APPRECIATING COLLEGE STUDENTS’ HOME DISCOURSES THROUGH CODE-MESHING: A QUALITATIVE STUDY WITH FIRST-YEAR WRITING STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON

Understanding college student writers’ literacies and discourses as other than a monolithic set of practices helps writing teachers become more accommodating of and invested in their learners’ wide array of community discursive resources and home-grown linguistic skills. In this dissertation, I recruited 16 research participants from three of my 2019 First-Year Writing sections in order that I study their code-meshing moves in their writing for class. While a teacher research project informed by past and more recent code-meshing research, my qualitative IRB-approved study draws from the following data sets: my students’ responses vis-à-vis their code-meshing experiences collected via their interview and survey responses and the code-meshing choices they made in their writing for class. The dissertation’s introduction chapter provides an overview of the context of the problem of code-meshing and a literature review of language difference in Rhetoric and Composition, identifies the research gaps, and proposes the study’s interventions. Chapter 2 goes through the data collection process for the surveys, interviews, and student writing gathered from student participants, addresses the dissertation’s methodological framework of teacher research, and identifies the multi-data-supported thematic categories deduced from the study. Each of the dissertation’s data-focused chapters, Chapters 3 through 5, begins with the collection process of the data for that chapter, offers takeaways based on analyzed data, provides student-data examples, and finally reaches a conclusion by the chapter’s end. Each one of these middle chapters also identifies the thematic categories most significant to research questions based on its own data type and proposes triangulated thematic overlaps with data types in other chapters. Chapter 6, the dissertation’s conclusion, provides a reminder of the lines of inquiry asked in the dissertation’s introduction, answers them, and offers takeaways and implications for writing teachers, researchers, and scholars by the chapter’s end. This dissertation project reaches the conclusion that code-meshing, as a composing strategy, helps make student writing more rhetorically compelling, more intimately personal, more processually aware, more community-conscious, and more politically responsive to the struggles and concerns of college students and their communities, especially transitioning (first-year) college students. Also, it suggests that code-meshing can be one means to promote rhetorical and linguistic diversity in college writing and one buffer to guard against retarding student language and thought by exclusively adhering to entrenched apparatuses of academic prose.