For many transnational students in North America, digital literacies entail precarious participation—the adaptive engagement in digital literacy practices under conditions of systemic vulnerability and instability. This multiple case study examines how Chinese international students at a Canadian university perceive and navigate the precarity of their digital literacy practices across national and cultural boundaries. Findings reveal that the four participants exhibit tacit sensitivity to transnational digital precarity, employ strategic adaptation, and engage in measured resistance that cautiously transgresses digital norms. These insights contribute to broader discussions on digital literacies, transnational literacies, and digital precarity, extending and complicating existing frameworks in writing studies, literacy studies, and media studies.

This study explores how the scholarly writing practices of early-career academics in China create new “ecologies” of research writing. Using a literacy studies framing, we examine how productivity policies, including evaluation and incentivization, impact the writing practices of academics working in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), creating a set of spatiotemporal predicaments and uncertainties. We draw on interviews and multimodal journals obtained from 22 academics at Chinese universities. Findings reveal important practices among China’s HSS academics within the distinctive institutional and policy landscape of Chinese academia, including how they organize their space and time for writing, the significance and function of writing practices, and the ways in which boundaries are disrupted and negotiated. We show that writing is deeply intertwined with multiple spaces and times, forming an ecology of research writing within emergent and shifting assemblages. We emphasize the need for further theoretical and practical understanding of research writing in the context of Chinese universities.

Drawing upon scholarship on cultural-historical activity theory and writing across difference, this study investigated how students reflect on critical incidents in writing-intensive courses that are expansive by design, that is, spanning courses, semesters, communities, and cultures, and seeking to orient students toward critical incidents as catalysts for expansive learning. Findings indicate that students who reported valuing/understanding critical incidents in developing more expansive conceptualizations of literate activity tended to be further along in their studies, to be enrolled in courses with more reflective writing and semester-long community-engagement projects, and to have assumed significant team responsibilities. Students most frequently reported finding helpful concepts and design elements associated with the expansive-by-design classroom, and least helpful prior knowledge, skills, and experience (or lack thereof). The authors recommend more research into designing and assessing curricula bolstered by a writing across difference framework to illuminate the relationship between agency, sociocritical literacy, critical incidents, and expansive learning.

This article follows the academic literacy learning trajectory of Farah, an undergraduate anthropology major at the American University in Cairo. In charting her path from the Egyptian public schooling system to a Western-based transnational university, this study offers a perspective in which a writer created and navigated a challenging trajectory and adapted Western-based literacies to aid in the development of an academic and professional agenda based in personal and national interests. This article draws on frameworks in composition studies and transnational literacy studies to suggest that theorizing such trajectories may require new concepts that can account for literacy learning trajectories for writers like Farah.

Language learning is context-dependent and requires learners to employ different sets of language skills to fulfill various tasks. Yet standardized English as a foreign language assessments tend to conceptualize English proficiency as a unidimensional construct. In order to distinguish English proficiency as separate context-driven constructs, I adopted a register-based approach to investigate academic English proficiency (i.e., specific set of language skills that support academic literacy) and general English proficiency (i.e., wide range of language skills undifferentiated by context that are measured by traditional assessments) as separate predictors of overall essay quality. In the study, students completed a general English proficiency assessment and an academic language proficiency assessment, and essays were coded for academic writing features at the lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels. Beyond the contribution of academic writing features and general English proficiency, academic English proficiency emerged as a significant contributor to essay quality. Findings suggest that academic English proficiency scores more precisely identified a subset of academic language skills that is relevant to essay writing. The article concludes by discussing implications for strategic writing instruction that articulates the key expectations of academic writing used in and beyond school contexts.

The writing of transnational youth has continued to emerge as a promising area of research in writing and literacy studies, and yet despite the breadth of this work, few studies have examined transnational students’ writing about social and racial justice. Drawing on theoretical contributions of coloniality, this article highlights the experiences of one immigrant adolescent’s participation in a secondary ethnic studies course in California. In this study, photovoice was used as a mutually informing classroom writing pedagogy and research methodology to understand how students in an ethnic studies course problematize the dominance of Whiteness in school. I specifically analyze field notes and a focal student’s writing and interviews to demonstrate (a) her understandings of her participation in this course and (b) the ways in which her writing of self was a form of curricular justice that spanned school and home. These findings help to amplify writing as a tool for social justice and remind us that literacy and students’ histories are inextricably linked.

