ABSTRACT
This qualitative study offers critical insight into how language policy interacts with daily classroom decisions at a large and highly diverse urban community college in the United States. Specifically, it examines the challenges that faculty teaching developmental writing courses for English language learners experience when determining what constitutes academic literacy and what language dimensions should be taught when their students’ success is solely based on the results of a summative, high-stakes assessment of expository writing. To identify these challenges and analyze how teachers negotiate their curricular decisions and classroom practices, this study includes interviews with ten writing instructors regarding reading choices, writing assignments, syllabus construction, and pedagogical methodologies in order to ascertain descriptive theories of academic literacy knowledge. This study of micro-language planning demonstrates that how university writing instructors define academic literacy and translate this construct into classroom policies and practices does not always align with university language policy, and offers a broader understanding of the complexity of English academic literacy within American community colleges.
