Chinese international students’ social interaction and use of cultural resources in online discussions in an ESL classroom

While research on Academic Literacies has continued to develop, students’ cultural and linguistic differences have only been superficially explored within this framework without consideration of their contribution to writers’ practices, identities, and meaning-making processes. There is a need to continue extending the scope of this promising framework as both a pedagogical design frame and a logic of inquiry. To this end, this qualitative case study grounded in discourse analysis explores the writing moves Chinese international students make as they construct text meaning within the context of online discussions. This paper focuses on excerpts from two online discussion groups, including assignment prompts, news articles, student responses, and comments to one another within a university ESL Composition course in the U.S. An intertextual analysis suggests that when students socially interacted within online discussions in response to written texts and brought their perspectives and experiences into relationship with other writers’ ideas, they took the opportunity to draw upon the dialogue and their own cultural knowledge and experience, positioning these as valuable sources in co-constructing the meaning of texts and negotiating their stances toward them. • Students' cultural resources are valuable in constructing text meaning (74) • Students can co-construct text meaning through dialogue in online discussions (80) • Writing moves can be learned through social interaction in online discussions (80) • Multiple sources beyond the source text help students make meaning (77) • Intertextuality and intercontextuality play a role in students' analysis of text (83)