Winner of the AAAL Book Award 2015 Winner of the Modern Language Association's Thirty-Third Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize Winner of the BAAL Book Prize 2014 Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations introduces a new way of looking at the use of English within a global context. Challenging traditional approaches in second language acquisition and English language teaching, this book incorporates recent advances in multilingual studies, sociolinguistics, and new literacy studies to articulate a new perspective on this area. Canagarajah argues that multilinguals merge their own languages and values into English, which opens up various negotiation strategies that help them decode other unique varieties of English and construct new norms. Incisive and groundbreaking, this will be essential reading for anyone interested in multilingualism, world Englishes and intercultural communication.

This book responds to recent criticisms that the research and theorization of multilingualism on the part of applied linguists are in collusion with neoliberal policies and economic interests. While acknowledging that neoliberal agencies can appropriate diverse languages and language practices, including resources and dispositions theorized by scholars of multilingualism, it argues that a distinction must be made between the different language ideologies informing communicative practices. Those of neoliberal agencies are motivated by distinct ideological orientations that diverge from the theorization of multilingual practices by critical applied linguists. In addressing this issue, the book draws on the author’s empirical research on skilled migration to demonstrate how sub-Saharan African professionals in English-dominant workplaces in the UK, USA, Australia, and South Africa resist the neoliberal communicative expectations and employ alternate practices informed by critical dispositions. These practices have the potential to transform neoliberal orientations on material development. The book labels the latter as informed by a postcolonial language ideology, to distinguish them from those of neoliberalism. While neoliberal agencies approach languages as being instrumental for profit-making purposes, the author’s informants focus on the synergy between languages to generate new meanings and norms, which are strategically negotiated in pursuit of ethical interests, inclusive interactions, and holistic ecological development. As such, the book clearly illustrates that the way critical scholars and multilinguals relate to language diversity is different from the way neoliberal policies and agencies use multilingualism for their own purposes.

After the first chapter, which deals with the theoretical issues, ensuing chapters treat particular instances of translingual practice such as national character, individualism, stylistic innovations, first-person narration, and canon formation

The term translingual highlights the reality that people always shuttle across languages, communicate in hybrid languages and, thus, enjoy multilingual competence. In the context of migration, transnational economic and cultural relations, digital communication, and globalism, increasing contact is taking place between languages and communities. In these contact zones new genres of writing and new textual conventions are emerging that go beyond traditional dichotomies that treat languages as separated from each other, and texts and writers as determined by one language or the other. Pushing forward a translingual orientation to writing—one that is in tune with the new literacies and communicative practices flowing into writing classrooms and demanding new pedagogies and policies— this volume is structured around five concerns: refining the theoretical premises, learning from community practices, debating the role of code meshed products, identifying new research directions, and developing sound pedagogical applications. These themes are explored by leading scholars from L1 and L2 composition, rhetoric and applied linguistics, education theory and classroom practice, and diverse ethnic rhetorics. Timely and much needed, Literacy as Translingual Practice is essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners across these fields.

Based on range of global case studies, this book expands current work on translingual playfulness through an exploration of precariousness.

Working within the framework of translanguaging, the contributors to this collection offer nuanced explorations of how translingual dispositions can be facilitated in English-medium postsecondary writing programs and classrooms. The authors and editors comprise a wide array of writing scholars from diverse teaching and learning contexts with a corresponding array of institutional, disciplinary, and pedagogical expectations and pressures. The work shared in this collection offers readers cases of translingual dispositions that consider the personal, pedagogical, and institutional challenges associated with the adoption of a translingual disposition and interrogate academic translingual practices in U.S. and international English-medium settings.

