identity-formation
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- PaperTESOL Quarterly12 Jul 2026
“Disciplinary Writing Is Like Playing with Legos”: Exploring a Multilingual International Student's Navigating Science Writing
Hongye Zeng, Laura Mahalingappa
A 3-year case study of an undergraduate multilingual international student reveals that, despite limited or harmful instruction, the student used translingual, multimodal, and GenAI strategies to navigate science writing, gradually reframing it from high-stakes evaluation to an agentive process of professional identity formation. The findings underscore the need for linguistically responsive pedagogy that treats disciplinary writing as a space for engagement rather than just assessment.
Original abstract
This study explores the experiences of an undergraduate multilingual international student in becoming a science writer at a large public university. Taking the lenses of identity and investment, language socialization and multiliteracies, we address the question: How does a college‐aged multilingual science student navigate disciplinary writing over time? Interviews using talk around text based on the student's disciplinary writing samples over 3 years tracked his unique learning progress. Findings reveal he employed strategies including translingual, multimodal, and interdisciplinary practices and used GenAI to participate in disciplinary writing tasks, particularly when instruction and feedback were limited or harmful. The student gradually shifted from seeing disciplinary writing as a high‐stakes evaluation to understanding it as an agentive process of enacting future professional identity. By centering the lived experience of a multilingual writer, the study offers insights into the challenges and possibilities of disciplinary writing development in higher education (HE) classrooms. It provides a window into how students demonstrate resilience and agency to support learning, build disciplinary knowledge, and envision professional futures. The findings call for more linguistically responsive pedagogical practices in HE science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields that go beyond writing as a tool for assessment, but rather a vital space for disciplinary engagement and identity formation.