| This inquiry explores how eight young francophone scientists within anglophone and francophone postsecondary institutions in Montréal and Paris developed academic literacies in English and French, and constructed identities as members of national, linguistic, academic, and socio-cultural groups. I define literacy development as an individual's development of writing competencies and appropriation of language and social practices in and around written texts within specific socio-cultural, interactional, and discursive contexts. I adopt a socio-cultural, hermeneutic approach to literacy and identity to propose an integrated model of academic biliteracy development and identity construction inspired by Bakhtin, Halliday, Ricœur, Taylor, and Vygotsky. To understand how the participants engaged in academic literacy practices and constructed identities in their academic writing, I conducted 50 hours of autobiographical and text-based interviews about their writing, life plans and experiences, and sense of self as writers and learners, over three years. I also paid visits to the participants' homes and workplaces, and collected documents such as legal texts, university statutes, and national census data so as to situate the participants' texts and experiences within their autobiographical, institutional, historical, and societal contexts. Through selected excerpts from interviews, documents, and writing samples, I argue that the participants' academic biliteracy development and identity construction was shaped by their individual evaluative responses to social forces. I suggest the shared individual and collective responsibilities of scientists, language specialists, academic gate keepers, universities, and governments for the advancement of academic literacies in more than one language. I draw implications of this inquiry for academic biliteracy, instruction and research in bilingual academic writing, and the theoretization of writers' identities. |
