Two Sisters and a Heuristic for Listening to Multilingual, International Students’ Directed Self-Placement Stories

Directed self-placement (DSP) methods remain relatively rare in multilingual writing programs because such methods present unique ethical and academic risks. Grounded in five years of institutional research, this article reports on a first-year writing program in which DSP is the sole means of placement for international students and in which the international student population is linguistically, educationally, and culturally diverse. We offer logistical and technical guidance for creating DSP programs for multilingual writers, and we argue that DSP can be a vehicle for more equitable, socially just writing placement for multilingual, multicultural writers.

Section: International Students and Directed Self-placementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ethical Pedagogical and Programmatic Consequencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ethical Pedagogical and Programmatic Consequencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Directed Self-Placement for Multilingual, Multicultural International Students

Johnson,

Vander Bie

2024

“…We have been in a kairotic moment for SSP since the shift to remote education in Spring 2020 and the simultaneous antiracist awakening (and subsequent backlash) in higher ed, and we have excellent disciplinary literature to show for it (Aparna, 2022;Aull, 2021;Brathwaite et al, 2022;Coleman, 2022;Guida Mesina, 2023;Horton, 2022;Johnson, 2022;Klausman & Lynch, 2022;Melito et al, 2022;Messer et al, 2022;Morton, 2022;Nastal et al, 2022;Snyder et al, 2022), but some universities who adopted test-optional policies during the pandemic have returned to requiring tests. Faculty who were committed to SSP have recognized the messiness and difficulty of what perhaps only seems like an "elegant solution. "…”

Section: Assessment Is Everyone's Businessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Placement is Everyone’s Business: A Love Letter to Our SSP Coalition

Pantelides,

Whittig

2024

In this introduction to the special issue, the co-editors offer the umbrella term "methods of student self-placement" (SSP) to refer to any placement mechanism that includes student choice so that we can further build theoretical apparatus, gather much-needed empirical data, and subsequently flesh out meaningful differences in approaches. They argue that just as SSP asks us to rethink the mission of first-year writing, it also asks us to rethink some of the divisions in Writing Studies because placement work is meaningful across the university. Ultimately, they conclude that SSP isn't an easy fix for systemic problems in higher education, but it is powerful in fully acknowledging the complexity of placement and meeting students' diverse learning needs. 

“…and others have argued that placement into first-year composition (FYC) courses has been "a perennially thorny issue" for multilingual students (p. 775). These students have rarely had a say in their writing placement (Horton, 2022). This fact has been especially true for Generation 1.5 students, native English speakers born into linguistically diverse households, who are often inappropriately placed with either first language (L1) or English as a Second Language (ESL) students (di Gennaro, 2008).…”

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confidence: 99%

Supporting Student Linguistic Identity and Autonomy in Directed Self Placement Through Linguistic Domains Using Qualtrics Scoring

Decker,

Taormina-Barrientos

2024

In this article, we review the current and dynamic state of multilingual writers, especially their experiences in Composition and with English self-placement methods. Then, we position our institution and department’s theoretical underpinnings for support of multilingual writers and their self-placement, and we describe how we utilized Cavazos and Karaman’s (2021) Translingual Disposition Questionnaire as a framework for our recent revision of our Directed Self-Placement survey and utilized Qualtrics scoring tools to provide students with feedback on a novel language domain.  Our intent was to offer multilingual students transparency and choice in the English placement process so they could select the first year Composition course that best matched their needs. We hope that other WPAs gain insight on how to integrate asset-based philosophies and linguistic domains using Qualtrics scoring to offer their multilingual students more autonomy in their first year Composition experiences.  