Plurilingual students' negotiations of subjectivity, agency, and collaboration in undergraduate business writing: a qualitative case study

The purpose of this study is to provide insight into how plurilingual students learn business writing in English in Anglophone Canadian higher education contexts. It examines how students' linguistic and cultural resources, agency, and peer collaboration are shaped by disciplinary expectations, institutional discourses, and assessment practices in a lower-division writing in business course. Adopting a qualitative case study approach, the study draws on interview data from students, supplemented by instructor and TA interviews, student texts, and course materials, analysed through reflexive thematic analysis and narrative analysis. The findings show that students' plurilingual subjectivities were not primarily expressed through the overt use of multiple languages but were negotiated in relation to dominant monolingual business English norms. Students' agency was frequently enacted through strategic restraint, as they selectively withheld or adapted their linguistic repertoires in response to assessment expectations emphasizing correctness and professionalism. Collaboration was similarly shaped by discourses of legitimacy, where English proficiency functioned as a key criterion for participation, often resulting in unequal involvement among group members. Communities emerging from plurilingual collaboration were not simply the sum of group members' linguistic and cultural repertoires, but contingent communities of practice shaped by peer interactions and group dynamics, in which some members' resources were valued more than others. At the same time, these communities also created spaces where students navigated dominant expectations while enacting alternative ways of learning and belonging. Overall, the study reconceptualises plurilingual learning in disciplinary contexts as a relational and political process in which subjectivity, agency, and participation are continuously negotiated under institutional constraints.