ilona Leki

warns that starting from an assumption of difference, we must certainly avoid drawing

generalizations from the rhetorical practices of contemporary U.S. university students about

linguistic, cognitive, or cultural norms in whole nations or civilizations (Casanave, 2004, p. 42;

Leki, 1997). Both Leki and Matsuda emphasize the importance of evaluating the writing of

bilingual students within pedagogical, cultural, and rhetorical contexts. Proceeding with caution,

we share Casanave’s sense that contrastive rhetoric holds out some promise, but because of the

qualifications just sited, and because few of our students come with a solid and deep primary

knowledge of the home language, contrastive rhetoric in its original form will not serve as a

reliable frame of interpretation (see also Matsuda, 2001b). Rather, we may use it to generate

questions for our students, as Casanave suggests: questions about our students’ educational

backgrounds and writing experiences, about the sources of their writing preferences, and their

beliefs, about good writing (pp. 53–54). As Horner and Trimbur (2002) have argued, to ignore the

rich and complex histories of such students’ literacies is to participate in the ‘‘tacit default

assumption’’ of composition teaching in the U.S. composition—English monolingualism—and in

so doing, to miss significant opportunities to understand our students’ discursive backgrounds and

to benefit from their prior bilingual experiences in the new context of academic writing (see also Li,

2005). If writing pedagogy is a rhetorical act, ignoring the language histories of our students would

be like speaking to only part of the audience, hearing their responses with only half an ear.

What is it, indeed, possible for us to ‘‘hear’’ in writing produced in a required first-year course,

one organized around conventions of academic reading, writing, and research? How are we to

avoid reproducing what Kubota and Lehner identify as a version of the colonizer/colonized

relationship to our research subjects under such conditions (2004, p. 9)? While contrastive

S.C. Jarratt et al. / Journal of Second Language Writing 15 (2006) 24–4826

rhetoric could be accused of an implicit Western ethnocentrism, a comparativist perspective

dethrones Western rhetorical practices as a norm from which others are considered deviations.

Through this comparativist reevaluation, ‘‘the American style’’ can itself be seen as the product

of historical and cultural factors.1 But even though we may as critical readers and theorists be

able to achieve some distance on this ‘‘American style,’’ for historical and institutional reasons

well documented in composition histories such as Sharon Crowley’s Methodical Memory (1990)

and David Russell’s Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History (1992), we work

within a program which places a high premium on the conventional markers of ‘‘academic

English,’’ not one that cultivates alternative (Schroeder, Fox, & Bizzell, 2002) or hybrid (Bizzell,

1999) discourses. This conversation brings home to us the power of the social identity (not to

mention the cultural capital, future academic success, and potential financial benefits) offered to

all students as a reward for mastering this form of ‘‘composition.’’ We recognize that we are

schooled in looking at student writing through a nationally and culturally specific screen, but it

would be a mistake to presume that such a recognition will necessarily unveil well-developed

counter-discourses in our students’ writing. A composition pedagogy such as the one in force at

our institution which substitutes a relatively uniform, dominant style of rhetorical structure,

argumentation, and ethos for the varieties of discourse practices brought into the composition

classroom by our students minimizes the likelihood that students—whatever their home

discourses (bi- or multi-lingual, dialect-influenced, etc.)—will produce distinctive rhetorical

styles which could be identified even within a comparativist model. Given these concerns, we

sought as far as possible to interpret our students’ writing in light of multiple factors rather than a

cultural and linguistic difference assumed in advance (Kubota and Lehner, 2004, p. 12). The

evidence of our students’ responses and writing in this study gives credence to Matsuda’s (1997)

point that the significance of biliterate students’ writing can be found in the agency they take in

responding to academic writing opportunities.

3. Research plan

To answer the research questions posed above, we designed a study aimed to elicit more

detailed information from bilingual students in the first-year humanities sequence who were the

subjects of the questionnaire. The study had three additional components: open-ended interviews

in the context of focus groups; a research paper produced within the humanities course; and each

student’s commentary on that paper in the form of a writer’s memo. The one-hour focus groups

were held in spring 2002 and were conducted by a research analyst from the university’s office of

research support, with a member of our research team sitting in.2 The writing was gathered at the


1 Leki (1992) offers a convenient description of the rhetorical features valued in the world of academic English (what

Kaplan, 2001, refers to as SASE: Standard American Schooled English; see also Lunsford, 2003). Here is how she

summarizes ‘‘what native English speakers appear to expect and admire in writing: English expository writing is said to

be highly hierarchical. Typically, generalizations are supported by subtopics and specific explanations are directly related

to the main point under discussion. English requires fairly explicit indications of the logical links between main topics,

subtopics, and subordinated ideas. Directness is usual; digression is not usual. Originality is highly valued . . .. Hence our

violent reaction to plagiarism’’ (p. 94).2 The focus groups were small, allowing for each student participant to respond at length to each question but enabling

students from different sections to share impressions of the course, the assignments, university writing experiences in

general, and the transition from high school to college. Of the three students who became the focus of our study, two

(Chao and Carlos) attended the same group, which had a total of three participants. The third, Mai, attended a group with

only a single other participant.

end of the spring quarter and analyzed in June of 2002. For the focus groups, we constructed a set

of 15 open-ended questions grouped in three categories concerning (1) the transition from high

school to college (both in terms of writing and more generally), (2) experiences with the

university writing class, and (3) experiences with multiple languages (see Appendix C). The

writing we solicited was the final paper for the year: an extended research project emphasizing

work with primary and secondary sources (see Appendix D).3

The spring quarter of the humanities sequence—the whole of which was based on the theme

Laws and Orders—focused on McCarthyism and the hearings of the House Un-American

Activities Committee of the 1950s. Students read about, heard lectures on, and researched the

ways individual historical actors—‘‘Americans’’ of various backgrounds, as well as ‘‘foreign-

ers’’—responded to the pressures of a national political crisis within the larger international

context of the Cold War era. The course content created a socio-politically oriented context for

writing research as recommended by Casanave (2003). Because the research paper invited

students to explore topics related to national loyalties and identifications, it offered an

opportunity for historical exploration of phenomena with some resonance with the students’ own

lived experiences without demanding straightforward identification or autobiographical

narrative. Because the long research paper required for the spring quarter was the least scripted

of the year’s assignments in the humanities writing course, allowing for more latitude in

invention and organization, we hoped that it would allow us to discover more individualized

information about composing strategies and rhetorical choices. How effectively do bilingual

students adopt the persona of knowledgeable authority in their researched writing in standard

written English? Does their bilingual background come into play as they engage research topics

and devise writing strategies? Along with the paper, we requested a writer’s memo: responses to a

set of questions about how the paper was composed, emphasizing particularly the areas of

rhetorical organization and ethos (see Appendix E).

