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The Pew Hispanic Research Center reports that between 1996 and 2012, enrollment in US higher education among Latinxs between the ages of 18 and 24 increased by 240 percent. In 2012 college enrollment among Latinx high school graduates aged 18 to 24 surpassed that of Whites for the first time in history, and NCES calculations show that more than half of those Latinx students enroll in two-year schools. Hence, in 2015 Latinxs found themselves the explicit targets of community college recruitment efforts aimed to capitalize on the increased presence of students from Latinx backgrounds. Once they pass through the doors, however, Latinx students too often find institutions ill-prepared to support their retention and success. Policies intended to guarantee equity might be effective in an environment where everyone is, in effect, the same, or when people are different in institutionally sanctioned ways, as when a student is diagnosed with a disability. However, in the case of multilingual students, such policies can mean they are consigned to a kind of institutional purgatory. They are neither in nor out; they gain access to college but remain blocked from advancement by required courses or chosen programs of study.

This study accounts for the complex tensions that four FYW multilingual students from Lebanon experience as they strive to reconcile monolingual representations of language—as a fixed, internally uniform, and discrete entity—on one hand with their own commitment toward mobilizing their diverse language resources as fluid, malleable, and intermingling in their academic work. Based on an analysis of the "postmonolingual" nature of their representations of language and language relations as socially embedded and constructed, I argue that diverse, and often contradictory representations circulating in their minds have complicated, even stifled, these writers' translingual academic literacies and abilities.

A concerned group of L2 professionals write an open letter to express their concern that the terms “L2 writing” and “translingual writing” have become almost interchangeable in—writing studies publications and conferences and further argue that much will be lost if “translingual writing” replaces “L2 writing.” Each are distinct areas of research and—pedagogy: L2 writing is a more technical description applied to writing in a language acquired later in life, while translingual writing describes an orientation to language—difference. Without attention to the distinct contributions made by each field, L2 scholarship becomes marginalized in publications, conferences, and hiring practices. The letter—authors and endorsers encourage writing studies editors and organization leaders to recognize and understand the difference between the fields so as to ensure a strong and—enduring future for L2 scholarship.—

This article draws from ethnographic research to explore the interplay between Western capital (both monetary and cultural), the English language, and Indonesian religious identity at the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies, an “inter-religious, international Ph.D. program” in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. After discussing research methodology and positioning the program’s local-global religious identity within the larger Indonesian geopolitical context—which highlights English’s complicated role as both the language of Western imperialism and the language of global academic connection—this article explores how two Muslim PhD students negotiate this contact zone as they write. These student portraits, in turn, highlight the importance of acknowledging (1) religious identities as resources in our increasingly global US classrooms; (2) that identity negotiation occurs both textually and extratextually as multilingual writers reformulate and circulate information they draw from English publications to foment social change in their local communities; and (3) the contributions that non-Western voices can make in academic conversations long dominated by the West.

This essay examines the lived literacy experiences of six multilingual immigrant writers, arguing that their everyday multilingual practices foster a distinct rhetorical sensibility: rhetorical attunement—an ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity. Rhetorical attunement is a way of acting in the world as a multilingual writer that assumes linguistic multiplicity and invites the negotiation of meaning across linguistic differences. The essay shows that multilingual writers aren’t aware of this quality of language a priori, but come to know—become rhetorically attuned—across a lifetime of communicating across difference.

The literary work of Anzia Yezierska is relevant to the fields of composition, rhetoric, and literacy. Partly in dialogue with the philosophy of John Dewey, it reveals the tensions and conflicts inherent in progressive education, emphasizing how these were viewed through the lens of the immigrant student. Yezierska shows that pedagogical progressivism has had tremendous potential to tap into students’ lived experiences and transform them into more fully realized, engaged citizens, even as she also shows that such power has been constrained by institutional structures.

President Bush’s National Security Language Initiative focuses narrowly on gearing language education to security and military needs. English educators should work with their counterparts in foreign language departments to promote a broader view, one that encourages study of the multiple language groups that currently exist within the United States.

The author suggests that English-only classrooms are not only the implicit goal of much language policy in the United States, but also assumed to be already the case, an ironic situation in light of composition’s historical role as “containing” language differences in U.S. higher education. He suggests that the myth of linguistic homogeneity has serious implications not only for international second-language writers in U.S. classrooms but also for resident second-language writers and for native speakers of unprivileged varieties of English, and that rather than simply abandon the placement practices that have worked to contain—but also to support—multilingual writers, composition teachers need to reimagine the composition classroom as the multilingual space that it is, where the presence of language differences is the default.

The author suggests that models positioning the multilingual writer as passively conditioned by “interference” from his or her first language, as well as more correlative models of the interrelationships of multiple languages in writing, need to be revised. Analyzing works written to different audiences, in different contexts, and in different languages by a prominent Sri Lankan intellectual, the author instead suggests a way of understanding multilingual writing as a process engaged in multiple contexts of communication, and multilingual writers as agentive rather than passive, shuttling creatively among languages, discourses, and identities to achieve their communicative and rhetorical objectives.

