"I Hate the ESL Idea!": A Case Study in Identity and Academic Literacy‪.‬

Introduction The site of academic writing today is a nexus for several powerful forces: the internationalization of higher education and of English; the increasing heterogeneity of university populations; and poststructural, postmodern challenges to traditional ways of representing and legitimating knowledge (Jones, Turner, & Street, 2000; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Pennycook, 1994). These forces elicit official and unofficial discourses about the so-called problem of student writing and a corresponding solution in a skills approach to teaching academic literacy. Recent research into academic literacy challenges the conceptualizations of language implicit in such approaches and interrogates the regulation of meaning-making in academic discourses (Lea & Street, 1998; Lillis, 2001, 2003; Silva & Matsuda, 2001). Rather than viewing language as a transparent conduit for meaning to be possessed and produced by an individual--the assumption behind a skills approach--language is understood as constructing meanings. Academic discourses are situated in historical, cultural, institutional, and social contexts in which meanings are contested (Lea, 2005). Reading and writing in university are defined as "socially situated discourse practices which are ideologically inscribed" (Lillis, 2003, p. 194). From this understanding, the increasing diversity and destabilization of higher education can be seen as an opportunity to raise questions about the nature of the academy and its reading/writing practices.