Researchers from the fields of ESL and applied linguistics have endorsed similar research

approaches. Jan Frodesen and Norinne Starna (1999), for example, argue that instructors ‘‘need

to find out as much as they can . . . about the students’ first language (L1) as well as L2,’’ about

students’ ‘‘attitudes about themselves as L2 speakers and writers, and the investment they have in

acquiring various types of writing proficiency for their academic and career goals’’ (p. 64). Their

study offers extensive profiles of two students in an effort to identify language features of

students who are still language learners versus those who are more advanced L2 writers. In the

same essay collection (Harklau et al., 1999), Yuet-Sim D. Chiang and Mary Schmida (1999)

present the results of a study of language identity and linguistic conflicts of first-year writing

students at the University of California, Berkeley (pp. 81–96). Their research identifies a group of


3 All students who identified themselves as bilingual on the questionnaire were invited to participate in focus groups.

From over 500 potential subjects, fewer than twenty students agreed to participate. We speculate that many students’

hesitance to be singled out on the basis of their language-other-than-English (and implicitly their national origin/

ethnicity), along with the timing of the study in the spring, when students are tiring of school and busy with many

responsibilities, were factors in the very low participation rate. Given this low rate of response, we recognize that the

students who did continue with the study were not necessarily representative of humanities core students. Indeed, the

continued interest of these students may suggest their own desire to share their experiences with multiple languages.

Because of the wide variety of experiences among bilingual university students in our region and the relative paucity of

information about them, we believed that a close look at a small number of students was worth pursuing. This small

number of participants required a shift to something akin to a case-study method, enabling the closer examination of

individual subjects, although we were not able to obtain as much detailed information as in a conventional case-study

method (see Yin, 1994, on case study method; Lauer, 1993, on multi-modal research designs in composition studies).

young writers who find themselves in between two languages—i.e., not fully competent as

speakers or writers in either. Our study contributes to this growing body of research by focusing

on students who are clearly successful (if not always excellent) in academic English but who also

have a fairly strong sense of themselves as functional in an ‘‘ethnic,’’ ‘‘home,’’ or ‘‘heritage’’

language. Neither conventional L2 writers, with a firmly established L1, nor struggling English

language learners, the writers we study are nonetheless worth examining in the context of L2

research because of their active literacy practices in languages other than English. Another

contribution of our work is the application of rhetorical rather than linguistic analyses to the

students’ writings, extending issues of ‘‘identity’’ into the terrain of rhetorical ethos: the voices

adopted by the students in their academic writing.

Here we present analyses of three bilingual students whose language profiles, composing

practices, and writing offer an informing, though by no means representative, picture of

composition in a twenty-first-century U.S. university. We compiled the responses of each student—

information from the questionnaire, his/her comments from the focus group script, and the writer’s

memo—into a kind of linguistic, academic, and cultural ground against which we read the paper.4

We sought to sketch the narrative of movement into and out of languages, where it was available,

reading the valences and attitudes toward each language and toward academic writing as a practice.

Responsive to the ways writing constitutes the self, especially in the dual transitional passages from

high school to college and between two languages, we read both for the ways the students

themselves articulate their sense of what it means to be within one language or another—what they

are trying to do with academic English and who they are within its borders—and for identifications

produced by their academic discourse. The three students we profile are speakers and writers of

three of the languages most commonly occurring among our population: Chinese, Spanish, and

Vietnamese. Each entered college at a traditional age but took quite different routes as far as literacy

experiences are concerned to arrive in our first-year composition course. We chose these three

students not so that each might represent a single language or culture but because of the very

complexity of the narratives, identifications, choices, and writing styles they present.

The terms ‘‘identification’’ and ‘‘ethos’’ require clarification. Recent research has called for

more attention to the issue of identity in writing (Casanave, 2003; Ivanic, 1998), a subject now

well-grounded in post-Romantic perspectives on the construction of a self through discourse, as

opposed to the assumption of a pre-linguistically formed autobiographical self (e.g., Bakhtin,

1981). Roz Ivanic’s (1998) detailed study offers useful distinctions among the array of terms

currently available for addressing the general phenomenon of the ‘‘discoursal construction of

identity’’ (1998). Her preference for ‘‘identification’’ over ‘‘identity’’ places a helpful emphasis

on a dynamic process rather than static categories (pp. 10–17). Such ‘‘identifications’’ can also be

related to the concept of ‘‘subjectivity’’ in that they area not always consciously adopted (Kubota

& Lehner, 2004, pp. 17–18).5 Not confined to direct self-descriptions, our readings of student

identifications trace a web of influences as they come into play across the range of materials we


4 In our initial approach to the focus group transcripts and writers’ memos, we used a coding method for finding

repeated themes, tracking student comments on authority, relations to teachers, representations of knowledge, and ideas

about research and resources. But, like Herrington and Curtis (2000), we found ultimately that the coding framework

obscured more than it revealed, especially when we narrowed our attention to a small number of students. As we worked

more closely with the three main figures in our study, we arrived at interpretive insights by reading through the layering of

complex biliterate identifications with a rhetorical ethos in relation to the writer’s choices in preparing the research paper.5 See also Leki (2000) on the postmodern intellectual context within which contemporary researchers ‘‘(re)construct

and (re)present’’ human behavior (pp. 18–19).

collected. The rhetorical concept of ‘‘ethos’’ is compatible with the notion of self-constructed

through writing (Jarratt & Reynolds, 1994). Although it comes out of an ancient oral tradition, it

has been adapted by contemporary scholars to call attention to the way writers establish

authority.6 In the profiles below, the students’ bilingual literacy histories and investments provide

a rich context against which to interpret their efforts at constructing a convincing academic ethos

as historical researcher. These three students in particular offer vivid examples of Ivanic’s (1998)

assertion that selves, particularly those of students, are implicated in power and struggle through

the medium of discourse (pp. 12–13).

3.1. Chao7

The largest language group in the initial survey, Chinese, dramatically demonstrated the

difficulties of establishing a norm for background linguistic experience. Almost 12% (118) of the

respondents reported Cantonese or Mandarin as home languages, but among that group, some

mentioned speaking with family members in Min dialects such as ‘‘Chiu Chow,’’ ‘‘Fu Chien,’’

‘‘Hakka,’’ and ‘‘Hokkien.’’ The fact that according to our survey Chinese students were less

likely to speak their home language on campus than their Korean or Spanish peers could be

attributed to this multiplicity of dialects. Chinese speakers also reported widely varying levels of

fluency and literacy. Student self-evaluation of fluency in the home language ranged from ‘‘1’’ to

‘‘10,’’ and students with the same fluency profile could have very different literacy profiles. There

were salient differences between students who could only read the language, often in many

different genres, and those who could also write it. The data verified Valdes’s (1992) warnings

that it is risky to generalize about a typical speaker of any single linguistic group.

Chao’s language questionnaire revealed an interestingly mixed relationship to his home

language: Mandarin Chinese. Both parents speak the language in his home, and Chao himself

indicated that he had studied the language both abroad and in the U.S. Although he ranked his

spoken fluency in the language at only four on a scale of 10, Chao responded ‘‘yes’’ to the

question about reading (but didn’t mark any kinds of texts, e.g., newspapers, letters, etc.). In the

focus group he said that he had not read a Chinese book since eighth grade. Chao’s history with

Chinese, in fact, was an uneven one. He learned Chinese before English and made comments that

suggested his progress toward competence in English was somewhat frustrating. When asked

about the uses or impediments of his bilingual status, Chao (unlike the Spanish speakers in the

group) called Chinese a hindrance: ‘‘The language is structured differently. Everything is totally

different between English and Chinese: words, the way you put things together. Reversed. It

intrigues me how different they are.’’8 Intrigued, but not helped. Toward the conclusion of his

interview, Chao shifted the issue from language to ethnicity. In response to a question about voice

in the focus group, Chao replied, ‘‘Being bilingual is a heavy emphasis. I need to prove

something to the reader because of my ethnicity. I have to prove that I can cross barriers and make

my point, my statement.’’ For this bilingual student, using academic English entails managing


6 Ivanic (1998) preserves the term ‘‘ethos’’ for the forms of self-construction directly aimed at persuading a reader and

proposes a separate category, ‘‘author,’’ to mark those gestures writers use to establish authority (pp. 27–29, 89–91). We

bring together both those functions under the single term ‘‘ethos.’’7 Our research project was approved by our local IRB; pseudonyms for student subjects are used to ensure

confidentiality.8 Because none of the researchers is a Chinese language specialist, it wasn’t possible for us to recognize or correct

Chao’s perception about the lack of relationship between English and Chinese. Whether or not Chao is right, his

perception of complete difference is significant.

something weighty—something more than simply linguistic expertise. With these comments,

Chao articulates what could be termed a minority stance as a bilingual student in a monolingual

academic culture.

