SoE Voices Seminar: Language Deficit or Linguistic Repertoires?
Event details
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Wednesday 18 March 2026 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm
Description
Language Deficit or Linguistic Repertoires? Documenting International Students’ GenAI-Led Linguistic Practices
Literacy, language and digital literacies cluster
With AI’s widespread use and reliance, there is a greater need for criticality and meta- awareness of what is ‘black-boxed’ (Latour, 1999) when becoming an academic writer.
This article investigates how the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) influences culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) students in their cross-cultural thinking and linguistic expression as writers. The article is based on a study that addresses a lack of critical framing about knowledge generated and how GenAI knowledge frames and disguises larger social categories related race, culture, and linguistic diversity. The article therefore takes a disruptive and critical stance on AI use by interrogating ways that CALD students in higher education see themselves, their cultures and their identity in AI-assisted compositional practices. Taking a reflexive lens on AI practices over one week through journaling and visual documentations (Gillen, 2010) combined with focus groups, data were examined through Ivanič’s (1998) writer identity lens. What became clear were new forms of academic authorship where burgeoning writers mediated their linguistic repertoires with iterative knowledge brokering in LLMs. This picture of academic writer identity is not always easy or ideal, and participants shared feelings of disempowerment as they developed their AI-led academic writing identity. The article provides the field with more digitally disruptive ways to prompt critical responsivity about GenAI and methods to identify embedded stereotypes hidden within GenAI knowledge generation.
Author biographies
Jennifer Rowsell is Professor of Digital Literacy at the University of Sheffield. Her most recent book is The Comfort of Screens: Literacy in Postdigital Times (Cambridge University Press). She is Lead Editor of Reading Research Quarterly and Co-Editor of the Routledge Expanding Literacies in Education book series.
Tianyi Wang is Lecturer in Education at the School of Education. Her primary research interest lies in language learning motivation, multilingualism and AI-aided academic writing.
