Reviewed are: Literacy as Translingual Practice: Between Communities and Classrooms A. Suresh Canagarajah, editor Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations A. Suresh Canagarajah Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies Scott Wible Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African AmericanLiteracy Vershawn Ashanti Young, Rusty Barrett, Y’Shanda Young-Rivera, and Kim Brian Lovejoy

In coining new terms or proposing a new concept, it is important to survey the new territory to make sure that the land has not been previously inhabited by other peoples. (In fact, much of what passes as new ideas about language in U.S. college composition have already been discussed in applied linguistics.) (Matsuda, 2013: 135) As noted by Paul Matsuda in Chapter 12 of this volume ("It's the Wild West Out There: A New Linguistic Frontier in U.S. College Composition"), compositionists need to ensure that intellectual accountability is observed in a new composition era. Echoing a similar sentiment, Lewis, Jones, and Baker (2012: 649) point out that "a plethora of similar terms (e.g., metrolingualism, polylanguaging, languaging, heteroglossia, codemeshing, translingual practice, flexible bilingualism, multilanguaging and hybrid language practices) makes [the] extension of translanguaging appear in need of focused explication and more precise definition" (emphasis added). While these new terms warrant explication, a point to which I will return later, the above observations also underscore how writing and literacy stand to benefit from developments in applied linguistics.

In fields such as sociolinguistics and composition and rhetoric, communication is increasingly understood as translingual, that is, as negotiated socially across languages. Those of us engaged in community literacy can and should recognize the deeply multilingual nature of the communities in which we work, and we should understand, embrace, and forward the translingual approach. Here I reflect on my first conscious attempt to teach translingually in a college course with a community-based learning component. I present an overview of the translingual orientation, reflect on the decisions I made as I prepared a college community-based learning course with translingual intentions but not overt translingual objectives, and examine some the students’ reflections that reveal their language attitudes at the end of the course. I argue that small, intentional decisions made towards a broader translingual orientation towards language and literacy make an immediate difference in how students think about language, and that those engaged in community literacy partnerships are in need of a theory of communication that the translingual approach can provide.

Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.

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.

This article situates one possible future for rhetorical genre studies (RGS) in the translingual, multimodal composing practices of linguistically diverse composition students. Using focus group data collected with L1 (English as a first language) and L2 (English as a second language) students at two large public state universities, the researcher examines connections between students’ linguistic repertoires and their respective approaches to multimodal composition. Students at both universities took composition courses that incorporate rhetorical genre studies approaches to teaching writing in conventional print and multimodal forms. Findings suggest L2 students exhibit advanced expertise and rhetorical sensitivity when layering meaning through multimodal composition. This expertise comes in part from L2 students’ experiences combining and crossing various modes when they cannot exclusively rely on words to communicate in English. Through this evidence, the researcher argues the translingual practices of L2 students can bridge connections and help develop pedagogical applications of multimodality and RGS, primarily by helping writing instructors teach genres as fluid and socially situated. In addition, the researcher presents a methodology for analyzing the embodied practices of composition students, which can further expand how genres are theorized and taught in composition courses.

To underline the value of composition’s international and multilingual history, this article presents an account of language attitudes, policies, and pedagogies at Syrian Protestant College (Beirut) between 1866 and 1902, which also provides a historical dimension to contemporary conversations about international and translingual approaches to writing research and pedagogy.

While composition has become more open to issues of world Englishes and more aware of how English writing is taught and learned in countries other than the United States, one of the issues that needs further investigation concerns the influence of increasingly powerful and accessible technologies for translation on the teaching of English writing in places where English is not the language of local communication. The most widely available technology for translation, Google Translate, can quickly convert large amounts of text from one language to another, though it does it with varying amounts of accuracy. Despite its sometimes egregious mistakes, however, it is fast becoming a tool not only for people who want to read online texts written in another language, but for composing texts. How students of English as a foreign language (EFL) might use translation technologies such as Google’s translation function when composing is an important question because it stretches (perhaps uncomfortably) the boundaries of what it means to “write in English.” How should EFL writing teachers integrate the use of such technologies into their teaching? In this article, I will explore the context of Google translation use in one country where English is not a language of local communication. Finally, I will suggest ways to use this phenomenon to rethink the notion of what it means to teach EFL writing in an age of increasingly sophisticated machine translation.

Even as globalization has transformed communication into a multicultural experience, composition programs in American academia continue to promote a prescriptive approach to language(Katz, Scott, & Hadjioannou, 2009; Richardson, 2003), encouraging students to incorrectly assume that “there is only one right way to use written language” (Lovejoy, 2003, p. 92). Thisapproach can foster biased attitudes among our students while leaving them unprepared for interaction with linguistically diverse populations and users of World Englishes (WEs) in particular.Composition courses should prepare students for multicultural communication by increasing their awareness of WEs and developing the skills they need to interact with their WE peers atschool, in the workplace, and in their home communities. This study looks at the impact such an approach can have on American students’ perception of World Englishes, generally, and WEtexts, specifically. Interviews, surveys, and essays were used to explore the language attitudes of American college students before and after they participated in several activities meant to developtheir knowledge of linguistic diversity and to familiarize them with World Englishes. The research provided encouraging signs of a possible correlation between increased knowledge about linguisticdiversity and positive language attitudes.

