After I decided to use literacy narratives written by multilingual writers, I
established the criteria I'd use to select the narratives for intervention. My
yardstick was Corkery's concept of "identification bonds" discussed earlier.
Therefore, my criteria included the following. One, the writer self-identifies
as multilingual, in order for students to establish identification bonds with
them. Two, the narrative is about learning English as an additional language;
this usually means that the narrative includes the elements of reflection I hope
my students will notice: goal, shifting views, and lesson. Three, the narrative
is about the struggle of learning English, and was written at the time
immediately following the writer's arrival in the U.S.

The transnational context of writing a narrative would be similar to my
students' context writing about an event that most probably took place in their
home countries while living in another. However, searching the DALN for
materials that met these criteria was a serious challenge. Although Louie Ulman
assures us that the DALN archive was made public for a range of purposes, one of
which is research, Krista Bryson challenges that assertion, arguing that the
archive was not originally designed to serve research needs. Which explains the
difficulty researchers like myself may encounter as they try to locate
narratives with the special characteristics like the ones written by
multilinguals in my case.

Browsing through the DALN comprehensive collection, I noted that some
contributors refer to themselves as L2 learners in the title of their narrative.
Others disclosed their linguistic pluralism in the body of their narratives.
Unlike Bryson, who selected narratives by three self-identifying Appalachian
graduate students from the narratives she collected herself, I first identified
multilingual writers by their first names. Due to my familiarity with
foreign-sounding names, I was looking for contributors whose names sounded
Arabic, Asian, Latin, or Eastern European. I have to admit that as much as I
despised this approach, because it instilled stereotypes about ethnicities on
one hand and limited my search on the other, I was able to find a number of
literacy narratives that were written by international multilingual writers. I
read the ones I found very carefully, and finally selected two that met the
criteria previously set, while exhibiting the three elements of reflection
previously identified.