Importance of the social relations for the writing practices of international students

LAURA MARINA COLOMBO

Catonsville

Conferencia; The Third Annual Writing in the Disciplines/Across Communities WID/AC Writing Exchange Conference "Voices: Effective Communication Through Writing" (Tercera Conferencia Anual de Escritura en las Discipinas y a través de Comunidades "Voces: Comunicación E); 2010

The Community College of Baltimore County

Language, in particular writing, plays a vital role in the adjustment process of international students, and is especially important at the graduate level where course assignments, candidacy evaluations, and theses/dissertations define the academic experience of graduate students in any discipline (Casanave & Hubbard, 1992). Curiously, despite the central place that writing has in the life of graduate international students, only few schools in the U.S. offer graduate level writing courses that address discipline-specific issues (Ater Kranov, 2007; Martín Martín, 2003; Swales & Feak, 2003) and the admission requirements often do not reflect the later demands that students face when producing texts for their courses (1999, p. 493). However, many international graduate students become initiates in the academic writing "games" (Casanave, 2002) of their disciplines and manage the writing demands of their courses. In this session I will first present the situated learning and social capital frameworks to allow conceptualizing disciplinary writing as a situated process in which relationships with others are vital in shaping students? writing. Then, participants will relate the postulations of these two theoretical frameworks with their teaching experiences and propose different personal and institutional strategies that could improve the writing practices of international students.