L2 Students’ Adaptive Transfer Beyond First-Year Writing

Abstract

Learning transfer with regard to academic literacy in higher education has drawn more and more researchers’ attention in recent years (Baik & Greig, 2009). However, only a small number of transfer studies are pertinent to international and multilingual students or second language (L2) writing instruction. Situated in the area of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), this research investigates international and multilingual undergraduate students’ writing practice and development within and across the disciplines. Specifically, it looks into six Chinese international students’ learning transfer from their First-Year Writing (FYW) course to disciplinary writing in the college years. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of adaptive transfer proposed by Depalma and Ringer (2011), this study redefines transfer in L2 writing and expands the research scope of transfer studies. It examines writing transfer from a new vantage point by including writers’ creative and/or strategic transformation of learned knowledge.
 Using the case study methodology, this research documents detailed processes of how international and multilingual undergraduate students adapt and transform prior writing knowledge and experiences to construct discipline-specific literacy. The findings have captured a series of writing practices cutting across those students’ approach to language, rhetoric, and genre and identified the factors that contextualize their writing practices.

A Quest Towards Academic and Social Integration in the United States: A Narrative Inquiry into Academic Mobility Experiences of Indian STEM Post-Doctorates

“…Moreover, the push-pull factors individually cannot explain a student's motivation to migrate. Mobility decisions of international students usually consist of multiple push-pull factors and are complex (Chen, 2017).…”

Translanguaging in the Academic Writing Process: Exploring Chinese Bilingual Postgraduate Students' Practices at a British University

“…Research on translanguaging in the writing process in higher education is relatively limited. The existing scholarship in this topic focuses on academic genres such as essays (e.g., Chen et al, 2019), year-end reports (e.g., Adamson & Coulson, 2015), and reading responses and research proposals (e.g., Chen, 2017). Only a few studies focus on master's level dissertation writing.…”

“…The discussion of translanguaging emerged initially in relation to oral communication and soon expanded to writing. Most studies focusing on translanguaging in academic writing have been in primary and secondary education (Caruso, 2018), with few in higher education (e.g., Chen, 2017;Chen et al, 2019); of these, none to our knowledge have investigated the genre of postgraduate dissertation writing. The dissertation plays a significant role in the successful completion of a master's degree, and differs from traditional academic essays in length, leeway for topic choices, and because it includes specific sections on methodology results and discussions for example.…”