Beyond ‘write-talk-revise-(repeat)’: Using narrative to understand one multilingual student's interactions around writing

This paper offers a narrative framework for understanding how multilingual graduate students make sense of the continuous and frequently contradictory talk they engage in as they write. It illustrates how attention to the telling, form, and content of the stories such students relate about their ongoing interactions around academic writing can reveal aspects of the relationship between speaking and composing/revising that are not foregrounded in other approaches to data collection and analysis. Advocating movement beyond a ‘write-talk-revise-(repeat)’ model of L2 writing, the paper draws on Ochs and Capps’ (2001) multidimensional approach, adapting its use to a multilingual context. It then exemplifies how this modified model can be used by analyzing the stories told by one Taiwanese student in a U.S. university about her interactions with teachers, tutors, and peers. Analysis demonstrates how, through the act of storytelling, this student attempts to work through her model of what counts as “good” writing in her English language academic discourse community and to develop a sense of who she is as a multilingual writer. The paper ends with discussion of how a narrative approach provokes several shifts in perspective that serve to complement and extend existing work in the field.

► Multilingual students engage in a great deal of talk with others about their academic writing.
► A narrative approach sheds new light on the relationship between talk and second language writing.
► This approach is illustrated through analysis of one student's stories of talk-around-writing.
► Analysis of stories told by multilingual writers emphasizes models of writing and of identity.
► A narrative approach moves away from linear understandings of the writing process.