Social Media at Academia's Periphery: Studying Multilingual Developmental Writers' Facebook Composing Strategies

This article focuses on the writing strategies second-language students use to compose on social media sites. These alternative and unconventional sites for learning provide language learners opportunities to acquire language by using multiple modalities to respond to various rhetorical situations. In comparison to these sites, academic writing contexts, particularly the developmental-writing course, impose monolingual norms and deficient identities on students. Where these courses articulate these language learners as possessing inadequate skills to perform well in mainstream writing courses, the students’ social-media compositions demonstrate that these students have the potential to respond to communicative situations in rhetorically complex ways. This study exemplifies both the deliberate and flippant decisions these students make in these contexts as they shuttle (Canagarajah, 2006) between the linguistic and cultural expectations they perceive their audiences to possess.