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This program profile describes how teachers and administrators have collaborated in the design and implementation of a number of linguistic, cultural, and transmodal pedagogical and curricular initiatives. Strategies that writing teachers can implement to best meet the needs of multilingual students across a range of institutional contexts are discussed via a social justice lens. A focused examination of our First-Year Writing program’s layered response to increased international multilingual student enrolment as well as a brief discussion of campus-wide responses are offered to showcase how translingual, transcultural, and transmodal approaches to First-Year Writing can empower students, inviting them to learn from their existing linguistic and cultural funds of knowledge.

Positioning reading as a site of meaning negotiation, this article provides a detailed account of one multilingual, transnational student’s literacy practices for personal, academic, and disciplinary purposes across spaces. Drawing on the notion ofdisconnect, I examine the tensions and fissures that disrupt the flow of literacies across spaces.

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.