Troublesome Knowledge and Liminality in L2 Writing: The Challenge of Writing with Sources

1. Troublesome Knowledge and Liminalityin L2 Writing: The Challenge of Writing with Sources Gita DasBender Seton Hall University

2. Threshold Concepts A Threshold Concept (Jan F. Meyer and Ray Land, 2003) “can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress.” Threshold Concepts are pivotal but challenging concepts in disciplinary understanding (Perkins, 2006) andgenerally prove to be problematic or troublesome to learners. TCs have the potential to lead to troublesome knowledge---”Knowledge that is ‘alien’, or counter-intuitive or even intellectually absurd at face value.”

3. Troublesome Knowledgeand multilingual students For multilingual students—those who areconstantly engaged in traversing cultural, social, educational, and linguistic boundaries—threshold concepts hold particular relevance and as students encounter approaches to learning writing that involve: • Conceptually difficult knowledge— • Ritual knowledge—routine and meaningless application • Inert knowledge—passive understanding; not used in new contexts • Tacit knowledge—from prior settingsbut un-or under-utilized • Alien knowledge—foreign; conflicts with current beliefs • Troublesome language—discourse itself can render TCs incomprehensible

4. Troublesome Knowledge and Liminality L2 learners often struggle with dominant forms of academic discourse in composition courses and this struggle is reflected in their experience with “troublesome knowledge” and their passage through stages of liminality— “a suspended state in which understanding approximates to a kind of mimicry or lack of authenticity.” This project involves examination of the kinds of “troublesome knowledge” L2 students encounter as theyuse source materials, how they operate in the liminal space, and how they adapt prior writing knowledge as they encounter new writing situations and tasks. Number of participants in the study: 10 Demographic: All native Chinese speakers; 8 international students, 2 Gen 1.5.

5. Research Questions • What prior knowledge about academic writing do multilingual students bring to a first-year writing course? • What “troublesome knowledge” might they encounter as they engage with sources? • What sort of learning occurs in the “liminal” space as students encounter troublesome knowledge? • What potential “threshold concepts” emerge in their learning?

6. Reflective Prompts • 1. What types of formal or informal writing are you most used to or familiar with? For how long have you been engaged in this kind of writing? • 2. What does academic writing mean to you? What kinds of writing do you associate with it? • 3. Have you ever written about non-fiction texts? If yes, please describe the kinds of writing you have done. • 4. What kinds of writing do you find most difficult? Why?Please include any other information about your experiences as a multilingual user of English that you believe will give me a full picture of your writing abilities.

7. 1st writing stage: Pre-liminal L2 students struggle with new writing knowledge as they engage critically with texts because: • Source writing is conceptually difficult and often an unknown or alien type of writing • Students’ prior writing knowledge reflects familiarity with narrative essays or topic-based formal argumentative essays that don’t involve other sources • Students lack familiarity with critical, analytical writing (Sullivan, Zhang, and Zheng, 2012.) • 2 students (20%) remained at this stage at the end of the semester

8. Student reflectionsfrom the Pre-liminal Stage • “Academic and formal writing are most difficult for me. The reason is I need a good academic skill, plenty knowledge, and professional vocabularies to write...I don’t know how to write a strong argument to support my main point. I have never touched non-fiction texts before.” • “It’s hard for me to write response to an article or a point of view. The ideas just come out my mind and I don’t know how to arrange the structure of the essay and divide ideas into different parts. • “I have to read chapters of the source and think critically on reflecting the sourceswhich was very difficult.” • “I'm not good at analyzing other person's main idea…Ido not know how to lead my own opinion together with other person's opinion.” • “I need to use some quotes from other person's essay to explain my understanding. It's so hard for me.”

9. 2nd writing stage: Liminal Students are able to partially engage with new writing knowledge • Students still have trouble engaging with sources but recognize that sources constitute other voices, new perspectives, supporting or contradictory evidence, and complex ideas • They begin to summarize, paraphrase, and use quotations but awkwardly, without a clear rhetorical understanding of appropriate application of strategies • They are only partially aware of the discursive demandsthat texts place upon the writer and that their writing places upon the reader • 6 (60%) students achieved this stage at the end of the semester

10. Student Reflectionsfrom the liminal stage • “I feel free to write because I learned how to use quotations. Do the context before giving the quotations and explain the importance of the quotation and how I connect my ideas and the quotations. My essays are more substantial than before.” • “I learned the usage of quotations. Before I would just throw a sentence quote into the paragraph to support my argument but now I learn to change the quote so it flows with my argument and sentence. Also I’m slowly learning how to do a deep analysis of the text like understanding what the author is saying and the meaning.” • “I’m realizing as a writer that I should have my own type of writing instead of trying to copy another person’s style of writing.” • Critical thinking is also a new way of thinking for me. Critical thinking makes me think more about the reading, and it help me to find the “truth”, so I can understand more about the reading.

11. 3rd writing stage: Post-Liminal Students are highly aware of new writing knowledge as they • Develop rhetorical awareness and makes informed decisions about when to resort to summary or paraphrase and when to use direct quotations • Integrate textual references seamlessly into the writing • Understand American academic source usage as a threshold concept • 2 students (20%) achieved this stage at the end of the semester

12. Student Reflections from the Post-liminal Stage “I learned how to link my own essay's main idea together with other person's essay. I also know absolutely how to use other person's essay to explain my idea. This is unbelievable for me before this semester. “Now the quotation doesn’t seem like a single sentence, which means that quotations become part of the essay and support the essay naturally. Don’t let the quotation take over the whole. Use the quotations like reference. “ “There are a number of text types and genres in academic writing. It is not only a kind of writing within academic field but also its style is usually serious and intended for a critical and informed audience.” “Now my definition of academic is any writing that serves their reader knowledge and information about a certain topic that is beyond general knowledge. Because I felt that the word academic means knowledge or seeking knowledge, and an academic paper should satisfy ones need for knowledge and to provide legitimate information.”

13. Other Findings • Students rarely reported how much (if at all) they relied on prior knowledge to complete the writing tasks. Thus, the data revealed no evidence of articulation of adaptive transfer-- the “conscious or intuitive process of applying or reshaping learned writing knowledge in new and potentially unfamiliar writing situations.” (DePalma and Ringer, 2011) • If prior writing knowledge is repurposed for new writing situations, awareness of this process remains tacit in the minds of L2 students. • Students articulated their processes of acquiring new knowledge and skills such as critical thinking; analysis; reading, comprehending, and engaging with sources; and understanding that all writing has a specific purpose.

14. Implications • Scholarship in writing transfer points to genre, purpose, audience, and context as threshold concepts in the teaching of writing. Data from this study confirms that this holds true for multilingual students as well. • Multilingual students also experience other writing acts-- such as source engagement, textual analysis, and critical thinking—as potential threshold concepts. • Prior writing knowledge learned in international settings and grounded in culture-specific practices, beliefs, and expectations may account for the “troublesome knowledge” encountered in the liminal stage. • The majority of L2 students participating in this study remained in the liminal stage in FYW which indicates that it may bethe most crucial stage of learning where adaptive transfer has the potential of occurring.