This paper examines how writing samples produced by middle school students reveal their emerging academic identities through their rhetorical choices in writing. Analyses of two texts produced by each student revealed students’ implicit understandings of the requirements of academic voice. Through comparisons of each student’s texts, strategies for taking up academic voices become more transparent. We provide analytic tools with which to reframe how student essays that may not conform to expected conventions of academic writing might be read by teachers, and we suggest that instructional intervention to fill gaps in students’ written expression can facilitate students emergent academic identities.

In our previous “At Last” essay, “The “Problem’ of English Learners: Constructing Genres of Difference” (Gutiérrez & Orellana, 2006), we identified a predictable genre that characterizes much research on English Learners. We noted how the genre may unwittingly perpetuate deficit constructions and keep us from identifying other issues for redress”such as structural and institutional inequalities that create the vulnerability of non-dominant students in schools and society. In this essay, we pose alternative ways of conceptualizing, examining, and reporting our work with English Learners and members of other non-dominant groups. We hope our suggestions will facilitate efforts to research, write, and think against the grain.

In this brief essay, we take the opportunity to engage our literacy colleagues in a re-examination of approaches that have become normative ways of framing, representing, and describing English Learners and other nondominant students in literacy research.