Despite the apparent burden Chao carries, the quality that came to stand out most vividly as

we listened to him talk in the focus group and read his writing is a supreme confidence in his

abilities as a thinker and writer. The theme of self-authorization surfaced again and again in

Chao’s responses. When asked in the focus group to describe a writing assignment he liked,

Chao mentioned the argumentative analysis and elaborated on his preference: ‘‘I prefer

argumentation over expository analysis because it comes straight from me.’’ On this occasion,

Chao does gesture toward a conventional use of primary sources (making an argument and

backing it up), but as we’ll see later, in his actual research process, he relies much more heavily

on his own opinions. The strength and creativity of his own ideas is something Chao takes

pleasure in as a first-year writer. He finds the more structured assignments less satisfying

because of the limitations on his ideas. As he discusses differences from high school writing,

Chao does seem to find the more rigorous expectations of college a satisfying challenge, in part

because that challenge gives him the opportunity to distinguish himself from others: ‘‘In high

school 75% would have the same thesis. Now I need to separate myself. I feel the need now to

have a unique thesis.’’ We get some perspective on this need Chao expresses as he talks about

the intense competition he experiences as a member of the Campuswide Honors Program.

Although he associated with honors students in high school, he finds the university crowd

‘‘egotistical’’ from ‘‘excessive knowledge.’’ He also experiences more time pressure at the

university and more critical comments from teachers on his writing.

Partly because of his demanding computer science major but maybe for other reasons, Chao

responds to this pressure by putting most of his study-time eggs into the computer course basket.

He admits that, while he typically wrote two or three drafts of an essay in high school, here he

does only one and fails to take advantage of help from the writing instructor who would have held

an individual conference with him on every essay: ‘‘All my [instructors] were willing to pre-read.

For me it’s time restraints, stubbornness, and sloth.’’ But Chao is by no means a totally self-

absorbed or casual student. His comments about impressions of instructors show an admirable

reflectiveness about the teaching situation. He admits the pleasure of having a section leader who

was easy-going and held wide open discussions but observes that, with such an instructor, ‘‘we

didn’t get a lot done.’’ He appreciates the lectures from an English Ph.D. (perhaps suggesting

more responsiveness to authority than he acknowledges elsewhere) and observes that the focus on

grades corrupts students’ perspective: because of the absorption in the instructor’s grading style,

‘‘we don’t focus on how well we learn.’’ Does Chao’s bilingual/biliterate language history have

anything to do with his attitudes towards learning and his approach to writing?

Although the instructors’ listserv for the course indicated that many writing teachers were

encouraging their Chinese-American students to write about the persecution of Chinese

Americans during the McCarthy era, on the assumption that straightforward performance of

identification would foster greater engagement with the research project and provide focus for

students grappling with a wealth of documents, Chao did not take that path. Instead he chose to

write about Hollywood director Elia Kazan in a paper that reflects some of the themes related to

immigrant status appearing in Chao’s comments in the focus group. Elia Kazan’s naming of

names to the House Un-American Activities Committee leads Chao to pose the question of

motives. His answer: Kazan, as a poor Greek immigrant, was driven by resentment against

privileged WASPS to join the Communist Party, and later, by anger and humiliation in dealings

with the Party and a kind of vindictive patriotism, to name names. Chao gave voice to Kazan’s


anger, but despite the difference in status of famed movie director and student author, Chao’s

own voice was in no way subsumed by his research subject. In fact, Chao adopted one of the

most vivid writerly voices we encountered: confident, self-assured, even cocky at times. Here

is his initial presentation of the thesis: ‘‘Any one of the motives journalists have noted as the

cause for his naming of names would be sufficient for the public, but not for me. I find that all

of the collected motives lead to Elia’s central source of vitality: revenge’’ (1). Chao’s sense of

drama led him to create dialogues with his subject at times. After an opening quotation from

Kazan’s autobiography, in which the director addresses the reader, Chao talks back: ‘‘No Elia,

I favor you not, nor do I expect an apology from you. In fact, I am not even passing judgment

on your act of naming names. What I am evaluating, however, is the morality of your character,

that which you have been so ardently defending’’ (1). After an extended introduction, Chao

reintroduces the question of motive by asking, ‘‘Elia, why so eager to supply these names?’’

We might have been prepared for Chao’s authoritative ethos by his response to a question

about ‘‘experts’’ in his writer’s memo. When asked how he would compare the value of his

opinion to the sources cited in his bibliography, Chao replies, ‘‘I agreed to an extent. But I

found my personal opinion to be more correct.’’

Ethos, the construction of a persuasive self within the text, was a rhetorical category of

particular interest in our study. Some research on Chinese rhetoric focuses on the value of

authority and respect for other writers, exemplified by indirection, especially in situations of

potential conflict.9 Chao himself made reference to Chinese indirection in his writer’s memo.

When asked if he sees any influence of his other language in his academic English writing, he

responded as follows: ‘‘I tend to write in the passive sense, however that term is used . . . ex) the

loyalty of Elia Kazan was questioned by HUAC instead of . . . HUAC questioned the loyalty of

Kazan [.] I do that from time to time, perhaps because my culture would expect a degree of

indirectness.’’ Though we were impressed by Chao’s correct demonstration of the difference

between active and passive voice, we were very surprised by his analysis of his own writing as

‘‘indirect.’’ Even in terms of the verb construction alone, Chao’s interpretation doesn’t hold up.

He used only eight passive constructions in a nine and a half page paper, several of a conventional

type that would have sounded awkward in active voice (e.g., ‘‘Members of his cell were educated

. . . in Marxist and party doctrines’’), and others used effectively for syntactic variety. The

authorial agency in the paper is by no means obscured by passive constructions. The author fairly

leaps out as a personality. Chao’s writing posture was so confident—his arguments so free from

qualification, his treatment of sources so summary—that his writing calls to mind another

category of rhetorical analysis: gender.

Feminist research in composition has identified gender-specific qualities in first-year student

writing (Annas, 1985; Flynn, 1988; Peterson, 1991; Tobin, 1996). In one example, a study of

50 autobiographical narratives of students from two institutions, Linda Peterson found that

male writers frequently chose topics ‘‘that focus on the self, the self alone, the self as distinct

from others,’’ favoring episodes that help the writer define a sense of individuality (pp. 173–

174). Pamela Annas observes that male students tend to argue more forcefully than female

students, who more often qualify and hedge assertions. None of these studies is definitive, all the

scholars give examples of student writing (often the strongest) that crosses gendered lines, and

all warn against assuming in advance predictable gendered writing styles in their students.


