Gail Shuck, professor of linguistics and director of English Language Support Programs, presented “Linguistic Repertoires, Institutional Data and the Ecology of Writing Placement” at the 2024 Symposium on Second Language Writing, an international conference at the University of Arizona.
Her presentation provided a framework for situating both writing placement and the ways that institutions collect student data in a much larger context that includes global migration – voluntary and forced – and the ideologies of language that imagine nations to be monolingual by default.
This work was one work-in-progress facet of a College of Arts and Sciences Innovation Lab grant, which is a collaborative effort to build a data set that allows for tracking the academic progress of multilingual Boise State students from refugee and immigrant backgrounds, as many of them fall into the identity categories named in the Strategic Enrollment and Retention Plan: Latinx students, first-generation students, rural students and Pell-eligible students.
It is a collaboration between College of Arts and Sciences Student Success, English Language Support Programs, the First-Year Writing Program, the Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Enrollment Services. The work is ongoing and will be used to identify and close achievement gaps among subgroups of multilingual students.