Taking Hold of Global Englishes: Intensive English Programs as Brokers of Transnational Literacy

Abstract

Institutional studies are valuable for exploring these intersections because formal institutions-such as schools, churches, and workplaces-are primary sites where literacy becomes localized at the intersection of lived experience and established ideology. While a great many educational institutions now take part in the complex network of global English language learning-public universities, K-12 schools, community colleges, and MOOCS-I ask what an institution expressly created to respond to and spur the transnational movement of English language learners, the Intensive English Programs (IEPs), can reveal about how literacy is taught and learned transnationally.According to the Institute of International Education, an estimated 110,870 international students attended one of 500 American IEPs in 2012-2013. Those students were just some of the 800,600 international students who matriculated to US universities and colleges in 2012-2013. Clearly, a substantial number of young adults have transitioned through and encountered forms and norms of English enacted within IEPs. These types of institutes are integral stopovers within the transnational landscape of higher education, and they operate within transnational social fields of education as part of the "set[s] of multiple interlocking networks of social relationships through which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed" (Levitt and Schiller 286). As such, they serve as one in a series of institutional brokers wherein learners position themselves and are positioned in relation to versions of English literacy at both the global and the local levels.A few select studies of transnational literacy have included telling examinations of writers moving through such formal institutions from this type of trans-institutional perspective (Duffy; Farr; Guerra; Lorimer Leonard; Rounsaville; Vieira). While each of these studies contributes to a growing understanding of how literacy is enacted in and transformed by institutions, none provides an exclusive or sustained focus on English language institutes as "regimes of literacy" (Blommaert) that feed the internationalization of higher education, which is of growing interest to those in composition studies. Christiane Donahue, for example, explores the significance of this growing