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Motivation to English Academic Writing: Chinese Students’ Literacy Autobiography

This study looks at literacy as a site of power in which some forms of literacy practices have more power. Such power relations is even more complicated in English as a foreign language context, where school literacy, family literacy, and English language come into the picture. Many studies have explored different research methods to examine language learners’ voices in literacy practices, while literacy autobiography (LA) is not frequently used. LA is a reflective, first-person narrative of personal engagement in literacy practices. Through the LAs from a group of third-year university students in China, this qualitative case study examines motivation to in-school writing in general, their L1 and L2 in- and out-of-school writing experiences in particular. The main dataset includes 25 participants’ LAs; critical discourse analysis was used for data analysis. The findings suggest that their motivation to English academic writing is closely intertwined with their L1 academic writing, that it is the pedagogies employed in both L1 and L2 in-school writing that has affected their engagement, and that EFL students’ border-crossing experiences between both temporal and spatial spaces have shaped their engagement in writing. More important, demotivated students are not necessarily slow students in writing classes.