Abstract
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.