语言教学 | 普渡大学写作教学系列Teacher&Tutor Resource35-Translingual Writing

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1、Introduction to Translingual Writing

What is Translingual Writing?

Translingual writing is a pedagogical approach and linguistic disposition proposed by a group of writing scholars at the beginning of the 2010s (Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, John Trimbur, Samantha NeCamp, and Christiane Donahue). The translingual writing approach invites students coming from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds to acknowledge and negotiate the various languages and rhetorical styles they bring into their writing.

A translingual approach to writing and teaching writing recognizes the linguistic differences in student texts as a resource. Variations in students’ writing are a strategic and creative choice, rather than a barrier or error. Linguistic differences usually appear as code-switching, which is the use of more than one language within a single passage, adoption of an imported concept in its original language, or application of grammatical, structural, or rhetorical conventions from another language.

The Tenets of Translingual Writing

A translingual approach to writing and teaching writing aims to acknowledge and challenge a monolingual ideology currently guiding the design of writing programs and curriculum in the U.S. In 2016, Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner articulated seven tenets for a translingual approach to writing and teaching writing:

• Language (including varieties of Englishes, discourses, media, or modalities) is performative: it is not something we have but something we do;

• Users of language are actively forming and transforming the very conventions we use and social-historical contexts of use;

• Communicative practices are not neutral or innocent but informed by and informing economic, geopolitical, social-historical, cultural relations of asymmetrical power;

• Decisions on language use are shaping as well as shaped by the contexts of utterance and the social positionings of the writers, and thus having material consequences on the life and world we live in;

• Difference is the norm of all utterances, conceived of as acts of translation inter and intra languages, media, modality during seeming iterations of dominant conventions as well as deviations from the norm;

• Deliberation over how to tinker with authorized contexts, perspectives, and conventions of meaning making is needed and desired by all users of language, those socially designated as mainstream or minority, native or first, second, foreign speakers, published or student writers;

• All communicative practices are mesopolitical (the intermediate space between global and local, social and personal) acts, actively negotiating and constituting complex relations of power at the dynamic intersection of the social-historical (macro) and the personal (micro) levels (Lu & Horner 208).

Origin

Here are some key moments in the scholarly development of the translingual approach in composition studies. Please note that the scholars included here are not necessarily representative of this intellectual movement. Scholars whose translingual orientation related to other disciplines are excluded. This is only one, simplified narrative of how translingual writing developed, but in reality, origins are always more complex than a timeline.

1994: Min-Zhan Lu demonstrated what she termed a “multicultural approach to style” that foregrounds student writers’ agency in transforming discursive norms with idiosyncratic styles (447). She attempted this by “asking students to explore the full range of linguistic choices and options, including those excluded by the conventions of academic discourses” (447).

2002: Bruce Horner and John Trimbur identified “a tacit language policy of unidirectional English monolingualism” and argued that it “has shaped the historical formation of U.S. writing instruction and continues to influence its theory and practices in shadowy, largely unexamined ways” (594-595).

2006: Suresh Canagarajah introduced World Englishes theories into composition studies, and proposed a model of “code meshing” that allows students to “strive for competence in a repertoire of codes and discourses” and “shuttle between communities in contextually relevant ways” (“The Place” 592-593). In the same year, he proposed a negotiation model that stressed multilingual writers’ agency and the process of languaging (“Toward” 2006).

2011: Horner, along with NeCamp, Donahue, Lu, Royster, and Trimbur, published two articles in CCCand College English, respectively, in which they proposed a translingual approach that “sees difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening” (“Language Difference” 303). The historical sketch of the evolution of translingual writing suggests to whom translingual writing matters and in what context it is practiced.