The essays gathered in this special issue of College English participate in an emerging movement within composition studies representing, and responding to, changes in, and changing perceptions of, language(s), English(es), students, and the relations of all these to one another. This movement critiques the tacit policy of “English Only” dominating composition scholarship and pursues teaching and research that resist that policy. It draws attention to the fact that within much composition teaching and scholarship, both the context of writing and writing itself are imaged to be monolingual: the “norm” assumed, in other words, is a monolingual, native-English-speaking writer writing only in English to an audience of English-only readers (Horner and Trimbur). This tacit policy of monolingualism manifests itself in other ways as well: the institutional divides separating most composition programs and courses from ESL programs and courses, including courses in “ESL composition,” and separating composition courses from courses that involve students in writing in any language other than English; the nearly complete absence in composition textbook “readers” of writings by anyone other than North American and British writers whose first language is English (even translations of texts written in languages other than English are rare); the insistence in composition textbooks on standardizing students’ English, and their neglect of competing standards and definitions of English; and the neglect in histories of composition of writing in languages other than English. Such practices define composition as composing in, and only in, an English that has a fixed standard that students

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PICK UP ANY RECENT PUBLICATION on composition and you will almost surely find some reference to the problem of evaluating writing. Teachers and researchers alike acknowledge that pronouncing judgment on a piece of writing is both important and difficult. Important because teaching students to write, sorting students for placement or admission, and research in composition all depend upon ability to discriminate levels of quality in writing. Difficult because the theoretical basis of evaluation remains unarticulated. In contrast, composition instruction has begun developing a coherent set of assumptions. For example, theorists may disagree on the relative merits of classical, tagmemic, dramatistic, and prewriting forms of invention, but they agree on the principle that invention is part of the writing process. Evaluation of writing proceeds without a similar set of principles. Yet evaluation does proceed. The need for deciding who shall attend which college, designating those competent to graduate from high school, identifying growth in writing, or determining our nation's educational progress have spawned various systems for evaluating writing. Holistic scoring, quantification of syntactic features, analytic scales, and primary trait scoring illustrate the range of existing methodologies for evaluating writing. Rather than evolving from commonly held assumptions about evaluation, each method rests upon its own set of assumptions. Statistical computations of reader responses provide the rationale for holistic scoring and analytical scales; developmental stages of language acquisition account for quantification of syntactic features; a triangular model of discourse underlies primary trait scoring. Each of these systems and the assumptions underlying it represent careful and intelligent thought, and my purpose here is not to denigrate any of them. I cite them simply as illustrations of my point. Driven by the necessity to evaluate writing, theorists have avoided examination of the nature of evaluation itself and have moved directly to devising means (and rationales for these means) for accomplishing this difficult task. In this article I wish to propose a more general theory of evaluation and to suggest how it might be worked out in practical terms. This theory grows out of a philosophical and linguistic debate on the question of meaning. The debate, best summarized by P. F. Strawson's distinction between

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LAST SPRING I VOLUNTEERED to teach an English graduate course entitled Teaching of Writing to Speakers of Dialect. Of course everyone speaks a dialect, but the graduate students were no fools. They knew that this verbose title was a euphemism for teaching students in remedial courses to write. After consenting to do the course, I panicked. I am and therefore thought by my department to know something about dialect problems. Of course I felt just about as much in the dark (forgive the racist imagery) on this matter as most of my colleagues, though I regularly taught the remedial, freshman English course which enrolls mostly and Spanish-speaking students. Now I was going to be unmasked as being as unenlightened and unexotic as my white colleagues. Heaven forbid! I scurried around to the graduate students who might take such a course and made them promise that they would not pre-register, hoping that the course would fold for lack of enrollment. But, alas, it didn't. So on the first day of class, I went to the assigned room, met my ten white English graduate students, confessed my ignorance, and began to teach what proved to be a fairly useful course, i.e., I learned a lot by teaching it. We began the course as all good graduate courses begin and end, with the students doing most of the work. We tried to make a complete annotated bibliography from 1964-77 on black dialect and from four journals which publish in this area: English Journal, College English, College Composition and Communication, and Florida Foreign Language Reporter. We dittoed our bibliographical finds each week and also starred and commented on the most interesting articles. The students murmured about the amount of time our comments took each week, but I found the practical ideas for teaching writing which came from these articles and the students' comments most helpful. The articles were also helpful, especially when compared with the readings in our three texts,' in eradicating the naivete with which some of the students began the course: they wanted me as a teacher of remedial composition to tell them how to teach dialect writers in twenty-five words or less, and if not in so few

