In the field of plurilingualism, qualitative studies of the plurilingual literacy practices of university students are still lacking. Within the scope of plurilingual literacy development and learning through the use of plurilingual repertoires, I examine the writing activities of plurilingual students in interactive writing processes. For this purpose, I present preliminary results from a qualitative study that I conducted for my dissertation project with students of Romance studies at Goethe University Frankfurt.
The theoretical-methodological framework consists of the principles of conversation analysis. The data of interactive writing processes (n = 21) were gathered accordingly in my seminar (summer term 2017, winter term 2017/18). Analyzing an extract of an exemplary writing process, I aim to answer the following questions:
- How do students negotiate formulations within the writing process?
- In what way do they use their plurilingual repertoires while formulating?
By answering these questions, I develop criteria for further analysis of the interactive writing process in my data corpus. Furthermore, I attempt to discover potential benefits of plurilingualism for interactive writing that might arise from plurilingual knowledge structures in formal registers.