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The translingual turn has prompted various attempts at bringing “translingual writing” into various curricula. However, if such writing, indeed any writing, continues to be bound to prevailing assessment practices, then we potentially sustain and exacerbate inequitable sociolinguistic economies and relations. Lee argues that questions of whether to invite and how to assess translingual writing are secondary to questions of how to go about translanguaging assessment, which entails the application of theoretical tenets of translingualism toward a reimagination of existing assessment ecologies.

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.

Bria78-4n Ray comments on Jay Jordan’s “Material Translingual Ecologies” from CE 77.4.

Keith Gilyard's contribution offers a bracing response to the symposium and the larger body of work identified with "translingual." Identifying the emergence of translingual perspectives with a long tradition in composition (and beyond) combating monolingualist ideology, he cautions against temptations to turn translingual theory's insistence on difference as the norm of language practice into a flattening of all difference through abstraction that elides the negotiation of differences in power from communicative practice, a removal that would lead to overlooking which differences in language have what effects on whom. Gilyard's response and this symposium as a whole show how "translingualism" can, might, and needs to be always put to work.

Decades of research on rater training and scoring practices demonstrates that raters' preferences for writing quality are malleable; for instance, it is customary to "calibrate" raters' scoring decisions through documents like scoring protocols and rubrics. This essay argues that while rubrics from contemporary large-scale writing assessments (and the local assessments they inspire) maintain retrograde assumptions about language variation, relatively small adjustments to these rubrics could help raters and candidates establish what Joseph Williams once called "the ordinary kind of contract" that readers and writers routinely observe anywhere outside of testing contexts.

This essay argues that students must call on their rhetorical sensibilities each time they sit down to write instead of automatically assuming that engaging in code-meshing is the appropriate response to every writing situation. It also encourages pedagogical efforts among teachers that invite students to locate translingualism in its larger contextual relationship with monolingualism and multlingualism, two other approaches to language difference that inform the teaching of writing. In the end, the essay suggests, students must take into consideration how each of these approaches to language difference influences the various decisions they are required to make in the writing classroom.

This essay argues for approaches to composing that underscore the translingual and multimodal (or transmodal) character of texts and communicative practices. It maintains that learning about and working with different language varieties, cultural conventions, modes, and communicative technologies (digital as well as analog) helps to highlight processes of making, engaging, remixing, and transforming which, in turn, provide markedly different, and greatly enriched, points of entry for experiencing and appreciating the dynamic, highly distributed, translingual, multimodal, and embodied aspects of all communicative practice.

This essay traces a branch of translingualism in US college composition to the era of open admissions, when the emergence of basic writing precipitated a new kind of reading on the part of composition teachers and a new understanding of what error or language differences might mean. It locates one of the antecedents of a translingual approach in the close reading derived from literary studies that developed out of the experience of basic writing, from Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations to David Bartholomae’s “The Study of Error” to the present-day work of Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner.

This issue both reflects and builds on the efforts prompted by the 2011 College English essay “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach,” by Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur. Contributions to this symposium contextualize the emergence of a translingual approach, explore the tension and interconnections between a translingual approach and a variety of fields, and explore the viability of a translingual approach in light of existing academic structures.

This essay identifies the definitional confluences between transfer and translingualism and then reflects on the ways that each term might benefit from considering the other’s research questions, theoretical frames, and methodologies. While translingualism challenges assumptions about how to recognize and evaluate transfer, the transfer literature demonstrates the value of fine-grained, long-term, naturalistic studies of writing, a value productively taken up in research on a translingual approach. Ultimately, the essay suggests that both transfer and translingualism might best be understood not as prescribed pedagogies or policies but as terms with explanatory value: small theories that help open up changing practices in our writing lives.

Teacher preparation for translingual writing differs from dominant forms of professional development wherein teachers are armed with predefined norms, materials, and knowledge for classroom purposes. Describing the principles that guide a teacher training course, this essay argues that teacher preparation for translingual writing should focus on encouraging teachers to construct their pedagogies with sensitivity to student, writing, and course diversity, thus continuing to develop their pedagogical knowledge and practice for changing contexts of writing. The essay outlines the principles (practice-based, dialogical, and ecological) that shape the course, describes its main features, and assesses its outcomes.

Emancipatory projects that have sought to change paradigms of knowledge making in English studies have fallen short of addressing the imperialist underpinnings of modernist thought. This essay defines three key aspects of translingual approaches to composition and rhetoric (i.e., languaging, translating, and dwelling in borders) that can potentially involve scholars and students in meaning making that attempts to level linguistic and knowledge hierarchies that always index imperialist legacies of thought and deed.

This essay examines what a translingual orientation offers to the study and teaching of genre, in particular what we gain when we think of genre difference not as a deviation from a patterned norm but rather as the norm of all genre performance. A translingual perspective draws our attention to genre uptake as a site of transaction where memory, language, and other semiotic resources, genre knowledge, and meanings are translated and negotiated across genres, modalities, and contexts. Focusing on genre uptake performances shifts attention from genre conventions to the interplays between genres where agency is in constant play.

Recent scholarship has highlighted discursive constraints students face when writing on religion in college classrooms and has questioned the efficacy of current classroom—practices for responding to such students and texts. This article addresses these concerns by positing a translingual framework for responding to students’ religious discourse. It—describes how changing conditions create and transform religions and illustrates how religious practitioners participate in those transformations. It rereads texts written by—religious writing students, demonstrating how instructors could use translingual responses to help students employ their diverse religious resources in writing to interrogate and—intervene in these changing religious contexts.

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.—

Translingual approaches to composition promise to nudge the field fully away from outdated concepts of linguistic diversity, replacing judgments of correctness and assumptions—about discrete languages with analyses of local, situational negotiations and pragmatic competence. Yet in fully displacing the monolingual “native speaker” with the translingual—composer, the approach replaces one linguistic hero with another—a fully competent “user” who shuttles between languages. This article seeks to extend translingualism’s—analysis of (metaphorical) language ecologies into the material surroundings of language contact situations. Drawing on scholarship on affect, vital materialism, and material—rhetorics, it suggests an empirical reorientation that diffuses attention beyond human language-using rhetors in order to account for shared rhetorical agency.

We argue that composition scholarship’s defenses of language differences in student writing reinforce dominant ideology’s spatial framework conceiving language difference as deviation from a norm of sameness. We argue instead for adopting a temporal-spatial framework defining difference as the norm of utterances, and defining languages, literacy practices, conventions, and contexts as always emergent, ongoing products of iterations, and thus manifestations of writer agency. Using the “White Shoes” essay from David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” we show how such a framework addresses the writer’s agency iterating the “same,” and how it resolves concerns to meet students’ need and right to learn both dominant and subordinate languages.

This article provides a historical case study of the Sentinelle Affair, a conflict between French language rights and the English Only educational policies of the Catholic Church in New England in the 1920s. An analysis of this conflict reveals a correspondence between programs of language centralization and the production of language differences in the United States. The article explores the possibility that such language histories of white ethnic groups might provide grounds for creating what Malea Powell calls “a rhetoric and composition alliance.”

Arguing against the emphasis of traditional U.S. composition classes on linguistically homogeneous situations, the authors contend that this focus is at odds with actual language use today. They call for a translingual approach, which they define as seeing difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening.

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 reads the essays in this issue from the perspective of work in rhetorical genre theory on the concept of “uptake” in order to examine some of the challenges and possibilities teachers as well as students face as they engage in the work of identifying and deploying multiple languages and discourses. He suggests that the essays allow us to see uptake both as a site for the operations of power and a site for intervening in those operations, as well as allowing us to see a number of such interventions underway.