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.
Details
Title
- Investigating agency in multilingual writers' placement decisions: a case study of the writing programs at Arizona State University
Contributors
- Saenkhum, Tanita, 1976- (Author)
- Matsuda, Paul Kei (Thesis advisor)
- Rose, Shirley (Committee member)
- James, Mark (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
2012
Subjects
- English as a Second Language
- Language
- Advising
- first-year composition
- multilingual writers
- placement
- Second Language Writing
- writing program administration
- English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching (Higher)--Foreign speakers--Case studies.
- English language
- College freshmen--Arizona--Tempe--Psychology--Case studies.
- College Freshmen
- Multilingual persons--Education (Higher)--Arizona--Tempe--Case studies.
- Multilingual persons
- Counseling in higher education--Arizona--Tempe--Case studies.
- Counseling in higher education
- Decision making--Case studies.
Resource Type
Collections this item is in
Note
- Includes vita
- Partial requirement for: Ph. D., Arizona State University, 2012Note typethesis
- Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-137)Note typebibliography
- Field of study: English
Citation and reuse
Statement of Responsibility
by Tanita Saenkhum