Multilingual Learners: Student Experiences in a First-Year Academic Literacy Class

This thesis explores how multilingual students might negotiate their multilingual identities while navigating a first-year academic literacy class (ALC). Through an ethnographic approach, with qualitative data including interviews and samples of students’ writing (both formal and informal), I analyze how multilingual students in the ALC might conceptualize their multilingualism and as tied to this, how they then might integrate multilingual practices into their learning and writing processes. While students’ conceptualizations and presentations of their multilingual identities varied, the multilingual students of this study demonstrated how their linguistic perceptions and practices were reflective of and sometimes constrained by dominant linguistic discourses about English and multilingualism.