Translingual Identities and Transnational Realities in the U.S. College Classroom

Heather Robinson, Jonathan Hall, Nela Navarro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367026363
• eBook ISBN: 9781000034837
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

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.

1
MAKING TRANSLINGUALITY AND TRANSNATIONALITY VISIBLE

Ask the students. That is the simple premise that underlies the several related studies that are discussed in these pages. All of them focus on college students on U.S. campuses who, in a myriad of ways that we explore, differ from the norms of “typical” college students that were prevalent in the days when the disciplines of rhetoric and composition and writing across the curriculum were being originally formulated, and which prevail across the board in our institutions of higher education. For one thing, almost none of them are white, so to some extent this is an exploration of going to college while Brown, Black, or Asian. But our primary focus will be on their language performances and affiliations, the way in which their language identities are negotiated, and the ways in which the students’ various language goals and performances may both develop from and help to form transnational experiences.

Students, that is, are the best experts on their language practices, experiences, proficiencies, and identities, but they often need a space in which they can reflect on what are, for them, often routine activities. That such mundane conversations, which cross supposed linguistic and national boundaries, are of interest to researchers comes as a surprise to some of our students, who find that linguistic identity is less a source of either anxiety or pride than monolingual speakers, looking at it from the outside, might expect. The students do not necessarily see their other languages as sources of weakness, but they don’t necessarily see them as sources of academic strength, either, unless prompted.

In the pages that follow, we examine how college students on two campuses conceptualize and articulate their own language identities, based on assigned language narratives, on short stories and their associated commentaries, on surveys and in interviews, and in instructor reflections. In their writings, students negotiate between the linguistic identities that are imposed upon them because of their skin color, educational background, perceived geographical origin, immigration status, and the many other cues that are used to “minoritize” them, and the linguistic identities that they actively construct and perform. Our textual analysis draws upon multiple disciplinary discourses of language and identity, including theories of critical pedagogy, of New Literacies, of translingual agency in rhetoric and composition, of code meshing and other translingual practices in applied linguistics, of language identities in second language writing, and on queer and feminist theories. We examine the rhetorical and performative moves through which students structure relationships with particular language identities, attitudes, ambitions, goals, and visions of future use of English and other languages.

We report on three separate but related studies of translingual practices among two groups of students on two different U.S. college campuses in the northeast of the United States. Chapters 2, 4, 9, and 10 explore the linguistic affiliations and practices of students on a public urban university campus, which we will name Urban College, examine translingual practices within a broad umbrella of “Englishes,” with emphases on post-colonial native English speakers and on African-American Vernacular Englishes. Chapters 2, 6, and 13 focus on two distinct groups of “international” students on the campus of a public research university, which we will name State University: 1) first-year undergraduates and 2) graduate students. Despite their cultural and experiential differences, all three groups of students may find themselves marked as outsiders within U.S. language practices that stress a limited definition of “standard English.” Using similar methodologies, both projects began from a simple premise: ask the students how they negotiate their language identities on a dayto-day basis, and in their academic work, and examine what they show us when they do it. We seek to enter into their subjective linguistic world, by trying to create spaces in which students can speak or write, where they can use their languages and/or language varieties as a person who inhabits multiple language communities and where thinking or speaking or writing calls all the time—not just when they are consciously playing or performing—for the integrated use of their full linguistic repertoire, even if, as is almost always the case, the final product is recognizable as being “in” a single language. But what, exactly, do we mean by “in”? In the following sections, we explore this question in detail.

I. Translingual/Transnational Spaces

Translingual practices and transnational connections are frequent topics of investigation today in a variety of disciplines and settings. The translingual approach (Horner, Lu, Royster, & Trimbur, 2011) has drawn increasing interest among scholars in writing studies (e.g. Canagarajah, 2013; Horner & Tetreault, 2017; Barwashi, Guerra, Horner, & Lu, 2016; Lee, 2017), connected with parallel developments in TESOL (Jain, 2014) and applied linguistics (Garcia, 2009; Kubota, 2014); and also elicited some controversy, especially in second language writing (Matsuda, 2014; Atkinson et al., 2015). Transnational issues, meanwhile, have illuminated a number of fields, ranging from the origins of the term in anthropology (Duany, 2008) and sociology (Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007) to, more recently, Writing Program Administration (Martins, 2014); TESOL (Solano-Campos, 2014); composition studies (Donahue, 2009); WAC/WID (Zenger, Haviland, & Mullin, 2013), and mobility studies (e.g. Blommaert & Horner, 2017). But these phenomena are often discussed in separation from each other, as though translingual practices and transnational connections were independent entities. Our approach, by contrast, explores the intersections between translingual and transnational practices. We move now to considering in more detail our terms of engagement for exploring these intersections.

From Translingualism to Translinguality

Viewing differences not as a problem but as a resource, the translingual approach promises to revitalize the teaching of writing and language. By addressing how language norms are actually heterogeneous, fluid, and negotiable, a translingual approach directly counters demands that writers must conform to fixed, uniform standards.

(Horner et al., 2011, p. 306)

Students and their instructors—who, as a group, may be more monolingual than the students whose linguistic practices we explore here—often approach translingualism from very different starting points. For monolingual instructors, it may well be that a “translingual approach” is a pedagogical aspiration, or a state of consciousness that they may someday be able to acquire by being open to otherness within language.