Translingualism perceives the boundaries between languages as unstable and permeable; this creates a complex challenge for writing pedagogy. Writers shift actively among rhetorical strategies from multiple languages, sometimes importing lexical or discoursal tropes from one language into another to introduce an effect, solve a problem, or construct an identity. How to accommodate this reality while answering the charge to teach the conventions of one language can be a vexing problem for teachers. Crossing Divides offers diverse perspectives from leading scholars on the design and implementation of translingual writing pedagogies and programs. The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1 outlines methods of theorizing translinguality in writing and teaching. Part 2 offers three accounts of translingual approaches to the teaching of writing in private and public colleges and universities in China, Korea, and the United States. In Part 3, contributors from four US institutions describe the challenges and strategies involved in designing and implementing a writing curriculum with a translingual approach. Finally, in Part 4, three scholars respond to the case studies and arguments of the preceding chapters and suggest ways in which writing teachers, scholars, and program administrators can develop translingual approaches within their own pedagogical settings. Illustrated with concrete examples of teachers’ and program directors’ efforts in a variety of settings, as well as nuanced responses to these initiatives from eminent scholars of language difference in writing, Crossing Divides offers groundbreaking insight into translingual writing theory, practice, and reflection. Contributors: Sara Alvarez, Patricia Bizzell, Suresh Canagarajah, Dylan Dryer, Chris Gallagher, Juan Guerra, Asao B. Inoue, William Lalicker, Thomas Lavelle, Eunjeong Lee, Jerry Lee, Katie Malcolm, Kate Mangelsdorf, Paige Mitchell, Matt Noonan, Shakil Rabbi, Ann Shivers-McNair, Christine M. Tardy

Toward Translingual Realities in Composition is a multiyear critical ethnographic study of first-year writing programs in Lebanon and Washington State—a country where English is not the sole language of instruction and a state in which English is entirely dominant—to examine the multiple and often contradictory natures, forces, and manifestations of language ideologies. The book is a practical, useful way of seriously engaging with alternative ways of thinking, doing, and learning academic English literacies. Translingualism work has concentrated on critiquing monolingual and multilingual notions of language, but it is only beginning to examine translingual enactments in writing programs and classrooms. Focusing on language representations and practices at both the macro and micro levels, author Nancy Bou Ayash places the study and teaching of university-level writing in the context of the globalization and pluralization of English(es) and other languages. Individual chapters feature various studies that Bou Ayash brings together to address how students act as agents in marshaling their language practices and resources and shows a deliberate translingual intervention that complicates and enriches students’ assumptions about language and writing. Her findings about writing programs, instructors, and students are detailed, multidimensional, and complex. A substantial contribution to growing translingual scholarship in the field of composition studies, Toward Translingual Realities in Composition offers insights into how writing teacher-scholars and writing program administrators can more productively intervene in local postmonolingual tensions and contradictions at the level of language representations and practices through actively and persistently reworking the design and enactment of their curricula, pedagogies, assessments, teacher training programs, and campus-wide partnerships.

Exploring the roles of students’ pluralistic linguistic and transnational identities at the university level, this book offers a novel approach to translanguaging by highlighting students’ perspectives, voices, and agency as integral to the subject. Providing an original reconsideration of the impact of translanguaging, this book examines both transnationality and translinguality as ubiquitous phenomena that affect students’ lives. Demonstrating that students are the experts of their own language practices, experiences, and identities, the authors argue that a proactive translingual pedagogy is more than an openness to students’ spontaneous language variations. Rather, this proactive approach requires students and instructors to think about students’ holistic communicative repertoire, and how it relates to their writing. Robinson, Hall, and Navarro address students’ complex negotiations and performative responses to the linguistic identities imposed upon them because of their skin color, educational background, perceived geographical origin, immigration status, and the many other cues used to "minoritize" them. Drawing on multiple disciplinary discourses of language and identity, and considering the translingual practices and transnational experiences of both U.S. resident and international students, this volume provides a nuanced analysis of students’ own perspectives and self-examinations of their complex identities. By introducing and addressing the voices and self-reflections of undergraduate and graduate students, the authors shine a light on translingual and transnational identities and positionalities in order to promote and implement inclusive and effective pedagogies. This book offers a unique yet essential perspective on translinguality and transnationality, and is relevant to instructors in writing and language classrooms; to administrators of writing programs and international student support programs; and to graduate students and scholars in language education, second language writing, applied linguistics, and literacy studies.

This book advances a translingual orientation to writing--one that is in tune with the new literacies and communicative practices flowing into writing classrooms and demanding new pedagogies and policies.