Weaving Relationship Webs: Tracing how IMing Practices Mediate the Trajectories of Chinese International Students

Over the past decade has been a dramatic increase in the international student population at U.S. universities with the total enrollments at many colleges having doubled or quadrupled within the span of a few years. Despite the size and scale of these transformations, there remains little situated research attending to how this population's home languages or grassroots literacies mediate their transitions into the university. To understand this process, this study attends to ways an online chat room called QQ mediates the students’ transition into a large Midwestern public university. In performing this work, the present study contributes to current scholarship on IMing and to what Haas, Carr, and Takayoshi (2011) characterize as interactive networked writing (INW). Given the centrality of INWs in students’ everyday lives, attention to this area is key for understanding how their out-of-school literacies afford and constrain their academic socialization and learning. This exigency is particularly critical in relation to transnational students, as the extant INW scholarship has focused primarily on English with limited attention to practices in other languages beyond North American borders.