Transnational identifications: Biliterate writers in a first-year humanities course

This essay presents the results of a study of first-year students in a California University who report competence as speakers and writers of a language other than English. The data collected for the study include a language questionnaire administered to over a thousand students and, from a smaller sample, responses to focus group interviews, a research paper written at the culmination of a year-long writing-intensive humanities course, and reflections on that paper drawn from a writer's memo. To establish a theoretical context, the authors review the founding assumptions of contrastive rhetoric as well as recent critiques of CR, arriving at a framework for analysis based in transnational cultural theory. Drawing from the data, they sketch profiles of students with home languages of Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, and Spanish, finding that the students’ transnational linguistic experiences and identifications inform in complex and significant ways their research and writing strategies, as well as their future educational goals.