Translanguaging Pedagogy

In 2011, four Writing Studies scholars wrote this short piece critiquing the traditional model of compulsory monolingualism in US-based writing programs and called for the field of Writing Studies to move toward a translingual approach which supports a more thorough examination of “standard” English, greater respect and support for all writers to move across difference within writing, and a more widespread recognition of multilingualism as a the dominant global norm.

In his keynote speech at the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Asao Inoue discussed the concept of white language supremacy in the judgment of student language, advocating for writing assessment that takes linguistic judgment out of the equation entirely and focuses only on student labor. The ideas in this speech are a follow-up to Inoue’s work around assessment, especially his book Antiracist Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future.

Looking closely at what happens when translanguaging is actively taken up to teach emergent bilingual students across different contexts, this book focuses on how it is already happening in classrooms as well as how it can be implemented as a pedagogical orientation. It extends theoretical understandings of the concept and highlights its promises and challenges. Using a Transformative Action Research design, six empirically grounded ethnographic case studies describe how translanguaging is used in lesson designs and in the spontaneous moves made by teachers and students during specific teaching moments. The cases shed light on two questions: How, when, and why is translanguaging taken up or resisted by students and teachers? What does its use mean for them? Although grounded in a U.S. context, and specifically in classrooms in New York State, Translanguaging with Multilingual Students links findings and theories to different global contexts to offer important lessons for educators worldwide.

Vershawn Ashanti Young responds to cultural critic Stanley Fish’s series in the New York Times on what college writing classes should teach with this essay that features code-meshed AAVE with other typical features of “standard” academic writing to argue for ways to teach language descriptively rather than in a prescriptive way that insists on a single standard. Lindsey has used this in her class both as a way to facilitate conversations around students’ beliefs about “standard” academic writing, but also as a model of scholarly, code-meshed writing.