SSLW2024

In this plenary talk, I begin by exploring key ecological theories of language and literacy development relevant to multilingual writers and their writing before then describing how I have found it useful to conceptualize and apply ecological framings in my own work. Taking up the notion that ecological perspectives help us better understand both connection and disjuncture in the experiences of multilingual writers, I reflect upon the ways that a longitudinal interactional histories approach (LIHA: Kibler, 2019) helped me understand the dynamic literacy journeys of five Mexican and immigrant-origin multilingual writers over an eight-year period as they navigated adolescence and early adulthood in the United States. I also explore other studies, including how colleagues and I adapted LIHA to use with pre- and in-service teachers, and what we learned about how the ecologies in which teachers live and work impact their views of multilingual students and their writing. Such research not only highlights the profound and intricate connections between writers and the ideological, institutional, and instructional contexts in which they learn: it also underscores how linguistic and racial discrimination is deeply embedded in the ecologies that multilingual writers must navigate. Recognizing such a disjuncture allows us as scholars and educators to ask critical questions of the contexts in which we teach, research, and share our knowledge, both in terms of the power structures that unjustly inhibit the potential of many multilingual writers and the ways that we can work to disrupt those structures and systems. I close by commenting upon how our work and our field might use ecological perspectives to embrace the teaching and learning of multilingual writers as a fundamentally critical and dialogic endeavor.

The concept of ecology invites reflection on current transformations in the world of multilingual writing, and especially academic writing, and how those transformations might (or not) be represented in research and pedagogy. Ecology foregrounds two aspects of writing that are particularly relevant in light of recent changes: relationships and environment. Firstly, as students and researchers increasingly engage with writing that aims to communicate knowledge beyond academia through blogs, op-eds, press releases, and so forth, different languages and modes are used for meaning-making, and new relationships are formed between academic and hybrid/popularized genres. A second, hard to ignore environmental transformation, is the increasing digitalization of writing, including the advent of Generative AI (GAI) and Large Language Models (LLM), posing both opportunities and threats to learning. The challenge we now face is how to tackle these ecological transformations, in teaching and research. A key question is: How can multilingual writers become agile, agentive writers that can master knowledge recontextualization across different genres and languages, and through a critical use of technology? In this talk, I will explore this question through two cases, and more specifically two pedagogical tasks that aim to address the challenges set out above. The first task connects to the concept of transfer, and proposes reformulation as a prospect for transformation in multilingual writing pedagogy. Data shows how writers can be scaffolded towards rhetorical flexibility and a meta-awareness of the relationships between genres targeting different readers, including contextually-motivated linguistic variations. The second task builds on the idea of self-regulation and metacognition, leading multilingual doctoral writers to practice and reflect upon on the implications of using GAI for scientific writing—critical AI literacy. My talk will conclude by showing how these two cases illuminate important future directions in multilingual writing research and pedagogy.