ABSTRACT
This study began informally at the beginning of a fall semester at a private 4-year liberal arts university. I had a 9 a.m. meeting with a first-year student from Japan who had requested a space in the ESOL composition program, which I directed. Yuko (a pseudonym) had not been invited to enroll in the program primarily because she had achieved a high TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) score-640-which indicated that she could do work at the same level as U.S.-born speakers of English. Yet nothing I said in the meeting could convince her that this was true; she gave no explanation other than “I can’t.” Partly because she was having difficulty expressing herself, I decided to allow her to enroll in ESOL composition. As she chose the time block in which I was teaching, I realized I had a unique opportunity to look beyond her TOEFL score to gain a fuller understanding of her acquisition of academic literacy before she en-
tered the university and to determine if her assessment of her ability to do the work of the English composition program was valid.