9 See, for example (Garrett, 1991; Jolliffe, 1992; Oliver, 1971; Young, 1994). For critiques of this tradition, see (Liu,

1996; Mao, 1995).

Nonetheless, they convincingly describe a masculine writing personality like that which appears

vividly in Chao’s work.

It is tempting to interpret Chao’s writerly persona as over-compensation: countering

stereotypes of the Chinese as deferential and indirect, Chao rhetorically hypercorrects for

qualities that don’t fit well with his image of a successful, male U.S. university student. And he

is drawn to Kazan as someone who shaped his own personality (for better or worse) through a

similar process. But it might be just as likely, given Chao’s repeated reversion to the problems

of time for a first-year student in the demanding and competitive computer science program,

that the blustery persona was generated in an attempt to cover up other flaws in a quickly

thrown-together paper. Not only did Chao compose his paper the night before it was due, he

chose a subject that had been thoroughly treated in the lectures all students are required to

attend. He has a complete list of Works Cited, including both print and electronic sources, and

talks about a longer process of collecting information. But in fact much of the content of his

argument came from lectures presented in class and source material printed in the course text.

Time pressure and high school training in academic research must be counted as factors

shaping Chao’s composing process and written product. Chao was successful in the course,

earning solid B’s in writing throughout the year, yet the grade hardly captures the uneven course

of his development as a writer in the first year. Perhaps Chao was using the bluster of his

supremely confident persona to cover both the anxiety created by turning in a too-quickly

composed paper and as a vehicle for performing at some level the immigrant outsider’s

independence he so powerfully responded to in Elia Kazan. We found equally complex but

distinct modes of identification in the other two students’ writing profiles.

3.2. Mai

Mai reported a great degree of confidence in her abilities to communicate in her home

language. On the questionnaire she ranked her spoken fluency in Vietnamese at 9 on a 10-point

scale. Both parents and two siblings spoke Vietnamese in the home. She listed many specific

genres in her regular Vietnamese reading repertoire: letters, newspapers, magazines, nonfiction

books, and fictional literature. Overall, 30% of Vietnamese-speaking students surveyed in the

course said that they regularly read a newspaper in Vietnamese, and Mai’s inclusion of

journalistic prose seems indicative of membership in an ethnic community in which news and

journalistic discourse about current events are a significant part of her language experiences. In

her focus group comments, Mai said, ‘‘I commute from an Asian community.’’ Mai also reported

using the home language with other students on campus in her questionnaire, like 27% of her

Vietnamese-speaking Humanities Core Course peers.

Like Chao, Mai was a member of the freshman campus-wide honors program, a residential

and curricular enclave for first-year students who generally self-report high rankings in writing

ability. But unlike Chao, who concentrated on the theme of competition with fellow students, Mai

emphasized cooperation with family members in her focus group comments. Mai also presented

a personal history of rhetorical success that was intimately tied to her Vietnamese linguistic

identity: ‘‘I participated in a Vietnamese decathlon [a competition testing expertise in 10

intellectual activities related to Vietnamese language, culture, history, speaking, and writing] and

was happy with my performance in history, language, etc. I won awards for my writing skills. I

didn’t think I could compare with native-born Vietnamese speakers. I make Vietnamese

important in my life.’’ Meeting this challenge in the decathlon was apparently particularly

significant for Mai because elsewhere in the interview she reported her perception that


Vietnamese was ‘‘more formal’’ in its discursive conventions and ‘‘hard to speak’’ correctly.

Although code-switching between English and Vietnamese often characterizes membership in

linguistic communities of immigrants (Tuc, 2003), Mai achieves social inclusion through

standardized, unadulterated Vietnamese alone.

Mai’s experiences in the Vietnamese decathlon can be interpreted as what Shirley Brice Heath

(1982) calls a ‘‘literacy event.’’ According to Heath, these events occur ‘‘within particular

communities of modern society’’ and constitute occasions in which a piece of writing is ‘‘integral

to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes’’ (p. 93). From these

events, researchers can learn about ‘‘the actual forms and functions of oral and literate traditions

and co-existing relationships between spoken and written language’’ (p. 93). Making connections

between literacy and orality in the home language in her decathlon experience seemed to cement

Mai’s membership in her Vietnamese community, and it may have also carried over into her

attitudes about participating in her assigned writing course. In the focus group, Mai expressed

satisfaction with her subsequent initiation into college discourse communities conducted in

academic English: ‘‘It’s easier to get into the debates. The writing course is good to get students

to express themselves in writing or orally. I’m much stronger now.’’

Mai’s acculturation to college writing was not without obstacles, although it was considerably

less traumatic than the transitions described in other recent case studies on Vietnamese students

(Harklau, 1999; Herrington & Curtis, 2000). Despite her privileged position in the honors

program, Mai was still conscious of impediments to mastering the procedures associated with the

production of academic discourse. In comparing her AP English class and her freshmen year

experience in the Humanities Core Course, Mai initially said that ‘‘the writing in both was

similar.’’ Later in the interview she presented a different picture: ‘‘In high school all of the focus

on writing was for the AP exam. We weren’t prepared for drafts after drafts or for the length of the

papers. The university is a very different experience for me than high school. We relied on peer

editing for improvement on the longer papers at the university.’’ On her final paper she found it

necessary, unlike Chao, to invest considerable time in drafting and revision. On her writer’s

memo she said, ‘‘My paper changed a great deal after incorporating all the comments and

suggestions that my editors made. My leader had cut out about three pages (I had only eight), so I

had to add a great deal in order to meet the minimum requirement.’’

Mai claimed that her second language background had neither a positive nor a negative effect

on her performance in academic English. She told the investigator that ‘‘I think better in

Vietnamese but sometimes I trade off . . .. It doesn’t hinder or help.’’ On her questionnaire she

described her confidence in grammar, usage, and mechanics in academic English as ‘‘strong.’’

She also articulated interest in acquiring knowledge of additional languages. She discussed plans

to minor in Spanish and already had some experience composing argumentative discourse in a

prerequisite Spanish course. At the end of the interview, Mai expressed enthusiasm for learning

‘‘as many languages as possible’’ and reported that her father was teaching her French, which he

spoke in Vietnam.

Bilingual elders like her father seemed to play an important role in Mai’s responses to the

investigator’s questions. An older sister ‘‘learned English and helped me to speak English,’’ and

‘‘in preschool my teacher was Vietnamese; she taught me in English but helped me in Vietnamese

with English.’’ By her freshmen year, Mai saw herself maturing into a similar role as a bilingual

interlocutor. Her present status as ‘‘a teacher at my Vietnamese school’’ was ‘‘an integral part of

who I am.’’ From her interview Mai presented a linguistic and rhetorical identity in which family

relationships and authority structures were an integral part of her conceptualization of herself as a

person who could cross national and linguistic boundaries.


Although pundits in the mass media may express alarm that English is being acquired too

slowly by members of immigrant communities, Lee Thomas and Linh Cao (1999) have argued

that this process is actually happening too quickly for Vietnamese-Americans, and they express

concern that educational situations that enforce English monolingualism are disrupting the

dynamics of intimate familial discourse in household communication so that heritage language

loss occurs even more rapidly and subtractive bilingualism becomes the norm. An ‘‘English

Only’’ ideology may have dominated U.S. classroom instruction and educational policy during

the period of her upbringing (Horner & Trimbur, 2002), but Mai was fortunate to have had

bilingual teachers and even education-oriented bilingual family members who filled critical

pedagogical and mentoring roles.