This qualitative study traces different articulations of the public, emotional honesty, and economic advantage in the literacy sponsorship of detained writer Lil’ Purp by The Beat Within, a publication for incarcerated youth and adults. Findings are compared to The Beat’s own account of Purp’s progress, revealing a set of practices reminiscent of Socratic parrhêsia that revise understanding of literacy sponsorship by expanding it to a philosophical register. Because The Beat also becomes a site of affective solidarity among detained writers in a way that resists the directional logic of writing toward civic participation, the study supports thinking about affect in public writing not as a process that moves toward political action, but rather as action in the immediate space of its utterance and reception. Such findings have implications both for public writing pedagogy and for community-based literacy scholarship.

Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status school. A new writing program taught students how to design multimodal and digital texts across a range of genres and text types, such as web pages, online comics, video documentaries, and blogs. The authors use Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device to theorize the pedagogic struggles and resolutions in remaking English through the specialization of time, space, and text. The changes created an ideological struggle as new writing practices were adapted from broader societal fields to meet the instructional and regulative discourses of a conventional writing curriculum.

Scholars have recently begun to conceive of literacy practices as drawing from resources that are simultaneously situated and extracontextual. In particular, studies of transnational literacy affirm the importance of both locality and movement in literacy studies. Continuing this inquiry into the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy, the author investigates the distinct effects that shuttling between national contexts have on the accumulation and use of genre knowledge. Specifically, through a case study of one Third Culture Kid student writer, the author reports on how her genre knowledge develops in response to transnational relocations between Italy and the United States and the way this transnational genre knowledge informs her writing of a high-stakes in-school genre. This case illustrates the value of rhetorical genre studies for understanding the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy and begins to outline the distinctiveness of transnational boundary-crossing practices.

This study examines the factors influencing language and script choice in instant messaging (IM), a form of real-time computer-mediated communication, in a multilingual setting. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies, the study understands IM as a social practice involving texts, encompassing a range of literacy practices, within which a subset called “text-making practices” is highlighted in this article. Drawing on results from an analysis of chat texts, interviews, and logbooks collected from 19 young people, the author suggests that the text-making practices related to language and writing system choice are guided by the perceived affordances of the IM technology and the available linguistic resources. Seven ecological factors influencing these perceptions have been identified: perceived expressiveness of the language, perceived functions of IM , user familiarity with the language, user identification with the language, technical constraints of inputting methods, speed , and perceived practicality of the writing system. The author argues that these factors often co-occur in real use.

This article examines the poetry, prose, and rap lyrics written by nine low-income, African American and Latino urban youths. The study is based on a 3-year research project using ethnographic methods including field observations, informal interviews, and collection of written artifacts. Part of a larger study of these youths’ writing practices, this article focuses on the ways that they use writing to negotiate gendered and sexual identities in complicated, sometimes conflicting, ways. The article is grounded in the field of new literacy studies, and the author argues that educators and other youth workers can find, in the writing of youths like those in the study, an entrèe into sometimes uncomfortable yet vitally important conversations about gender and sexuality. Through analysis of the writers’ texts and conversations, the author models ways of drawing useful insights from such texts.

In this article, the author builds on McHenry and Heath’s study of the “literate” and the “literary” and McHenry’s research on “forgotten readers” by examining the often undocumented literacy traditions and practices of men and women of African descent. First, the author traces the legacy of blended traditions of both written and spoken words in African American writing and activism. Continuing with an examination of Black literary and social movements, the author asserts that the recent renaissance of activities around literacy, such as spoken word poetry events as well as writing collectives, contributes to a historical continuum. Ultimately, the author shows the importance of the inextricable link between history, literacy studies, and the teaching of language arts.

This case study of a Chinese undergraduate nursing student focuses on her literacy experiences in her nursing major. Although traditional academic writing played some role in her education, the unusual demands of nonacademic, disciplinary documents, particularly nursing care plans (NCPs), played a more significant and more intractable role in her education and in the difficulties she faced. This investigation of features of academic literacy across the curriculum also embeds this student’s experience in broader concerns of the nursing curriculum and nursing regulatory agencies, further complicating the role of disciplinary literacy acquisition.

