A ruling passion for creative writing

This study examines a Korean undergraduate’s negotiation of academic literacies across his home country and the U.S., and its impact on his professional identity. The longitudinal data collected over two years have enabled the author to capture the critical incidents and the processes of how his assimilation, contestation, and negotiating academic literacies have occurred. Using analytical framework of transnational, interdisciplinary, and professional levels of context, this study reports that a ruling passion for creative writing primarily impeded the case study student’s learning academic literacies; however, various dialogic interactions with instructors and peers enabled the student to negotiate his identity as an academic and creative writer. Findings suggest that learning difficulties in academic literacies can be fundamentally rooted in the cultural clash of a belief system between the self and the discourse community. Therefore, an instructor’s understanding regarding how a student’s belief system can shape his literacy values and acts of writing is recommended. Findings also suggest the importance of multiple sources and specificity of feedback for the student's improvement of writing, when American academic discourses are elusive, intangible, and opaque to the international student who crosses the linguistic and national boundaries