Black Access and affiliation : The literacy and composition practices of English - language learners in an online fanfiction community ili

After reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels as a child, I had a difficult time leaving Middle Earth behind. There were so many plotlines and characters left unexplored that I began to write new stories using the characters and settings from Tolkien’s universe. At the time I was unaware that there were many children and adults across the United States who were enthusiastically producing similar works of fanfiction and publishing them in personal fan magazines (zines) or distributing them privately among the fan community. (See Jenkins, 1992, for an extensive history of fanfiction.) Fanfictions are original works of fiction based on forms of popular media such as television, movies, books, music, and video games. It was not until graduate school, when my research began to center on digitally mediated literacies and online cultures, that I realized there were countless other people across the globe who had been writing paper fanfiction for years and were now “meeting” online to share, review, and build on one another’s fictions. As a researcher of second-language acquisition (SLA) and literacy who has taught English as a second language (ESL) for years, I was even more intrigued to find that there are a great many English-language learners (ELLs) who are also writing, posting, and reviewing fictions in English in these online fanfiction communities. I wanted to find out what was so compelling about this space that adolescent ELLs would spend hours writing and reviewing fictions in English, when I could barely get many of my students to write a one-page essay in English class. During my observations across various fanfiction-related sites, the notions of “access” to and “affiliation” with SLA and writing came increasingly to mind.