Her final research paper on Lucille Ball can be read as an act of identification with a

quintessentially American woman, the star of I Love Lucy. Of course, the English-only

monolingualism of the ‘‘Lucy’’ character was highlighted in many of the episodes of the

show as a source of humor. Yet Mai described Ball as her ‘‘favorite actress/comedienne of all

time’’ in her writer’s memo. In her bibliography, Mai cited sources from scholars that pointed

to Ball’s proto-feminism and her potentially subversive cross-cultural marriage to a Cuban-

American, but as a writer Mai did not appear to be influenced by these perspectives in her

own reading of Ball’s testimony before HUAC. Instead Mai focused on Ball’s respect for

elders in her interpretation of Ball’s actions. ‘‘Pleasing her grandfather’’ served as the central

explanation for the actress’s affiliation with the Communist Party in the 1930s. Mai wrote:

‘‘Ball stated that she did not voluntarily register as a communist, but only did so to please her

grandfather. Because he was old and sickly, she and her family did everything he wanted

them to do as to not upset him.’’ Mai claimed that Ball also demonstrated a loyalty to her

memories of Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt in her HUAC testimony, whom Mai described as

‘‘iconic figures’’ for Ball. Mai argued that Ball experienced a conflict between loyalty to her

grandfather and to a paternalistic Roosevelt presidency—a conflict that is ultimately resolved

in favor of the latter.

In her essay, Mai’s explanatory mechanism for Ball’s actions was one of accommodation: Ball

agreed to sign a Communist Party membership card against her own interests in the face of the

demands of others. But unlike her ‘‘heroine,’’ Mai resisted attempts to regulate her discourse and

expressed explicit criticism of writing instructors in the course. For example, Mai expressed

resentment at the constraints presented by her Winter instructor who added formulaic

components to the writing assignments and presented the grading rubric for the course as a

precise quantitative instrument of measurement. Mai described this section leader as ‘‘biased’’

and said that the ‘‘topic wasn’t important to the leader.’’ Her Spring instructor also built

additional constraints into the writing assignment. In her writer’s memo, Mai wrote:

My section leader required that we include four elements in our paper: definition of terms,

counterargument, textual analysis, and rhetorical analysis. The rhetorical analysis section

was where I did not sound natural, because I had to use the phrases ‘appeal to logos,’ ‘pathos,’

and ‘establishing ethos,’ etc., which sounded really awkward. I do not ever talk like that.

Mai’s sense of how her own voice should ‘‘sound’’ is shaped by a clearly defined sense of

what is ‘‘natural’’ and what is ‘‘awkward’’ that leads her to resist the writing formulae that her

instructors require her to use. Certainly ‘‘voice’’ for Mai is not a simple matter of locating a

single ‘‘home’’ position of a speaking self. In her writer’s memo she said, ‘‘I try to be more

objective outside of my place and look without my person. I try to do this in both English and

Vietnamese.’’ By explaining Lucille Ball’s Communist Party affiliation as an expression of


loyalty to her elders rather than radical politics, Mai stages a complex and multi-layered

process of rhetorical identification worthy of recognition by writing teachers of multiliterate

students.

3.3. Carlos

The child of Mexican immigrants, Carlos was born in the U.S. and graduated from a public

high school in Los Angeles County. Along with English, he routinely speaks Spanish at home

with his parents and older brother, as well as on campus with his peers. Although he ‘‘learned

Spanish before English,’’ his written grammar and syntax show no signs of the transference

patterns ESL researchers have taught us to look for in L2 prose by Spanish-speakers. Though his

essay was by no means free of surface errors—like most English monolingual undergraduates,

he is guilty of idiom, usage, and agreement problems, as well as, to borrow from his own self-

description, a ‘‘disconcerting’’ number of typos and mechanical oversights—he appears to

master precisely those elements of written and spoken English that most frequently confound

native Spanish speaking students of English as a foreign language: articles, modals, auxiliaries,

gerunds, word order, pronoun inflections, and the spelling of non-phonetic words. Nor does his

spoken discourse, as reflected in focus group transcripts, appear to be inflected by Spanish as a

‘‘first language.’’

Like Mai, Carlos ranked his fluency in spoken Spanish as a 9 on a 10-point scale, which is to

say, quite good but not perfect. Indeed, the relatively high frequency of ‘‘9 out of 10’’ responses

to our questionnaire’s second language fluency question may itself be of some interest, since it

suggests a broad awareness among biliterate/bilinguals that language-competency is always

partial, in flux, and, when held up to some ultimate standard, prone to errors. The inherent

incompleteness of individual literacy development has long been a common refrain both in

contrastive rhetoric (Connor, 1996) and ESL research (Valdes, 1992) as well as in longitudinal

studies of undergraduate writer development (Herrington & Curtis, 2000; Haswell, 1991). It is

also one of the guiding assumptions of a nascent academic field called ‘‘bilingual aesthetics’’

(Sommer, 2002), which poses questions about the relationship between bilingualism and

identity. How, we wonder, would monolinguals have answered had we asked them to rank their

‘‘fluency’’ in speaking their mother tongue? Would they all have said ‘‘10’’? If so, would this

have seemed ‘‘natural’’ to us?

In any case, Carlos’s willingness to acknowledge the incompleteness or provisionality of his

own Spanish literacy may stem from his experiences as a student of classroom Spanish in both

high school (2 years) and college (one course), experiences that must certainly complicate the

familiar development narrative according to which Spanish would be seen as his oral ‘‘home’’

language, a natural grammar or baseline consciousness onto which the ‘‘school grammar’’ of

standard written English might then be overlaid. The transcript of Carlos’s first two quarters at

the university reveals that this native speaker of Spanish managed only a B in his first college

Spanish class. Of course, failure to master one’s native tongue without academic intervention

has been part of the normal experience of English monolinguals for well over a century

(Brereton, 1995), and a grade of B may be explained by a myriad of factors. The fact that Carlos

sees college as an opportunity to keep working on his Spanish reflects the attitude toward

composition of those few English composition students who somehow overlook the century-

old remedial taint of the class (S. Miller, 1991; T. Miller, 1997). In his focus group comments

Carlos even singled out his Spanish For Native Speakers class as the academic highlight of his

first year of college: ‘‘I had success this year in Spanish,’’ he told us. ‘‘I wrote essays well. The


teacher complimented me on my Spanish and ability to communicate.’’ His advice to other

fluent bilinguals is to strive for fluent biliteracy: ‘‘You should continue with both languages,

don’t stop with just one.’’

In short, Spanish informs Carlos’s linguistic identity not just as a primary orality but also as a

textual discipline that remains integral to his university identity. His report of literacy practices in

Spanish suggests in fact a close coordination between home and school reading and writing

cultures, rather than the gulf experienced by some bilingual students. Carlos reports regularly

reading newspapers and magazines in Spanish as well as practicing writing Spanish at home with

his parents’ encouragement. Far from being a deficit or handicap to his college writing in English,

Carlos’s Spanish-language heritage, in his view, gives him certain linguistic advantages, such as

the ability to ‘‘express myself better . . . [with] bigger words, better vocabulary.’’ This confident

self-assessment is borne out by his verbal SAT score of 620, which was slightly above the average

among those students we studied.

