L2 Journal: An electronic refereed journal for foreign and second language educators

International students in the US face challenges in navigating university-level academic writing, particularly if English is not their first language. To succeed in their coursework, they must demonstrate mastery of course content, academic English, and writing conventions, while also balancing their native writing habits. Facing these difficulties, international students employ different resources (i.e., repertoires) to facilitate their writing. Understanding challenges international students face as well as resources they employ allows instructors to better support this population.This study examines the academic writing experiences of Chinese university-level international students through the lens of translanguaging in order to identify these repertoires and explore how students use them. The research question is: how does translanguaging interact with Chinese international students’ academic writing outside the traditional classroom setting? Through in-depth interviews with seven multilingual Chinese international students, this study reveals that Chinese international students may feel disadvantaged in the American education system because they cannot fully showcase their mastery of course content in their second language, English. Translanguaging is a tool that can help alleviate this disadvantage, and participants in this study used it automatically. However, they kept this process in their mind, separate from the policed zone of written text due to internalized English-only policies.