Conversations with Arab graduate students of English about literacy: The construction of identity.

摘要

This dissertation explores the construction of identity in conversations about literacy with a group of ten Arab graduate students of English, attempting to answer the question: "How do Arab graduate students of English construct their identities through their literacies in Arabic and English?"; The study is done within a postmodern philosophy of language, knowledge, literacy, and identity. Within this philosophy, language is interpretive. A text can have many possible meanings according to different readers or the same reader at different contexts in his/her life. Knowledge is narrative. Identity is multidimensional, including aspects of race, class, gender, nationality, education, profession, beliefs, etc. To study the participants' identities, qualitative oral interviews have been conducted to collect data, which has been rewritten to highlight context, individuality, expansion, and connections in the literacy experiences of each participant. Discussions then have been made of the collective aspects of learner, country, and gender that the participants share.; The findings of the study are qualitative and descriptive. In constructing their identities, the participants synthesize, in individual unique ways, multiple dimensions of who they are: Arabs; English graduate students of TESOL, applied linguistics, and literature; teachers; writers; researchers; men/women; wives/husbands; and from different national contexts: Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, Palestinian Jordanian, Palestinian who has become a U.S. citizen, and Moroccan. In their conversations about literacy, the participants take different specific stances on the continuum between reality and possibility, past and present, local and global, individual and social in their lived literacy experiences. Literacy to them is not only the skill to read and write, but also a way of thinking, feeling, relating, and living.; The dissertation concludes with pedagogic suggestions for the development of literate identities in Arab education. These suggestions include studying, applying, and engaging in literacy activities such as: contemporary language and literary theories, literature (ancient and modern, by men and women, canon and multicultural), translation, composition, technology, qualitative research, and narrative writing. The contribution of this dissertation to the available literature on literacy and identity is that it studies Arab graduate students of English, a group that has not been studied before for this topic.