Whereas Carlos clearly does not see his experiences as a first-year university student in terms

of overcoming unusual linguistic challenges, his comments in the focus group and writer’s

memo do tend to foreground some of the ‘‘cultural’’ adjustments he has been forced to make

since leaving high school. Like Chao, Carlos sees his ethnic identity as having raised the

academic stakes somewhat. As he put it in his focus group, ‘‘The fact that I have two cultures has

emphasis in my writing. My parents are immigrants and that’s my point of view too; I have to

strive to show that I can do it.’’ Strive to do what? This language appears in Carlos’s response to a

question about voice or persona in academic writing and seems to suggest that when Carlos says

‘‘strive’’ he means ‘‘change.’’ ‘‘I try to change, strive,’’ he says elsewhere when asked to talk about

the feedback he gets from writing instructors. Asked to characterize his overall ability as a writer, he

couches his answer in terms of self rather than language: ‘‘I have to improve myself.’’ It is as if

Carlos sometimes hears a culturally prescriptive note in our questions about his language and

literacy.10 While he certainly does not see being a Mexican-American Spanish-speaker as

something one should strive to shed or overcome by conforming to a ‘‘unidirectional English

monolingualism,’’ it seems that Carlos remains unsettled about whether to approach his bifurcated

identity through a both/and or an either/or logic (see Horner & Trimbur, 2002, pp. 610–611).

Perhaps this confusion occurs because the curricular and institutional signals around him are

at best ambivalent when it comes to how one might define academic success biculturally. On the

one hand, Carlos is aware that his linguistic doubleness can be an asset. And yet, while it might

be tempting to imagine two interanimating and perhaps equally ‘‘native’’ tongues as amounting

to something academically greater than the sum of their parts, our admittedly limited portrait of

Carlos the first-year writer suggests someone struggling to construct an identity or persona that

will be deemed ‘‘proper’’ (his term) for college work in English. The paradox he seems to

embody, then, is that being good at a second language doesn’t lead in any straightforward way to

being good at school. For instance, unlike his verbal SAT score, his first-year GPA of 2.83 falls

below the class average. Asked to comment on the Standard Written English policy of the

writing course—which some of our white monolinguals said they didn’t know about or simply


10 As Miller (1991) and other composition scholars have pointed out, first-year composition in the U.S. addresses its

subjects as deficient adolescents in need of cultural betterment rather than as adults engaged in a process of intellectual

transformation. To what extent the pressure to ‘‘improve oneself’’ is felt more today by bilingual students than native

English speakers would make a good subject for another study. In any case, it seems worth pointing out Carlos’ expression

of a desire to improve.

ignored—Carlos immediately claims to ‘‘agree with it,’’ explaining that ‘‘research papers should

use proper English’’ rather than the ‘‘slang’’ and ‘‘cussing’’ he associates with his own cultural

background as a young Los Angeleno. ‘‘I never use proper grammar to speak and never use

intellectual words,’’ he writes, making it clear that he will in effect have to ‘‘become someone else’’

in order to fulfill assignments calling, as he sees it, for just those things. His sense of being

‘‘disconcerted’’ by ‘‘so many errors’’ may have as much to do with broad issues questions of self

and identity as with any definable language difficulty awaiting teacher remediation.

The final draft Carlos refers to is his 15-page research project entitled ‘‘Sandino and His Fight

Against Imperialism.’’ He made it clear he had never been asked in high school to do anything

comparable in scope or complexity (‘‘I never learned it. It’s harder.’’) The paper sets out to

explore the historical roots of U.S. covert operations in Central America. It is without a doubt a

bicultural gesture: rather than directly engaging the domestic politics of the Cold War through

HUAC testimony, as the prompt had directed, Carlos, a history major, bends the assignment

towards interests and ends that have emerged in his other courses. His writer’s memo also makes

use of identity categories to justify his rather loose interpretation of the assignment by

explaining, ‘‘Being of Mexican descent, I wanted to learn more about Latin American history

and the heroes within it. I would have done a piece on Mexico but they were never really involved

in the Cold War.’’11 But Nicaragua, as he learned in his preliminary research, ‘‘had a great man in

history that changed the times.’’ Again, what captivates Carlos is the possibility of change: in the

case of Nicaragua, revolutionary change. Thus, he chose to learn more about Augusto Cesar

Sandino and his ‘‘nationalistic cause.’’

Despite writing four drafts over a period of a month, Carlos does not quite succeed in turning

his enthusiasm for Sandino’s prolonged guerilla campaign against the U.S. Marines into a thesis-

driven argument. The relation between President Coolidge’s economic interest in a Nicaraguan

canal project and proto-Red Scare ideology is left unexplored, and much of the paper’s

‘‘argument’’ consists of exposition from secondary sources, along with occasional snippets of

Sandino’s anti-imperialist proclamations, which Carlos understands as speaking for themselves.

Carlos’s writer’s memo describes a ‘‘long and arduous’’ process of changing topics, theses, and

sources, and suggests that although he found the ‘‘ideal’’ topic, the critical theoretical framework

of the assignment came into conflict with his monumentalist approach to history. Still, it is worth

underscoring the apparent ease which Carlos accommodates his ‘‘striver’’/immigrant point of

view to a voice that unapologetically celebrates a communist who ‘‘disliked anything

American.’’ Though Carlos’s textual analysis may not exemplify course ideals of critical

thinking, his identificatory approach to the assignment, along with his desire to maintain and even

improve his Spanish-language, distinguish Carlos’s twenty-first-century immigrant ethos from,

for example, the experiences of many other Spanish-speaking immigrants who made

unidirectional English monolingualism household policy, and in so doing, allowed for the

disappearance of a ‘‘Spanish-language background’’ for future generations.

4. Conclusion: transnational writing identities

These profiles have offered a glimpse at the complex language histories biliterate students

bring to college and the metalinguistic consciousness such histories foster. No doubt there are as


11 Leki (2000) cites Losey (1997) on students in L2 writing classes adjusting topics to ones they ‘‘know and care about’’

(p. 23).

many ways of being biliterate in a U.S. university as there are students in that situation; we should

not expect the complexities of such writers and their writing to reduce easily to generalizations.

But issues of identification surface in each and warrant closer scrutiny and analysis. Each of the

three writers we profiled made explicit links between language and identity in the focus group

interviews. Further, each chose biography as a research approach. Among the various research

strategies suggested to students, biographical criticism was, in fact, one of the most popular,

offering narrative as a strategy for organizing often conflicting source materials. Students found

the dramatic situation of testimony from accused individuals in the Cold War era and the act of

bearing witness to the public a compelling rhetorical site. Introduced to a historical period of

xenophobia not without resonance with our own post-9/11 national consciousness, students from

many linguistic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds found in the subject matter possibilities for

identifications across boundaries.

Many scholars in education, second language writing, and ESL have written—sometimes

autobiographically—about the significance of identities and identification in the process of

language learning, especially in individual situations of educational indoctrination. James Paul

Gee (1998), for example, by positing that ‘‘discourses are connected with displays of an identity’’

and proposing that we ‘‘think of discourse as an ‘identity kit’ ’’ (p. 529), presents a relatively

direct model of the relationship between discourse and identity. Fan Shen (1989) was one of the

first to present the student’s perspective on composition pedagogies that subvert traditional

discursive positions of Chinese identity for English language learners. Min Zhan Lu (1994) gives

an explicitly political dimension to this bifurcation by writing about the complexities of

simultaneously having an English identity moored in Romanticism and a Chinese identity rooted

in revolutionary politics. Even students with much less competence in a home language may

make strong rhetorical moves toward national and ethnic identification (see Chiang & Schmida,

1999, p. 88).

