‘I've never done a dissertation before please help me’: accommodating L2 students through course design

Abstract

This article considers how course design accommodates the adaptation of L2 students into the early stages of the master's dissertation (Social Sciences and Humanities) at a UK university. I present a contrastive process-oriented analysis of two students' experiences on different courses, extracted from a 13-month ethnographic study in which students' self-reports (journals; interviews) were triangulated with their assignments, interviews with lecturers and classroom observation. I identify two ‘literacy events’ in the early stages: discussing the topic and preparing the proposal. In order to make visible these events, I deploy Lave and Wenger's Community of Practice model, while taking a post-structuralist view of learning as a dynamic between language, identities, power relations, affordances and agency. Findings show unequal support for these events on the two courses; I argue that this exemplifies significantly different ideologies relating to the accommodation of L2 students, and discuss implications for course design.

Keywords:

• L2 students
• accommodation
• course design
• identities
• apprenticeship
• literacy events