Using the notion of design developed as part of the New London Group's Multiliteracies Project, this qualitative multicase study examines undergraduate academic literacy as a multimodal achievement game. Retrospective interviews and textual analyses revealed a series of operations on course content that constituted moves in the game. The goal of the game was to find, move, and display content, including not only facts but also concepts and forms of situated knowledge that would gain the highest points on assessments. Better “players” were more aware than their lower achieving counterparts of the game as specific activity different from learning. They also had more nuanced and planned versions of the operations that began with what was expected on assessments and moved backwards toward sources. Findings support forms of preparing students for academic success through the multiliteracies pedagogy that combines consciousness raising through overt instruction with forms of immersion and critical analysis.

This article explores literacy sponsorship at an early 19th-century academy that schooled young Native American men near Lexington, Kentucky. In doing so, it presents two case studies based on the correspondence of J. N. Bourassa (Potawatomi) and Adam Nail (Choctaw), both advanced students at the academy who turned their literacy lessons toward a critique of their living and learning conditions. In examining their letters to federal authorities, it is possible to discern how the students moved beyond the limited literacy sponsored by the academy to embrace liberatory practices reserved by the White elites who managed the institution.

The issues of authentic context and authoritative ethos are explored through a study of a graduate student learning to write for mathematics within the context of an English for academic purposes (EAP) course. The student faced conflicts about audience, purpose, and content knowledge as she was required to write math texts within what she perceived was an inauthentic context, an English as a second language (ESL) course. She questioned the purpose of the writing tasks as well as why an ESL instructor was teaching her to write for math, and she addressed the conflicts by writing for the instructor's discourse community and expectations, rather than her own, to earn a grade for the course. The text the student created was thus inauthentic within her own discourse community and lacked her voice of authority. These findings question the validity of EAP courses and raise several issues, especially in terms of the transferability of skills from EAP to content courses.

In many literacy studies, it is important to establish the reliability of independent observers' judgments. Reliability most commonly is measured either by the percentage of agreement or the correlation between the observers' judgments. This article argues that the percentage of agreement measure is more difficult to interpret than are correlation measures because of the following: (a) the effects of chance agreement are not accounted for automatically by the percentage of agreement measure; and (b) rates of chance agreement are strongly influenced by the variability of the data, by “ceiling” and “floor” effects, and by the scoring of near agreement as perfect agreement. For these reasons, the authors recommend that the field of literacy research adopt correlation as the standard method for estimating the reliability of observers' judgments.

Developing academic literacy involves learning valued content and rhetoric in a discipline. Within history, writing from primary documents to construct an evidenced interpretation of an issue requires students to transform both background and document knowledge, read and interpret historical documents, and manage discourse synthesis. The authors examine the potential of the Advanced Placement Document-Based Question as constructed and presented by an exemplary teacher to engage students in historical reasoning and writing. The authors analyzed how five students responded to four document-based questions over a year, tracing how organization, document use, and citation language indicate the degree to which writers transformed and integrated information in disciplinary ways. Students moved from knowledge telling (listing period and document content as discrete information bits) to knowledge transformation (integrating content as interpreted evidence for an argument). Students had difficulty learning to handle the complex layers of the task. The authors discuss how instruction might mediate this complexity and promote academic literacy.

This study examines the reading and writing strategies of one student, Yuko, over a 3-year period and traces the process she went through to acquire college-level academic literacy in English, her second language. Multiple data sources included interviews with the student and two of her political science professors, classroom observations, and texts from 10 courses in three disciplines—including course materials and the student's writing, with instructors' comments. The investigation was enriched by a cross-cultural perspective, for Yuko described learning strategies in two languages and learning environments in two countries, Japan and the United States. Data analysis suggests that her educational background shaped her approach to U.S. academic discourse practices and the way she theorized about those practices. Her theory and her analysis of her own experience changed over time, raising questions about cross-cultural interpretations of student learning.

Although some consideration has been given to the manner in which academic discourse is culture-bound, how the “nondiscursive” conventions and requirements of academic publishing can serve exclusionary functions has not been adequately explored. Meeting the latter requirements is contingent upon the availability of certain material resources. Reflecting on personal experience in trying to meet such requirements from an under-developed region, the author shows the manner in which they serve to exclude Third World scholars from the academic publication process. Though this detachment from Western academic literacy enables the development of an alternative academic culture, it can also lead to the marginalization of Third World scholarship. The exclusion of Third World scholars impoverishes the production of knowledge not only in the Third World, but internationally. Therefore the article finally considers steps that may be taken to ensure a more democratic and mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge.