Writing the Words and Writing the Lives: Dialogical Becoming of a Korean Undergraduate in the U.S.

Through deconstructing the term, international student, in Korea and the U.S., this paper examines how a Korean student's asserted identity as a cosmopolitan individual diverges from his assigned identity as an other in the U.S (Cornell & Hartman, 2005). His growing awareness of his assigned identity as a racial minority and foreigner in the U.S. was negotiated through his authorial voice as he wrote about affirmative action in his first-year composition class. Analysis of his first and final writing drafts illustrates that writing and literacy are ideological acts, where a text is interpreted in the context with the author's intention. Even though the student maintained his cosmopolitan identity, he tactically repositioned his assigned identity in relation to his mainstream American audience. The findings of this research show that the identification process of becoming is relational, social, and situated, which shifts L2 reading and writing practices from a comprehensive mode to a critical one, and eventually to a creative one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]