2、The Translingual Approach in the Classroom

Designing a Curriculum Using a Translingual Writing Approach

Designing a curriculum based on a translingual approach requires the instructor to rethink the writing classroom as a site of negotiation as opposed to prescription. Here, the OWL offers several suggestions for instructors to consider when incorporating the translingual approach into the curriculum based on three pedagogical purposes:

Here are some suggestions for using translingual writing as a syllabus approach:

• The process approach should be foregrounded, which includes multiple drafts and revisions. Sequenced assignments could be implemented to allow for sustained and extended negotiation between instructors and students;

• In order to highlight students’ linguistic and cultural resources in the writing classroom, literacy autobiography could be emphasized as a focal assignment to inspire students to explore the linguistic and cultural repertoire that embodies their identities;

• Conferencing needs to be built into the syllabus and highlighted. Conferencing might take place during the brainstorming phase, reading and discussing phase, drafting phrase, rewriting and revising phase, and reflecting phase. Instructors are advised to pay particular attention to students’ rationale for certain rhetorical moves that may be considered “different” and allow students to negotiate meaning;

• Initiate multiple discussion sessions that focus on writing conventions in different contexts;

• Course readings should cover texts written in and/or about different linguistic and cultural contexts.

Here are also some suggestions for how to use translingual writing as a theme in the course:

• Readings should be carefully chosen from the scholarship on translingual writing (see the suggested readings) to represent the full scope of the scholarly discussion, for example, the origin, development, debate, pedagogical practices of and about translingual writing;

• Discussions could begin with apparent differences in language, and then transition to less apparent rhetorical and discursive differences;

• Assignments could be designed as sites for translingual negotiation between the student and the instructor. It could also prompt students to critically engage with the scholarship by positioning themselves in relation to the scholarship and to reflect on their own translingual identity.

If however, you would like to focus an assignment on translingual writing, instead of an entire course, here are some suggestions:

• The literacy narrative is an optimal genre for a translingual writing assignment, as it prompts students to reflect on the advantage of mobilizing their own linguistic and cultural resources in a new rhetorical situation.

• Time should be allowed for students to reflect on and negotiate how they deploy and manipulate their linguistic and cultural resources, either in the form of a post-assignment reflection or during conferences.

• Please be aware that there are not a lot of translations of theory into the pedagogical imperative, and new assignments are always being developed or could be developed that work.

Feedback on Student Writing

Responding to student writing within a translingual paradigm requires students’ active engagement in the process and teachers’ willingness to negotiate with the student.

• Approach unconventional use of English as sites of negotiation rather than mark it as poor practice or error;

• Use questions instead of statements to create space for negotiation when noticing unconventional practice of English. This requires teachers to always assume that students make certain rhetorical and linguistic moves intentionally to achieve certain purposes;

• When interrupted by practices of code meshing or code mixing that involve the use of languages other than English, teachers should suggest using footnotes or other clarification techniques to facilitate understanding;

• Most of the translingual practices are manifested at the lexical level. Writing teachers should be cautious against being over tolerant when translingual writing is used as an excuse to account for other global issues in student writing, such as coherence and organization;

• Feedback should also invite students to fully unpack any unfamiliar use of English, as a means to build rapport with their audience;

• When giving feedback, teachers should not neglect the potential rhetorical context to which the student is likely to transfer the writing skills practiced in the writing classroom.

Assessment of Student Writing

Assessing student writing within a translingual paradigm calls for special attention to what to assess as well as how to assess it, which necessitates a revamp of the assessment rubrics from a traditional monolingual paradigm.

• When designing assessment rubrics, teachers should be cautious when using terms such as “standard written English” and “grammatical mistakes,” as these constructs represent a monolingual ideology rather than a translingual one. If you do need to use these phrases, teachers need to carefully define these constructs within a translingual paradigm;

• Language use should not be completely neglected in the rubrics, as it would do developing student writers a disservice. Rather, language use and students’ ability to justify their language use should be highlighted;

• Assessment should not focus only on students’ written products, but should also be implemented during the composing and negotiating processes; Assessment should be viewed as a dynamic practice as opposed to a static one.

• Context, along with students’ ability to analyze, adapt to, and transform the context, should be counted toward holistic assessment rubrics.

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