Other scholars describe more complex relations between language and voice (see, for

example, Belcher & Hirvela, 2001; Matsuda, 2001a). In one of the most extensive discussions of

identity in multilingual students’ writing, Canagarajah (2002) points out that the ‘‘self’’ has many

constructs in academic writing and suggests categories for organizing self-construction: ‘‘racial/

ethnic/national,’’ ‘‘identity,’’ ‘‘role,’’ ‘‘subjectivity,’’ and ‘‘voice’’ (p. 106). In articulating a self in

discourse, Canagarajah argues, students adopt stances toward dominant institutional and

linguistic forces: they may variously accommodate, avoid, oppose, or allow themselves to be

appropriated by the structures they encounter in monolingual English educational settings.

Among the most promising of the moves Canagarajah describes is one he styles

‘‘transpositional.’’ More dynamic than the other stances, this alternative operates in a dialogic

and critical fashion. This description comes closest to the forms of rhetorical ethos we observed

in our biliterate students, but their writings present a dimension not quite captured in the studies

mentioned above.

We suggest that the ‘‘transnational’’ might be productively applied as a framework for

interpreting these students’ discourses. A term used widely within cultural and literary studies

over the past decade, ‘‘transnational’’ evokes movement across boundaries and the sense of

incompleteness, of tension, and of the imbalance of power entailed in such movements (Rowe,

2003, pp. 78–79). It is a term often used with reference to global economic conditions, media, and

culture exchanges in a post-industrial era, but unlike ‘‘globalization,’’ transnationalism bespeaks

the persistence of nation forms and influences, and, implicitly, of their distinct languages.

According to Kaplan and Grewal (2002), transnationalism suggests that through such movements

distinctions among nations ‘‘become altered or more flexible’’ (pp. xix and 180). More to the


point of our study, the concept speaks literally to movements across national boundaries such as

those our students experienced as they were growing up (see Horner & Trimbur, 2002, pp. 610–

613). Chao’s defense of Elia Kazan, Mai’s interest in Lucille Ball, and Carlos’s selection of the

revolutionary Sandino each entail processes of identification involving various configurations of

similarity and difference across national and linguistic axes. Given the indebtedness of both

contrastive and comparative rhetoric as interpretive frameworks to forms of rhetorical integrity

within national languages, we believe that adopting a transnational theoretical perspective brings

into focus the sometimes subtle, sometimes identity-based, but always mixed and mobile ways

language and nation become relevant in our biliterate students’ writing, their engagement with

historical and literary figures, and their accounts of themselves as writers. Further, linking the

study of bilingual student writing to transnational theory responds to Ilona Leki’s call for

connecting L2 writing research with ‘‘broader intellectual strands, domains, and dimensions of

modern thought’’ (2003, p. 103).

The complex writing choices and reflections of these three bilingual students suggest the

possibility for future studies of students framed as transnational subjects, interested both in

cultivating their own linguistic and ethnic identities as well as in exploring identifications

across national and linguistic boundaries. These profiles suggest that continuing connections

with home languages, both extracurricular and school-based, may foster rather than detract

from mastery of academic English. Longitudinal studies tracing the growth of home languages

along side academic English may be warranted. Researchers might want to ask how self-

sponsored and recreational reading and writing relate to school-based writing specifically for

bilingual students. We need to learn what habits of thinking and writing will serve such

students well in academic work in the U.S. but also cultivate their abilities to function as

global citizens in the twenty-first century. Researching, fostering, and learning from the

bilingual lives and biliterate practices of composition students works against the tacit

monolingualism of university programs in academic English. If U.S. writing courses have

been bound in service to nationalism for the past one hundred years, they remain, nonetheless,

logical sites for ‘‘teasing English out of its univocal complacency,’’ in Doris Sommer’s apt

formulation (2002). Since, as Sommer observes, ‘‘living in more than one language is quite

normal and even common’’ in most parts of the world (2002), including, as we now know, the

worlds of our own student population, it is past time for composition to reorient itself toward

those new, transnational linguistic geographies.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Iveta Cruse and Sean Hill for assistance with the research on

which this article is based. We also thank Paul Dahlgren, Rodrigo Lazo, Katherine Mack,

Paul Matsuda, Alexandra Sartor, John Trimbur, audiences at Miami and Sonoma State

Universities, four anonymous reviewers, and the editors of JSLW for careful reading and

helpful suggestions.

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Appendix A. Language questionnaire for incoming HCC students (spring 2002)

The Humanities Core Course is currently gathering information about the language

backgrounds of our students for research purposes. The collection of this information is intended

to help us assess our students’ language backgrounds, abilities, and needs and to design better

instruction. Participation in this questionnaire is purely voluntary.


Appendix B. First-year students’ home languages (2001)

Ten largest language groups

Home language

(percent of total)

Self-reported spoken

fluency (from 1

to 10) (mean)

Reading in home language by genre

Letters

(%)

Newspapers

(%)

Magazines

(%)

Nonfiction

books

(%)

Fiction

(%)

Comics (%)

Chinese (11%) 6.14 11 12 9 4 2 18

Korean (9%) 6.14 48 26 37 4 7 39

Spanish (9%) 7.33 55 40 47 18 26 24

Vietnamese (8%) 6.65 35 30 14 6 7 9

Tagalog/Filipino (7%) 3.35 30 20 17 3 0 7

Indian and

Pakistani (4%)

5.67 6 11 11 9 4 4

Farsi (2%) 7.64 13 13 0 9 9 0

Japanese (2%) 6.21 63 26 47 21 47 63

Arabic (1%) 7.23 54 31 31 23 8 8

Armenian (1%) 8.75 50 50 8 33 33 17

63.7% of 1068 questionnaire respondents reported a second language spoken in the home.

Appendix C. Focus group questions

Humanities core (all groups)

1. Please describe for us a writing assignment you’ve been given since coming to UCI that you

really liked. Describe what you were asked to do, how you went about it, and what appealed to

you about it.

2. Now describe a writing assignment that you did not care for as much. Again, describe the

assignment and the process by which you fulfilled it, and tell us why you found it unappealing

or unhelpful.

3. In comparing the assignment you liked and the one you didn’t like as much, would you say that

one you liked helped you to learn more or differently than the other one? How so? Explain.

4. Can you tell us a little about what you have been asked to write in your other courses?

Cultural transition (all groups)

5. How would you characterize the differences between the academic writing you were asked to

do in high school and the academic writing you have been asked to do in college thus far? Have

these differences caused your writing to change? In what ways?

6. Considering language use more generally than just academic writing (e.g., oral conversation),

what differences have you noticed between the language practices of your home community or

culture and the language practices you’ve encountered here at UCI?

7. Tell us about the feedback you’ve gotten from your college instructors and peers about your

writing. If you want, you can compare this feedback to the responses you generally received to

your high school writing. Is there a kind of feedback you would like to get that you are not

getting?

8. What have been the hardest aspects of making the transition to college academic work,

especially college writing? Feel free to tell us about any support networks—groups or

individuals—that have helped you to cope with this transition.

