Rebecca Lorimer Leonard | University of Massachusetts Amherst (original) (raw)

Biliteracy by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard

community literacy journal, 2019

Review by Rebecca Lorimer of Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy. The review appeared in the F... more Review by Rebecca Lorimer of Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy.
The review appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of the Community Literacy Journal.
"Illegal Alphabets is immeasurably useful for both community literacy research and teaching. As a model for ethical community research, and as an elegantly accessible write-up of an ethnography, the book invites readers to explore scholarship about genre, vernacular writing, phonetics, and identity, all in terms of a lived literacy rompecabezas, grounded in one historical moment but resonating across time and space. Although told in fine ethnographic detail, the migrants’ story is a case study—or case history, as Kalmar names it—of a larger social phenomenon. The case is cultural clash in a small town, but the phenomenon is fear of the other. Thus, the book’s narrative simplicity belies its complex meaning: its singularity—the case—allow complex truths to become clear."

Papers by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard

College English, 2014

This article appeared in 76.3 of College English. "The accounts of six multilingual writers that... more This article appeared in 76.3 of College English.

"The accounts of six multilingual writers that follow show how writing across languages and locations in the world fosters what might be thought of as rhetorical attunement: an ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity. Rhetorical attunement is a literate understanding that assumes multiplicity and invites the negotiation of meaning across difference. By virtue of their daily experience with language variety, the writers in this study are tuned toward the communicative predicaments of multilingual interaction. Predicaments are idiosyncratic and ordinary moments in which rhetorical strategies are practiced but also created. This essay moves through these moments, exploring writing activities that reveal the negotiated, flexible quality of language, and showing that multilingual writers are not aware of this quality a priori, but come to know—become rhetorically attuned over a lifetime of communicating across difference."

College English, 2016

This article first appeared in "Translingual Work in Composition," special issue of College Engli... more This article first appeared in "Translingual Work in Composition," special issue of College English (78.3).

WPA-CompPile Research Bibliographies, 2010

This annotated bibliography includes case studies, pedagogical models, and theoretical essays tha... more This annotated bibliography includes case studies, pedagogical models, and theoretical essays that will help WPAs implement and assess service learning programs. The following sources address issues such as curriculum design and revision (Adler-Kassner, Crooks, and Watters; Deans); service learning program assessment (Bringle, Phillips, and Hudson; Canada and Speck); community-university partnerships (Deans, Roswell, and Wurr; Flower; Goldblatt; Parks); student development and attitudes (Cardenas and Garza); and civic engagement and social justice (Coogan, Davi, Flower, Herzberg). The annotations highlight tensions between academic and extracurricular discourses and offer strategies for overcoming some of the conceptual, programmatic, and institutional challenges in implementing sustainable writing programs with service learning components.

Composition Studies, 2016

This paper first appeared in the "Where We Are" section of 44.1 of Composition Studies.

Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 2021

Co-authored by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, Shanti Bruce & Deirdre Vinyard This article reports on a... more Co-authored by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, Shanti Bruce & Deirdre Vinyard

This article reports on a cross-institutional, mixed-methods research study designed to gather data on first year writers’ language backgrounds at three North American universities. Researchers administered a language survey to 1,870 first year writing students and led follow-up focus groups with 32 participants. Researchers utilized three methods (descriptive statistical analysis, systematic qualitative analysis, and thematic qualitative analysis) to analyze numerical survey responses, written survey responses, and focus group transcripts. Results include both quantitative and qualitative findings, featuring one extended case study that incorporates all three data sources to richly detail the article’s argument: while language surveys are conducted to understand changing populations, they reify language backgrounds in the labeling act, thereby constraining language identities more complex than institutional language allows. The article features rather than obscures this tension, including student resistance to the survey as data reveal how students co-opt, adopt, and resist the language identities supplied to them.

Literacy in Composition Studies, 2015

This paper is the special editors' (Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, Kate Vieira, and Morris Young) intro... more This paper is the special editors' (Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, Kate Vieira, and Morris Young) introduction to volume 3, issue 3 of Literacy in Composition Studies.