This article argues that an understanding of writing as translingual requires a shift to a different orientation to literacy—i.e., from autonomous and situated to negotiated. Such an orientationtreats the text as co-constructed in time and space—with parity for readers and writers in shaping the meaning and form—and thus performed rather than preconstructed, making the multimodal and multisensory dimensions of the text fully functional. Going beyond the native/nonnative and monolingual/multilingual speaker binaries, this study demonstrates that both student groups can orient themselves to such literate practices in the context of suitable pedagogical affordances. Drawing from teacher research informed by an ethnographic perspective, the study identifies four types of negotiation strategies adopted by writers to code-mesh and readers to interpret texts: envoicing, recontextualization, interaction, and entextualization. Envoicing strategies set the conditions for negotiation, as it is a consideration of voice that motivates writers to decide the extent and nature of code-meshing; recontextualization strategies prepare the ground for negotiation; interactional strategies are adopted to co-construct meaning; and entextualization strategies reveal the temporal and spatial shaping of the text to facilitate and respond to these negotiations. The analysis points to the value of a dialogical pedagogy that can further develop the negotiation strategies students already bring to the classroom.

Includes the syllabus and assignments discussed in Canagarajah’s article.

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.”

The classroom activity described in this webtext is my attempt to think through the ways that the multimodal nature of closed captioning as a language practice could intersect productively with a translingual approach to language. Part of rhetorical awareness for a globalizing citizenry is an acknowledgement of the complexity of language choices—even and especially in contexts where language is seemingly transparent, standard, unquestioned.

Scholarship on language difference has strived for decades to transform teaching practices in mainstream, developmental, and second-language writing classrooms. Despite compelling arguments in support of linguistic diversity, a majority of secondary and postsecondary writing teachers in the US still privilege Standard English. I join a number of scholars in arguing for a revival of classical style and the progymnasmata, albeit with the unique agenda of strengthening pedagogies of language difference. Although adapting classical rhetorics to promote translingual practices such as code-meshing at first seems to contradict the spirit of language difference given the dominant perception of Greco-Roman culture as imperialistic and intolerant of diversity, I reread rhetoricians such as Quintilian in order to recover their latent multilingual potential.

Reviewed are: Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy by Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff, Reviewed by Kara Poe Alexander Beyond Post process, edited by Sidney I. Dobrin, J. A. Rice, and Michael Vastola, Reviewed by William Duffy Code-Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Aja Y. Martinez, Reviewed by Gregory Shafer Autism Spectrum Disorders in the College Composition Classroom: Making Writing Instruction More Accessible for All Students edited by Val Gerstle and Lynda Walsh, Reviewed by Gary Vaughn

The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People’s Perseverance Ellen Cushman Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric Vorris L. Nunley Diverse by Design: Literacy Education within Multicultural Institutions Christopher Schroeder Code-Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance Vershawn Ashanti Young and Aja Y. Martinez, editors

Developing effective workplace safety and risk communication materials for Latino construction workers poses a challenge for technical communicators. These workers are at a disadvantage because of culture and language differences on many job sites. Furthermore, low levels of literacy in any language and lack of proper training compound their job site communication problems. This article builds on cultural studies-based recommendations to develop discourse in workplace safety and risk that these workers can fully understand. The authors in this study used direct creative input from Latino construction workers in order to create safety and risk communication products that were evaluated as effective and culturally relevant for these workers and their peers.

This essay offers an example of one course that focuses exclusively on Ebonics as a specific African American linguistic practice and on rhetoric and composition scholarship as the primary topics of investigation.

Against the limitations English monolingualism imposes on composition scholarship, as evident in journal submission requirements, frequency of references to non-English medium writing, bibliographical resources, and our own past work, we argue for adopting a translingual approach to languages, disciplines, localities, and research traditions in our scholarship, and propose ways individuals, journals, conferences, and graduate programs might advance composition scholarship toward a translingual norm.

Exploring language practices, beliefs, and management in a first-year writing program, this article considers the obstacles to and opportunities for transforming languagepolicy and enacting a new multilingual norm in U.S. postsecondary writing instruction. It argues that the articulation of statements regarding language diversity, co-developedby teachers and program administrators, is a valuable step in viewing and constructing the classroom as a multilingual space.

This article explores how the English language contributes to cross-boundary communication failure and establishes that there is an “English language problem” that has not been adequately addressed in preparing United States native English-speaking students for international technical communication tasks. For example, U.S. technical communication scholars are still grappling with the problems of using English in software internationalization and translating technical communication products across boundaries of national culture and language without privileging Western values and beliefs. The tendency is to assume American culture and American Standard English as the norm, and to identify cultural and linguistic differences as problems only when there is a communication failure or when non-native speakers of English translate product users' manuals and other documents for use by Americans. The article draws attention to the limitations of the current favored strategies for training native speakers in international audience analysis and calls for a revamping of the curriculum to allow for the integration of language-based methodologies. It suggests the incorporation of the World Englishes perspective into training programs to internationalize students' learning experiences.

