ABSTRACT
The opening words of my title are borrowed from Suresh Canagarajah’s (2001) essay in a collection titled ‘Reflections on Multiliterate Lives’ (Belcher and Connor 2001). In this edited collection, now successful multilingual academics reflect on their literate lives in English and one or more other languages. Suresh, who grew up in Sri Lanka, speaking Tamil at home and then English, is now a professor of English in the USA. Through his literacy autobiography, in which he recounts his journeys both physical, cultural and linguistic, shuttling between the different academic and private worlds of Jaffna, graduate school in the USA and his professional life as a teacher and writer, we learn much about the abilities and capacities of our students, often, perhaps thoughtlessly, or just as a convenient shorthand, labelled ESL, non-native speakers or international. The choice of the terms multiliterate and multilingual is therefore deliberate as they signal not an absence or a lack, but an accomplishment. His multiple literate lives have given Suresh a ‘rich repertoire’ of communicative strategies (Canagarajah 2001: 36). He views himself as a ‘fortunate traveller’. Literacy autobiographies and other reflective accounts by multilingual graduate stu-
dents and academics provide supervisors with an insight into the worlds their students come from. They allow us to recontextualise discourses that position international students and others from non-English-speaking backgrounds as different, or lacking, and come to understand them as having achieved and succeeded in meeting great challenges. The situated, localised nature of becoming literate in more than one language undercuts discourses that, for example, group Asian students as an undifferentiated, homogenous grouping. Whether it be China during the cultural revolution, postwar middle class Japan or Cold War Soviet Union, we learn about the power of imagination, what Wenger (1998: 176) refers to as ‘a process of expanding oneself by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves’. Many international students who enrol in doctoral programmes far from their home country have harnessed this power to imagine themselves becoming members of new communities ‘not immediately tangible and accessible’ (Kanno and Norton 2003: 241). Guilfoyle’s (2005: 2) interviews with international postgraduate research students
studying in Australia clearly indicate ‘an expressed desire for opportunities to develop
networks’. For Guilfoyle (2005: 2), students sought ‘a sense of community’ through their desire for essential networks as reflected in the words of one student, ‘the most important thing is to try and get yourself acquainted’. Other students’ comments reflect both the desire for ‘acquaintance’ and the absence of contexts that facilitate it:
One of the things I came to Australia for was the networks, developing. Get to know people, opportunities. … I was looking to the future, get to meet people from different cultures. … Unless you actually take the initiative yourself to get to know people, there are no structures in place to help this.
