Plurilingual writing processes at the heart of biliteracy development

Despite an ever-increasing interest in the means of supporting advanced forms of plurilingual literacies in higher education (Marshall & Moore, 2013; Mazak & Carroll, 2016), much remains to be learned about the specific strategies and processes involved as students learn to write university texts in two or more languages in bi/plurilingual programs (Gentil, 2018; Manchón, Roca de Larios, & Murphy, 2009). This presentation reports on an ongoing four-year longitudinal case study of eight multilingual undergraduate and graduate students committed to developing French and English biliteracy throughout their studies at a large Canadian bilingual university. A range of data sources is triangulated to generate detailed accounts of each case. These include bi-semestral interviews, questionnaires, copies of written assignments and course materials and screen capture recordings of students’ writing processes as they compose on their own computers both assigned research tasks as well as self-selected written assignments for their courses. The presentation will focus on the analysis of the screen capture recordings and the insights they provide as a means of retracing the steps and resources employed by the participants as emerging bi/plurilingual writers (Séror, 2017). The screen recordings are analyzed with the video annotator ELAN to tag and aggregate students’ composition processes. Findings focus on the instances where students draw synergistically on their multiple linguistic repertoires as they plan, compose, and revise their texts (e.g., writing in one language from notes composed in another, making use of machine translation to edit and revise texts). Conclusions focus on the role of these typically unobserved and under-researched practices for biliteracy development and the implications for writing instruction and the design of support systems for plurilingual writing development in higher education.