Content area
Full Text
Positioning reading as a site of meaning negotiation, this article provides a detailed account of one multilingual, transnational student's literacy practices for personal, academic, and disciplinary purposes across spaces. Drawing on the notion of disconnect, I examine the tensions and fissures that disrupt the flow of literacies across spaces.
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
With the increasing linguistic and cultural heterogeneity of students enrolled in US institutions, how to better support such students' literacy learning through strategic leverage of their rhetorical repertoires has become a critical question for literacy teachers across all levels. In writing studies particularly, a broader translingual turn has compelled theoretical and pedagogical attention to acts of linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary border crossing as an important dimension of students' rhetorical repertoire (Gilyard; Guerra; Horner et al.; Jordan; Matsuda), with specific attention to the innovative ways in which language users fashion and refashion inherently fluid and varied languages and semiotic modes to specific ends (Fraiberg, "Composition"). This attention indexes broader theoretical moves toward a reconceptualization of languages not as "discrete, preexisting, and enumerable entities" bound to geographical territories, nation states, or speech communities (Lu and Horner 587), but as practice-based, negotiated, and mutually constitutive historical codifications that change through dynamic processes of use (Canagarajah, "Lingua"). As such, a translingual perspective not only recognizes the increasing linguistic heterogeneity as the norm, but also values the rhetorical and linguistic resources nondominant students bring to their writing.
Against the backdrop of such theoretical contemplation have been ongoing efforts to empirically document transnational students' linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary border crossing (Christiansen; Fraiberg et al.; Rounsaville). An emerging body of scholarship has illuminated our understanding of a composite of broadly construed literacy activities transnational students perform across spaces, genres, and modes. Researchers have directed our attention to how informal engagement with digital literacies, such as fanfiction writing (Black), instant messaging (Lam), and online diary writing (Yi and Hirvela) create opportunities for transnational students to leverage their multilingual repertoires, practice authentic writing across genres, and develop agentive identities. While such research celebrates digital spaces for offering "multiple points of social and cultural contact with individuals from diverse backgrounds" (Black 398), the important role reading plays in enabling such social contact has often been overshadowed by celebratory accounts...