This article reports my classroom-based qualitative research, conducted at a midwestern university, on the role of World Englishes in the ethos transformation of U.S. native English-speaking students. The 30 participants completed assignments that enhanced their understanding of how the English language affects discursive tasks in international audience adaptation. Efforts at internationalizing technical communication can benefit immensely from the inclusion of the World Englishes paradigm in training programs to account for students' language attitudes.

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.

This article describes specific language experiences of three college writing teachers and the classroom practices that have resulted from these experiences. The authors want to raise awareness of linguistic diversity in writing classes and to help teachers connect with their own language experiences in order to integrate policies and practices that value students' own language varieties.

This article argues that traditional models of WAC too narrowly privilege academic discourse over other discourses and communities shaping the worlds in which our students live and work. Writing Across Communities represents a shift in paradigm informed by Ecocomposition, New Literacy Studies, and Sociolinguistics. A Writing Across Communities approach to writing program reform foregrounds dimensions of ethnolinguistic diversity and civic engagement in contrast to other models or WAC currently institutionalized across the nation. Writing Across Communities, as a resistance discourse, calls for transdisciplinary dialogue that demystifies the ways we make and use knowledge across communities of practice.

The basics of child writing, as traditionally conceived, involve “neutral” conventions for organizing and encoding language. This “basic” notion of a solid foundation for child writing is itself situated in a fluid world of cultural and linguistic diversity and rapidly changing literacy practices.

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.

Understanding data-modeling performance can provide valuable lessons for the selection, training, research, and development of data models. Data modeling is the process of transforming expressions in loose natural language communications into formal diagrammatic or tabular expressions. While researchers generally agree that abstraction levels can be used to explain general performance differences across models, empirical studies have reported many construct level results that cannot be explained. To explore further explanations, we develop a set of model-specific construct complexity values based on both theoretical and empirical support from complexity research in databases and other areas. We find that abstraction levels and complexity values together are capable of providing a consistent explanation of laboratory experiment data. In our experiment, data were drawn from three models: the relational model, the extended-entity-relationship model, and the object-oriented model. With the newly developed complexity measures, a consistent explanation can be made for findings from other studies which provide sufficient model details for complexity values to be calculated.

Contesting the monolingualist assumptions in composition, this article identifies textual and pedagogical spaces for World Englishes in academic writing. It presents code meshing as a strategy for merging local varieties with Standard Written English in a move toward gradually pluralizing academic writing and developing multilingual competence for transnational relationships.

This essay examines a Brooklyn College–based research collective that placed African American languages and cultures at the center of the composition curriculum. Recovering such pedagogies challenges the perception of the CCCC’s 1974 “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” resolution as a progressive theory divorced from the everyday practices and politics of the composition classroom.

It s no secret that, in most American classrooms, students are expected to master standardized American English and the conventions of Edited American English if they wish to succeed. Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice works to realign these conceptions through a series of provocative yet evenhanded essays that explore the ways we have enacted and continue to enact our beliefs in the integrity of the many languages and Englishes that arise both in the classroom and in professional communities.Edited by Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva, the collection was motivated by a survey project on language awareness commissioned by the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication.All actively involved in supporting diversity in education, the contributors address the major issues inherent in linguistically diverse classrooms: language and racism, language and nationalism, and the challenges in teaching writing while respecting and celebrating students own languages. Offering historical and pedagogical perspectives on language awareness and language diversity, the essays reveal the nationalism implicit in the concept of a standard English, advocate alternative training and teaching practices for instructors at all levels, and promote the respect and importance of the country s diverse dialects, languages, and literatures. Contributors include Geneva Smitherman, Victor Villanueva, Elaine Richardson, Victoria Cliett, Arnetha F. Ball, Rashidah Jammi Muhammad, Kim Brian Lovejoy, Gail Y. Okawa, Jan Swearingen, and Dave Pruett.The volume also includes a foreword by Suresh Canagarajah and a substantial bibliography of resources about bilingualism and language diversity.

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This study investigated a low-achieving class that featured regular discussions to gain insight into how dialogically organized instruction emerged within the context of a traditional recitation instructional setting, further complicated by settings of poverty and linguistic diversity. Dialogic discourse can happen when teachers are adept at linking and at enabling links between academic objectives and student concerns.

Empirical studies of gender-based language differences have provided con flicting, discreet conclusions that have little relevance for business- communications instruction. This paper presents informally collected obser vations of male and female students in undergraduate and graduate business- and technical-communication courses. Calling for future formal studies to verify its findings, this study concludes that people-intensive work experience modifies gender-based language differences in written business communica tions of undergraduate and graduate students. However, instruction in audi ence analysis, tone, content design, and style also modify these gender differences. If formally supported, these observations would help teachers argue for the value of business-communications instruction in helping stu dents develop varied and androgynous communication styles important for job-related communications.

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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