Crossing borders between countries is no longer an event for the few. An ever-increasing number of people not only pass borders, but also have to participate in the literacy activities in a new culture, as applicants of... [ view full abstract ]
Crossing borders between countries is no longer an event for the few. An ever-increasing number of people not only pass borders, but also have to participate in the literacy activities in a new culture, as applicants of educational programs or as students taking exams. Not everybody succeed. This might be due to the students' inexperience with the language, writing norms or academic contexts of the target discourse communities. For some the failure seems to be connected to crossing an additional kind of border, namely boundaries represented by culturally conditioned writing norms that are not always easy to detect or explain. Evaluations of texts in the new context (Golden, Kulbrandstad, Tenfjord 2017) often reveal greater difficulties in writing for some than others, e.g. the writers from the South and East seem to have bigger challenges when they meet norms in the North and the West than writers who move within these parts of the world.
In this colloquium we bring together empirical studies from different corners of the world. These studies are all concerned with writings in a new context, mainly academic. We aim to shed light on expectations that novice writers have to negotiate in such settings. We discuss how their production of texts might be influenced by previous experiences with literacy in culturally distinct educational settings with different literacy norms, or by lack of exposure to the specialized academic cultures and writing norms of Northern and Western tertiary institutions. An understanding of the challenges meeting the students – in particular from the South and East (also interpreted metaphorically, see Kerfoot & Hyltenstam 2017) – when entering a new writing community is not only important for the students themselves, but for the teachers and evaluators who need to reflect on and later articulate the hidden norms across different contexts.
Golden, Kulbrandstad & Tenfjord (2017): Evaluation of texts in tests, or: Where is the dog buried? In Golden, Jarvis & Tenfjord (Eds.), Crosslinguistic Influence and Distinctive Patterns of Language Learning: Findings and Insights from a Learner Corpus.
Kerfoot & Hyltenstam (2017): Entangled Discourses. South-North Orders of Visibility.
