Far More Than a Lonely Cactus

Read this!

Leki, Ilona.  Undergraduates in a Second Language: Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development.  New York City: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007.

The title of this post came from a phrase that Ilona Leki borrows from another scholar (Atkinson, 1999) to discuss how a language learner was once seen as “lonely cactus” but now the view is much more complex.  Exploring that complexity is exactly what Leki is after in Undergraduates in a Second Language as she describes the results and implications of a longitudinal ethnographic study she conducted with four multilingual students.  This book not only gives the reader some helpful insights into how four learners negotiated their undergraduate educations, but what Leki learned about their experiences has some important implications for both first-year writing programs and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) efforts. 

Overview

In the book, Leki describes the experiences of four L2 students over the course of their undergraduate careers.  There is Ben from Taiwan, who is majoring in Engineering.  Ben is a recent immigrant but not yet a permanent resident.  Yang is from China and is studying on a visa while her husband works in the U.S.  Her major is nursing.  Jan is a permanent resident, originally from Poland, and he eventually decides to major in business.  The fourth student, Yuko, is an international student from Japan, who majors in social work.

Leki devotes a chapter to each student and explores how they move from first-year general education courses to their major courses to graduation.  She is interested in teasing out how their general educations courses prepare (or don’t prepare) them for the literacy and communication demands of their major as well as looking in depth at what they are asked to do as students in their major disciplines.  She is also interested in the “socioacademic” relationships these students build with their teachers and classmates and how these relationships help and hinder their development as students and professionals in the fields they’ve chosen.

After focusing in on each of the four students, Leki takes a step back and spends the next two chapters considering the big picture.  She discusses what she learned about “university literacy” and how the experiences of these four students made her rethink her views about college literacy demands as well as the importance of first year/ESL writing classes.  Leki also explores how the results of her study suggest that issues related to social identity as well as socioacademic relationships profoundly shape learner’s literacy and language development.  She concludes by discussing the implications this has for the L2 writing classroom as well as for understanding the experiences of L2 students.

Response

This is a fascinating book and not just because the reader gets to experience the undergraduate journeys of four L2 students.  It is interesting because these students’ experiences have so much to teach us about what really happens as students move from first year coursework to their majors and how complex each student’s journey is—shaped by social forces, individual characteristics, and disciplinary demands. 

First of all, there’s the whole concept of socioacademic relationships—the connections students make with their classmates, teachers, and other university personnel.  How a student, not just an L2 student, is constructed by others (as a productive member of a group, as a slacker, as an insider, as an outsider, etc.) and how the student is affected by that construction can have a lot of influence on their development.  This is closely related to issues of social identity.  For example, Jan, the student from Poland (who Leki has written about elsewhere) really struggled his first two years because he didn’t feel connected to the university or the students around him.  He saw the academic work he was being asked to do as “hoops” to be jumped through and, as a result, he often cut corners.  However, things changed when he was hired as a Resident Assistant and was accepted into the Business major.  These new “roles” helped connect him to others and also gave him a set of more powerful identities to negotiate from.

However, the big takeaways for me from this study/exploration have everything to do with the classroom.  For example, Leki spends a lot of time both in individual student chapters and in her overall discussions focusing on the gaps between the literacies demanded by first year/ESL writing courses, general education courses, major courses, and the professional world.  Basically, in all four cases, students’ experiences in early coursework (composition and general education courses) did not (and maybe could not) prepare them for the type of writing they were asked to do in their majors.  However, the problem Leki notes is that disciplinary faculty don’t often see their role in helping to bridge that gap:

Those early writing courses simply could never have anticipated the varied writing the students would be required to do later in college.  Yet the expectation on the part of the institution, the faculty, and the students was that 1^st-year writing courses would prepare students for writing later in college (251).

Leki argues, and I think rightly so, that composition teachers might need to consider presenting “English-department genres” (284) as NOT universal but that discipline faculty also need to step up and spend more time teaching and not simply assigning the genres of their discipline.  Leki notes that many of the disciplinary faculty in her study constructed writing assignments “arhetorically”—that is, not helping students see the purpose or audience for the writing task or showing how it connects to the discipline.  Like any good WAC coordinator, she suggests that these faculty could make their writing assignments better by creating a clear purpose for the writing task, giving the students clear guidelines, providing sample papers, and allowing for multiple drafts.  This wouldn’t just help L2 writers make the transition from general education to major courses more easily, it would help all writers make this move.

Another classroom takeaway from this book for me involves group work.  Again and again, Leki described examples of group projects that the students had to do in their major coursework—labs in engineering, writing projects in business, presentations in social work, etc.  However, Leki was surprised at how rarely the “process” of working in groups was ever explicitly addressed.  That is, how does one work effectively and efficiently with a group?  Only one or two professors (if that) actually constructed their assignments to explicitly “teach” the students how to work in groups. 

Finally, I am reminded of the fact that my classroom is only one stop on my students’ academic journeys by Leki’s final words:

In all, although generally my sense of my own position in the hierarchy of my students’ academic lives and the position of L2 writing courses has deeply diminished, this is not discouraging.  Instead what has been enhanced for me is my sense of the importance of attempting to understand not just the individuals seated in a given classroom but also how those individuals negotiate the complexities of the social, cultural, academic, and sociopolitical environments that surround them (285).

Leki’s attempt to understand the complexity of four students’ academic lives at a four-year university makes me wonder what I could learn from a similar study in a community college context.