Preview this article: Contributive Knowledge Making and Critical Language Awareness: A Justice-Oriented Paradigm for Undergraduate Research at a Hispanic-Serving Institution, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/84/6/collegeenglish31988-1.gif

Given the influx in people of African descent immigrating to the United States from diverse national, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds, the demographics of the US Black community has shifted significantly over the last several decades. As a result of these changes, it is imperative that approaches to rhetorical studies, especially African-centered cultural rhetorics, remain inclusive and representative of diverse Black experiences in the United States and abroad. Toward this end, the authors propose a new disciplinary subfield called Global Black Rhetorics (GBR). GBR emphasizes engaging similarities and differences across Black experiences, positions of power, and privilege, which includes acknowledging, studying, and prioritizing the histories, languages, rhetorical traditions, and practices of continental Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Afro-Latinx, Afro-Europeans, and other people of African descent across the African Diaspora. The authors introduce a four-themed framework for GBR that includes: assessing methods of education about global Black experiences, studying and teaching Black language diversity, teaching and citing contemporary rhetors and texts from Africa and African Diasporic contexts, and prioritizing healing as a communal goal for all Black people. The essay concludes with an introduction to the contributors of this special issue whose research advances the authors’ call for a globalized approach to Black Rhetorics.

Drawing on Kenyan hip-hop, this article: (1) illustrates the decolonial possibilities of translingualism, including paths to linguistic decolonization; (2) showcases how translingualism can facilitate the recovery of Indigenous hybrid languaging practices; (3) highlights how global Western capitalism threatens translingualism’s decolonial potential; and (4) offers further implications for rhetoric and writing scholars and teachers.

Preview this article: Diversity of Raciolinguistic Experiences in the Writing Classroom: An Argument for a Transnational Black Language Pedagogy, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/83/6/collegeenglish31357-1.gif

The notion of translingual practice has gained much currency within college composition and sociolinguistics over the last few years. Translingual practices challenge structuralist conceptualizations of language as discrete, bounded, impermeable, autonomous systems, conceptualizations that unfortunately (1) privilege linguistic codes over nonlinguistic ones, and (2) contribute to the hierarchization and separation of languages, leading some languages and their corresponding users to be valued more than others. To counter such a stance, we advocate the use of translingual pedagogy, which values the fluid communicative practices of learners who mobilize multiple semiotic resources to facilitate communication. By sharing examples from our own classrooms,we also underscore the need for teachers to recognize and expand the communicative repertoires of their students. This pedagogical shift, as we illustrate, is accompanied by an instructional commitment to develop students’ metalinguistic awareness and cultural sensitivities in order to create inclusive and equitable learning environments.

Text-driven, quantitative methods provide new ways to analyze student writing, by uncovering recurring grammatical features and related stylistic effects that remain tacit to students and those who read and evaluate student writing. To date, however, these methods are rarely used in research on students transitioning into US postsecondary writing, and especially rare are studies of student writing that is already scored according to high-stakes writing expectations. This study offers a corpus-based, comparative analysis of higher- and lower-scoring Advanced Placement (AP) exams in English, revealing statistically significant syntactic patterns that distinguish higher-scoring exams according to “informational production” and lower-scoring essays according to “involved” or “interactional” production (Biber, 1988). These differences contribute to what we label emphatic generality in the lower-scoring essays, in which writers tend to foreground human actors, including themselves. In contrast, patterns in higher-scoring essays achieve what we call elaborated specificity, by focusing on and explicating specific, often abstract, concepts.These findings help uncover what is rewarded (or not) in high-stakes writing assessments and show that some students struggle with register awareness. A related implication, then, is the importance of teaching register awareness to students at the late secondary and early university level—students who are still relative novices, but are being invited to compose informationally dense prose. Such register considerations, and specific features revealed in this study, provide ways to help demystify privileged writing forms for students, particularly students for whom academic writing may seem distant from their own communicative practices and ambitions.