For our students, though, translinguality is not somewhere that they have to go, but rather somewhere that they already are, a place that they already inhabit every time they speak and each time they engage in reading and writing practices. They already live and embody translinguality, an often-unconscious state that many of them may not think about much, and that they may never have regarded as important until challenged in a course, when the instructor recast language difference, which they had thought of as negative or at best neutral, as, instead, a potential source of positive strength. Whether the students really come to think of it differently or whether they are just trying to please the instructor by saying so is another question, of course.

So we begin in a somewhat opaque and sometimes disputed theoretical territory of a translingual approach to language difference, and then make a turn simultaneously toward the concrete external conditions and toward the subjective reality of each student. Our various surveys, interviews, and analyses of student writing will help us to do so. For our readers, who may range from experienced researchers in translingual theories and approaches, to those who have not previously fully engaged in these scholarly conversations, we aim for rigorous analysis without getting lost in the theoretical weeds. Translingualism has deep roots in post-structuralism, post-colonial theory, multicompetence theory and other aspects of applied linguistics and second language study, which we will explore as needed. But our approach to translinguality—an existing condition rather than an ideology (that would be translingual ism)—is better described as:

• a routine practice, implicated in every act of reading, writing, speaking, or listening, even when not consciously visible.
• something that can be played with and/or performed consciously, exploring the echoes when languages bounce off each other, or blend together to create new language practices.
• a way of thinking about language and especially about language difference. It is here that translinguality morphs, perhaps, into an aspirational ideology of translingualism, a pedagogical consciousness mostly not yet achieved and difficult to access.

Translingual approaches toward language difference in writing are an important current topic in the discipline of rhetoric and composition, in second language writing and second language acquisition, in applied linguistics, and in various allied disciplines. Numerous panels at recent conferences in all these fields and in their publications testify to the interest—sometimes a somewhat controversial interest—in the subject. In this volume we will attempt to engage a nexus of theory and practice, asking how a rather theoretically complex concept can be applied in concrete situations—or at least how attempts are made to do so. As a preliminary definition of a translingual approach to language difference, or to an ideology of translingualism, or, (we will argue) best of all, to the existing, routine, and inescapable condition of translinguality, here are three important translingual assumptions about language:

• Languages are not distinct entities, either at the macro-level of societal practices or at the micro-level of the individual user. Rather, they intersect, interact, and interpenetrate.
• Students learn things in different languages, know things in different languages, and remember things in different languages.
• Teaching language or any aspect of it (writing, reading, speaking, listening) to translingual learners will benefit from affirming and encouraging students’ continuing productive reliance on all their linguistic resources.
• Sometimes these ideas are referred to in rhetoric and composition as “the translingual approach” or “the translingual turn,” but we are really articulating multiple approaches toward language difference. There seems to be a tension—perhaps a productive one, but one that should be acknowledged—between
• translingualism as a theoretical research framework, which can used to explain the relation of languages to each other, or to undermine traditional beliefs about the bright lines between languages
• translingualism as a pedagogical framework which is essential for writing instructors to incorporate into their models of instruction and especially of assessment
• translingualism as subject matter for students to understand and practice, sometimes in cross-cultural and cross-linguistic interchanges with students of different language backgrounds, sometimes in exploring their own linguistic repertoires in code-meshing experiments, etc.
• translingualism as a goal to be approached through a careful cultivation of an attitude toward language difference
• translingualism as simply a condition that exists, more or less unconsciously but continually exerting influence, every minute of every day when a speaker of more than one language or language variety reads, writes, speaks, or listens.

In this volume, rather than exploring these varying approaches to translingualism as such, we rather write of translingual ity. Of course, there is no such thing as a translinguality that is neutral in terms of post-colonial and racial power relations, or that is not situated in relation to existing ideologies of monolingualism, and so even as we assert that translinguality is everywhere, already operating in invisible and unconscious ways, the following chapters still must always inquire: why translinguality? whose translinguality? what kind of translinguality? for what purpose and where?

In this book, we conceive our task as that of making translinguality visible, by focusing on our students’ experiences, as manifested in their writing and in their reported language experiences. Many students have got the message that in U.S. culture at large their non-English languages are not valued, and in fact are often regarded as a handicap to the speakers themselves and even as a provocation to the unconscious English-only ideology which pervades many aspects of U.S. society including academia, and which many of our students have therefore come to internalize. Students are not necessarily eager to make use of their non-English languages in academic contexts, because they have always been told that English is the only way. Indeed, students who are immigrants, and/or whose language backgrounds include minoritized varieties of English, are sometimes the most vehement defenders of “Standard English”—or, as we write here, because it foregrounds its implication in structures of power, Standard ized English—because they have worked very hard to acquire it and sometimes consider themselves to have arrived in a linguistic space where Standardized English is all that they need to use. It takes a process not only of education but of self-examination and a questioning of cultural boundaries for students to see, first, that they are already living in translingual spaces in both their daily and their academic lives, and second, that this is potentially a good and useful thing for their own self-expression and for a re-valuation of language difference in the culture of academia and beyond. Translingual pedagogies create spaces where students tell ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Making Translinguality and Transnationality Visible
• PART I Everyday Translinguality
• PART II Translingual Transnational Literacies
• Appendices
• Index