Guillaume Gentil

Biography

My current research interests in second language writing and biliteracy development in professional and postsecondary settings originated from my academic literacy experiences in France, the USA, and Canada. As a student of biology and agricultural sciences (M. Sc. in plant pathology, Institut National Agronomique, Paris; 16-month research internship, University of Wisconsin Madison), and then a student of applied linguistics (M.A. and Ph.D. in second language education, McGill University, Montréal; postdoctoral internship with Alister Cumming, University of Toronto), I experienced firsthand the challenges of bilingual academic writers who must shuttle back and forth between languages and discourse communities, writing in one language while reading in another, and alternating the language of composing while negotiating divided linguistic loyalties. This interest has resulted in several case studies and institutional ethnographies of academic and professional biliteracy over the last ten years with a threefold focus on multilingual writers’ motivations for biliteracy, individual and institutional strategies for biliteracy, and ways to design enabling contexts for biliteracy. This research work has appeared in Canadian Modern Language Review, Discourse & Society, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of Second Language Writing, Written Communication, and several co-edited books. The theoretical and programmatic piece “A biliteracy agenda for genre research,” originally published in JSLW, was reproduced in The Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals: 2011. Initially, I turned to English for Specific Purposes and English for Academic Purposes for insight into the teaching of scientific and professional writing. While I have remained interested in these fields, I soon realized the importance of cross-pollinating them with other areas of research, such as second language writing, bilingual education, and academic literacies, in order to design instructional strategies that prepare student and professional writers for work in multilingual contexts. I have also turned to corpus linguistics as offering useful tools for the study of specialized discourses and writing development. More recently, my co-editorship of the Journal of Second Language Writing has rekindled my interest in multilingual scholars’ publishing practices and the geopolitics of academic publishing.

Research Interest

Professional and Academic Biliteracy Second Language Writing Languages for Specific Purposes Corpus Linguistics for Language, Writing, and Discourse Studies Identity and Language Learning.