Context
The study discussed in this article forms one of several case studies of a larger research project that
investigates the nature of L2 literacy in the globalized media of Internet communication, and how new
forms of social networking in these electronic media have provided alternative contexts of language
development for young immigrants in the US. Understanding how a specific group of learners, identified
as immigrants and ESL students in the U.S. school system, use English and other languages in the global
contexts of the World Wide Web necessitates a research approach that explores the research participants'
activities and experiences in multiple contexts and how these contextualized activities and experiences
relate to each other. I started with locating participants in a school site in an urban area on the West Coast
of the US, and proceeded to study their activities on the Internet. Using a multi-sited ethnographic
approach (Green 1999; Marcus, 1995), I carried out fieldwork in both the school site where the focal
youth were learning English in the American school system and the electronic social spaces on the WWW
where they were networking through English and other languages with young people around the globe. In
addition, I used discourse analysis to study how the participants' language practices are related to the
construction of beliefs and identities within their social networks and relationships online.
From a methodological perspective, the case studies in this project make up a purposive sample that
builds in variety and opportunities for intensive study (Stake, 1995, 2000). Given that this is an
exploratory investigation of the new and emerging contexts of L2 literacy practices on the Internet, a
contextualized study of the experiences of the focal students would serve to illuminate some aspects of
the organization of online literacy practices from an insider's perspective, the students' processes of
participation in these online practices, and how these practices relate to their use of English.