Biliteracy in context: the use of L1/L2 genre knowledge in graduate studies

This article draws on genre theory in a biliteracy context to analyze how one US-Mexico border-crossing graduate student used her genre knowledge and meta-knowledge in her first language, Spanish, as a resource for navigating disciplinary-based genres in her second language, English. The student's strategic use of her L1 genre meta-knowledge from non-university contexts to realize academic literacy tasks in her L2 represented a form of recontextualization, where meanings move and get re-shaped across contexts. This strategic negotiation, in turn, served to disrupt the notions of 'novice' and 'expert' that are prominent in the composition studies literature on second language writers, where students are seen to be moving on a linear trajectory from novice to expert status in academic writing. The article discusses implications for genre-based research and pedagogy for multilingual learners crossing linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries in their academic studies.