Project Ideas

I have a couple of ideas for the project for this course. First, I am interested in taking a critical look at literacy assessment. In the Casanave (2003) article that we read, she proposed examining writing as a sociopolitical artifact. I thought that I might take a close look at an assessment and ask questions such as:

1. Who was it designed for and for what purposes?
2. How does it influence ELL's  in a K-12 setting?
3. What sorts of identities does the test ascribe to students?

One assessment I might examine is the ACCESS which is a test of English proficiency that many states use in order to comply with NCLB requirements for ELL's.

I'm also very interested in the concept of identity, so another option for the project is to do a literature review on that topic. I would be particularly interested in research methodology and seeing how researchers of second language writing have conceptualized identity, what methods they have used, and what implications there are for future identitity studies.