The Production and Reception of Multilingual Student Written Assignments in Content Classes at the American University of Afghanistan

Henderson, Christopher and Tusting, Karin (2025) The Production and Reception of Multilingual Student Written Assignments in Content Classes at the American University of Afghanistan. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This study investigated the production and reception of multilingual students' written assignments in four content classes at AUAF. The goals were threefold: (1) to explore and understand how and/or the extent to which the subject lecturers scaffolded the production of their students' assignments in these classes; (2) how and why the students wrote their assignments in the ways they did; and (3) how and why the lecturers read assessed these assignments in the ways that they did. The overarching methodology was text-oriented ethnography. Ethnographic data were gathered through participant observation in the classes and cyclical talk-around-texts with the students and lecturers. Textual data included assignment guidelines, other written scaffolds or input materials, and the students’ assignments and drafts. Analysis of both the ethnographic data and student text drew on Turner’s (2018) concept of writtenness to explore if, how, and why the student and lecturer participants’ senses of writtenness influenced their text production and reception practices. Findings showed that writtenness did influence these practices, including some of the lecturers in class practices and guidelines, although these practices were often missed or ignored by the students. All the students' texts, however, suggest they had drawn on senses of writtenness during text production, although the amount of work they were willing to devote to the writing in the text as opposed to the content was often also influenced by their perceptions of the lecturers and the extent to which writtenness was valued in their classes or AUAF in general. Some students, however, engaged in significant labour to submit polished work regardless of the contextual factors, although for different reasons. The lecturers’ reading and grading practices were also generally influenced by their senses of writtenness, very much so in some cases. However, although all the texts exhibited varying degrees of marked writtenness, all the lecturers tended not to overly penalise this and rescaled the assessment ranges to the local context of AUAF. While the level and range of grades they awarded varied significantly, text analysis also showed that texts with less marked writtenness received higher grades in each class. The study aims to contribute to understandings of the production and reception of multilingual student writing in contexts such as AUAF.