IN The Bald Soprano Ionesco satirizes the grammar samples he studied while learning English, and many of us still remember some absurdly useless fragment, like How old is your aunt?, from a freshman foreign language class. But what about our own composition textbooks and tests? Humor, and opportunities to smile and share that pleasure with students, are welcome. But when I consider one of the findings of the second round of reading tests (1974-5) by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which demonstrated a decline in students' ability to detect irony, I wonder whether some of our grammar samples may not be suggesting unsuitable messages, to say the least, to students who are disposed, or decide, to read them literally. Such a discomfiting possibility occurred to me recently when a group of freshman composition students balked at doing this sentence combining exercise:

ALL I COULD SEE in front of me was white. White walls, frozen white on the roof outside my window, icicles hanging from a nearby roof gutter like translucent chandeliers. Rows of houses filled with blank minds; people staring at blank paper trying to fill the pages with anything. To generate thoughts and transfer them to paper, an impossible task. But why? Do writing demons cloud the mind and make writing so painful? The final paper was due in a few weeks. It was to be our perfect paper. A month after handing it in we would be teaching composition to some poor kids. I had no energy to write it and nothing to write about. I disgustedly left the typewriter and sprawled out on the bed. The page was blank so I couldn't even crumple it to vent my frustration. I picked up a book of short stories by Woody Alien and begin reading about a Boston College coed who hired a detective to find out if God was dead. She needed the information for a term paper. This story gave me an idea for my own final paper. There have been many articles on why Johnny can't read or write. Why such a tremendous interest in this fellow Johnny? Just who is he? I was determined to find out and use the material in my final paper. I went back to my typewriter and began writing letters to some of the major publications in which Johnny's story had appeared. After a week of receiving no replies, I began calling the places on the phone. Everyone I spoke with laughed at me. I called the FBI but the most I could get from them was, No comment. At this point I began to suspect conspiracy. There was no logical reason unless the government was now getting into conspiracy as an art form. Conspiracy for conspiracy's sake. One kid could not have any noticeable effect on the national average for standardized tests. My investigation had reached a dead end until one day I looked at a book titled Current Topics in Language (Nancy Ainsworth Johnson, ed.: Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1976) and came upon an article entitled Juanito's Reading Problems: Foreign Language Interference and Reading Skill Acquisition, by Nancy Modiano. So the plot thickened; either Johnny was using an alias, or matters had been complicated by a new person (or should I say persona) entering the scene. Going on the assumption that Johnny and Juanito were one and the same, I hired a detective to find him. All we had to go on was his name and the fact that he supposedly couldn't read or write. The detective tramped around the Midwest through the snow, made numerous phone calls, and followed around certain literary editors. After two weeks the situation seemed hopeless and I could no longer afford her fees, that is, if I was to pay the next semester's tuition. It was at the back of

WHEN W. NELSON FRANCIS said that, he didn't have it in mind to fun nobody. For sure there was no way he could have knowed, twenty years ahead of time, that his words would look like something meant for a bitter joke today. The revolution he was talking about (using structuralist linguistics to teach English) hasn't happened vet, to begin with. And to go on with, another one-generative transformational linguistics-has come along in the meantime and turned out about as useful to a teacher as a rubber crutch. The structuralists and the transformationalists haven't either one of them come up with the sweeping consequences Francis was so sure about. Structural linguistics gets used mostly in foreign language classes; and transformational grammar, in spite of two three papers saying that it might could be a little bit of use after all, has swept right into and right back out of English classes, leaving precious little behind itmaybe a good word or two said for sentence-combining exercises.1 There was the Roberts English Series, poor sorry thing, that no doubt meant well; all it did in the long run was teach a whole generation of English teachers to despise transformational grammar forevermore. Chomsky himself, they'll tell you, said T-grammar had no place in anybody's English class, and they're with him on that; by now you won't hear much else said on the subject amongst teachers. Seeing as how all this is true, it's purely radical of me to say that I disagree with all that; it's radicaller yet to say I think I can prove I'm right. Let me get the radicalities over with first off, then, by saving that six years work has got me convinced that transformational grammar for sure does have a place in

that it is meant mostly for lower-class blacks and not for the lower class in general. It comes, fortunately, at a time when many blacks are piecing together their identity, saving it from powerful attempts to fragment and destroy it. It is therefore controversial and widely discussed (see, for example, Olivia Mellan, Black English. Why Try to Eradicate It, The New Republic, 28 November 1970, pp. 15-17). But it has not been discussed in a wide enough context, so it is my purpose to do that in the following pages, thus to indicate why this ill-advised attempt to change people should be rejected. Let me begin with what I understand to be some facts and some pretty good hunches about language and language learning. It is, for example, an empirical assumption that language differences intuitively understood as dialect differences are relatively superficial, that is th t they amount to rule differences (in the terminology of the linguistic theory of Chomsky) which fall quite low in the ordered set of rules that constitutes

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