9. Give us some of your impressions of your various instructors so far, ranging from faculty

lecturers to TA’s and section leaders. Describe some of your interactions with them, both


positive and negative. How do these interactions compare to those you had with the authority

figures, mentors, and role models you grew up with?

Linguistic transition (bilinguals only)

10. How would you assess your overall communication skills right now? I.e., do you consider

yourself a strong, persuasive writer? A strong, persuasive speaker? Please elaborate.

11. What role did reading and writing play in your upbringing? In what language(s)?

12. Do you have any specific memories of successes or failures with your language other than

English? How about with your English?

13. How would you compare the ways you were taught to read and write in a language other than

English with the ways you were taught to read and write English?

14. Do you feel that your literacy in another language enhances or hinders your reading and

writing competency in English?

15. Do you consciously think about your ‘voice’ in your academic writing, i.e. the way you come

across to the reader as a ‘person behind the writing’? In what ways is your voice or persona

affected by being bilingual?

Appendix D. Research paper assignment

Essay 8: Documentary research paper—The McCarthy Era

The following assignment asks you to write a paper based on research related to the primary

source material about the hunt for communists under McCarthyism. Your section leader may

define the parameters of this research project further by asking you to focus on particular themes,

topics, modes of representation, or scholarly materials, and you may want to discuss material

regarding the ‘‘witch hunt’’ experience in Salem as well. Whatever topic you choose, you will

also be encouraged to work independently and to develop specific research goals related to your

interests in a particular field or discipline that you plan to pursue.

You will be focusing on some aspect of the HUAC hearings from 1947 to 1957 during what

has come to be called the ‘‘McCarthy era.’’ These hearings affected many fields that are studied

in the university: political science, social science, science, the arts, mass media, etc. You may

find that a topic that relates to your major or your personal interests will help you get started.

In developing and supporting your thesis with primary and secondary sources, it is likely that

you will be using many skills that you already know. Specific paragraphs or segments of your

paper should perform particular tasks in presenting your research and advancing your argument,

and identifying a specific purpose for a specific section of the paper will enable you to break

down the project into more manageable tasks. Your section leader may specify inclusion of items

from the following list:

� Definition of terms

� Counterargument

� Rhetorical analysis

� Image analysis

� Narrative analysis

� Textual analysis (close reading a passage)

� Textual explication (close reading a passage with a focus on ambiguity, connotation, or

omission)

� Comparison and contrast

� Application of one text to another


� Evaluation

� Causal analysis

Your essay should be 8–10 pages and will count for 60% of your writing grade. The focus of your

argument should be on primary sources. Preparatory work (which includes the annotated bi-

bliography) is required for a passing grade. Plan on cutting at least two pages of your rough draft

in the course of writing this assignment. If you don’t start out with more material than you will

eventually need, you will not be able to choose the most suitable claims and evidence for your

final argument.

Materials to use

� Primary sources:

1–2 texts from this quarter of the Core Course from either Ellen Schrecker’s The Age of

McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, the HCC Reader, or the Primary Sources

Web Site (HUAC testimony, FBI files, oral histories, etc.)

1–3 additional primary sources (recommended)

� Secondary sources:

1–3 scholarly books (See the books available in the Library Reserve Collection and in the

stacks of the main library.)

2–4 articles copied from scholarly journals in the library

No more than three non-journal Internet sources may be used! All Internet sources must be

properly cited!

A successful essay will do the following:

� Demonstrate that you have done independent research.

� Demonstrate that you have identified work by important experts and definitive texts in the

field.

� Integrate textual analysis of primary and secondary sources. You will want to choose the most

relevant and scholarly sources possible and only cite as much as is necessary to support

individual claims in your argument.

� Integrate multiple writing skills from the year-long curriculum of the Writer’s Handbook.

� Cite all sources properly in the format specified by your section leader.

� Paraphrase the arguments of secondary sources.

� Acknowledge limitations in the evidence.

� Subordinate and juxtapose sentence elements properly.

� Keep the reader on track by means of clear signals, clear paragraphing, interesting topic

sentences, and relevant evidence in the form of quotations from the text.

Appendix E. Writer’s memo

Dear Writer,

Thank you for taking the time to reflect on your final paper for Humanities Core Course. We

know that you did a lot of work on your documentary research project. We would like to learn

more about exactly how you approach researched academic writing and whether, or to what

extent, a home language other than English may have influenced your voice and organization

in this paper.


Listed below are guiding questions. Don’t feel that you have to respond to each one. Rather,

you should read through the questions in each section and then write a short paragraph in

response to the issues raised in that section.

Process

1. Describe your process in writing this paper. How did you schedule writing this paper? Where

did you find it easiest to write? How much time did you spend on this paper?

2. How many drafts did you do? How much did you change the paper between drafts? What kinds

of changes did you make?

3. What opportunities for revision did the course provide (pre-writing, drafting guide-

lines, conferencing, peer editing, forums, workshops at the Learning Assistance Center,

etc.)?

4. What opportunities for revision did you find useful outside the course (advice from friends,

family members, etc.)? What, in your view, are its strengths and weaknesses? If you were to

revise it, what would you do?

Persona

5. Did you feel like you knew who the ‘‘experts’’ were on the subject you were researching? How

difficult was it to read the books and articles of these ‘‘experts’’?

6. Why did you pick these ‘‘experts’’ and not others?

7. Did you agree with the ‘‘experts’’? How would you compare the value of your opinion to the

sources that you cite in your bibliography?

8. In this paper, are there any places that you think you don’t sound ‘‘like yourself’’? If so, where?

Why do you think you sound that way?

Organization and language

9. How did you get information about ‘‘proper format’’ for a research paper? How did you use

this information in writing this paper?

10. How is the writing in this paper similar to or different from other writing that you do on a

regular basis?

11. How would you compare your written ‘‘academic’’ English to your spoken English?

12. If you write a language other than English, what language do you write in and what kinds of

materials do you write in that language? What do you think makes a ‘‘good’’ writer in that

language?

13. If you speak a language other than English with your family, do you see any signs of that

second language in this paper? (This question is asking about more than grammatical

features, although you can certainly mention them if you notice them.)

14. What do you think about the Standard Written English policy of this course? Did you worry

about it when writing this paper?

Susan C. Jarratt is Campus Writing Coordinator and professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California,

Irvine. She has published on ancient Greek rhetoric and issues of social difference in contemporary composition studies in

journals such as College English, College Composition and Communication, PRE/TEXT, and JAC: A Journal of

Composition Theory. As Campus Writing Coordinator, she consults with faculty and administrators across the campus

on undergraduate writing.

Elizabeth Losh is Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course at the University of California, Irvine. She has

published articles about national and transnational rhetorics in Kairos, Sulfur, Literary and Linguistic Computing, and

Digital Experience: Design, Aesthetics, Practice. She is currently completing a book about the competing rhetorics of the

‘‘virtual state,’’ as they are expressed in government websites, publicly-funded video games, e-mails from policy makers,

and other forms of political digital ephemera.


David Puente received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Irvine, in 2002 with a dissertation on

narratives of education in nineteenth-century American literature. During the period of research for this study, he served as

Writing Consultant to the Campus Writing Coordinator at UCI. He currently lives in Granada, Spain, where he directs a

study abroad program for Americans while teaching English as a foreign language at the University of Granada. He and

his wife are enjoying the challenges of bringing up a bilingual child.


Transnational identifications: Biliterate writers in a first-year humanities course

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