Research in the Teaching of English, 2013

This essay explores the lived literacy experiences of four multilingual immigrant writers in the ... more This essay explores the lived literacy experiences of four multilingual immigrant writers in the US, showing first, how they have moved their literacy practices among multiple languages and locations in the world, and second, how these practices have been destabilized and redefined by the social contexts they have met along the way. Aiming to unsettle the assumed durability of literacy practices on the move, the essay argues that multilingual literacy practices do indeed travel with writers across locations and languages, but to uncertain effect. These multilingual practices appear to be too contingent on social dynamics to be easily accessed and deployed. Thus, even when writers migrate with fully developed multilingual repertoires—including fluency in English they do not always experience the social mobility often promised.

Written Communication, 2015

Contemporary international migration produces a great deal of bureaucratic writing activity. This... more Contemporary international migration produces a great deal of bureaucratic writing activity. This article reports on a study of one bureaucratic literacy practice—correspondence—of 25 international migrants in the United States. Contextual and practice-based analysis of data collected through literacy history interviews shows that (a) by virtue of living transnational lives, migrant writers develop correspondence practices that seem vernacular, but in fact take on the hegemonic qualities of modern bureaucracy, and (b) when composing everyday correspondence, migrant writers, rather than being subject to bureaucracy’s whims, take up bureaucratic roles that allow them to manage their own and others’ economic and geographic mobility. These findings complicate claims that migrant correspondence simply maintains relationships or fosters cultural cohesion. Migrant writers, while often corresponding to keep in touch with family and friends elsewhere, also adopt the practices of bureaucracy, becoming participants in the management of people on the move.

Journal of Second Language Writing, 2020

L2 writing pedagogies have traditionally raised students’ language awareness. By drawing attentio... more L2 writing pedagogies have traditionally raised students’ language awareness. By drawing attention to the form, structure, and properties of the target language, traditional paradigms foster L2 writers’ language and literacy development, but do not necessarily enhance their capacities for critical reflection on matters of social and linguistic responsibility. This paper explores the social justice potentialities that critical language awareness (CLA; Fairclough, 1992) and critical reflection (CR; Mezirow, 1990) hold together as pedagogies for the L2 writing classroom. It features the collaborative self-study research of a university developmental English writing instructor who presents three case studies of ESL writers, and reveals how the pedagogical phenomena appear to manifest in each students’ writing. The instructor’s own interpretations are questioned by a “critical friend”, who provides a trusted critique, and supports the instructor in identifying changes to her practice (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009). The article concludes with the instructor’s own critical reflection. Ultimately, the article offers further ways that CLA and CR can be fostered together in writing instruction. It proposes that L2 writers may become more socially and linguistically responsible individuals as they write and reflect on their own experiences with language differences.

Book Reviews by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard

Community Literacy Journal, 2012

Review by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard of Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography by Eli Goldblatt. Th... more Review by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard of Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography by Eli Goldblatt.
This review appeared in the fall 2012 edition of Community Literacy Journal.

Composition Studies, 2011

Review by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard of Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global C... more Review by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard of Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era
of Global Capitalism, by Gregorio Hernandez-Zamora.
This review appeared in 39.1 of Composition Studies.

Writing Program Administration, 2014

This essay reviews recent work in writing center scholarship: Babcock, Rebecca Day, and Terese T... more This essay reviews recent work in writing center scholarship:

Babcock, Rebecca Day, and Terese Thonus. Researching the Writing Center: Towards an Evidence-Based Practice. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. 214 pages.

Geller, Anne Ellen, and Michele Eodice, eds. Working with Faculty Writers. Logan: Utah State UP, 2013. 320 pages.

Grutsch McKinney, Jackie. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. Logan: Utah State UP, 2013. 174 pages.

Lee, Sohui, and Russell Carpenter, eds. The Routledge Reader on Writing Centers & New Media. New York: Routledge, 2013. 304 pages.