Exploring the perceptions, writing strategies and identity dynamics in international multilingual graduate students' academic writing in a Canadian university

This qualitative study explores the perceptions, writing strategies, and identity dynamics of seven multilingual graduate students in a Canadian university's Faculty of Education. Drawing on the Academic Literacies approach (Lillis, 2001; Street & Lea, 1998, 2006), writer identity framework (Burgess and Ivanič's, 2010) and my expansion of it, Hyland's metadiscourse model (2005), and critical pragmatism (Benesch, 2001a, 2001b; Cherryholmes,1988; Pennycook, 1997), the research analyzes data from semi-structured interviews with students and four instructors, student written assignments, and assignment rubrics. Findings reveal that students felt the immense weight of academic conventions. This often led to taking a pragmatic stance where they prioritize academic success over challenging dominant norms. To build their academic voices, they employed strategies such as mimicking scholarly writing and utilizing their multilingual repertoires. This process represents constant identity negotiation that involves their autobiographical, discoursal, authorial, perceived writer and envisioned future writer selves. Moreover, the results show a spectrum of agreement and divergence in student and instructor participants' views of academic writing, particularly concerning the role of voice and the nature and function of feedback. While Instructors and students acknowledged the challenge in presenting an academic, critical voice, students' perceptions of how to project that voice might not align with that of the instructors. For instance, some students' views on reflective writing and the use of the first-person pronoun "I" as ways of presenting authentic voice diverged from those of the instructors' Furthermore, a significant misalignment appeared in feedback priorities: while instructors focused on higher-order concerns like argumentation, some students expressed a strong need for explicit guidance on micro-level grammatical and stylistic features to build their writerly confidence. Therefore, they resorted to external resources for feedback and writing support, such as AI language models, to address their micro-level concerns. The study concludes by offering pedagogical implications on the instructor and institutional levels to better support multilingual graduate writers.