| The purposes of this study were to gain a better understanding of how multilingual students react to and are affected by two dominant language ideologies, the ideology of monolingualism and the standard language ideology; to see if students internalize writing proficiency exam writing values, reproduce them to pass, or resist them; and to see how the writing proficiency exam affects students' understandings of their place in the university.;To meet these purposes, the study examined multilingual students' understandings of and experiences with a high-stakes writing proficiency exam at a large, public, urban university. The exam was seen as a mechanism whereby the university imposed the standard language. Giroux's (1988) concept of "school voice," the authority that regulates students' language use, was used to construct a School Voice for this context through the analysis of university documents. School Voice discourses were isolated, analyzed for their use of the dominant language ideologies, and compared to discourses invoked by the students.;Sixteen students were interviewed, following Seidman's (1991) structure for establishing a life story context for a particular experience. Analysis of the interviews was both theory-based, relying on Carspecken's (1996) power relations analysis, and inductive.;The study found that, although a few students had positive experiences, most students experienced the exam negatively; the most negative experience was being failed on the exam while passing one's courses. Students were found to have accommodated the exam because of sanctions and shared norms, to have resisted the exam in a large number of ways, and to have used both School Voice discourses and some of their own to speak about the exam.;It was suggested that universities assess writing in classroom contexts rather than by means of a writing proficiency exam because this type of exam reinscribes the dominant language ideologies. It fails to promote a notion of literacy that encourages multilingual students to be academically engaged or to develop their voices. It also fails to promote an expanded notion of the literate tradition that allows the tradition to remain alive and allows students to contribute to it in new and meaningful ways. |
