Coping Strategies of ESL Students in Writing Tasks across the Curriculum

Writing research has given us few accounts of the writing experience of ESL students outside the English or writing classroom. This article reports a qualitative research study of 5 ESL visa students in their first semester of study at a U.S. university. The goal of the research was to examine the academic literacy experiences of these students in light of the strategies they brought with them to their first academic experience in the U.S. and the strategies they developed in response to the writing demands they encountered in their regular courses across the curriculum. The results of this study give us an in-depth and detailed picture of this group of ESL students at the initial stages of acquiring discipline-specific discourse strategies not in the English classroom but while fully engaged in the struggle to survive the demands of disciplinary courses. In the tradition of qualitative research, this report is at the same time fully embedded in a narrative of these students' experiences, giving us a picture not only of students learning to write but also of human beings negotiating the exhilarating and sometimes puzzling demands of U.S. academic life.