Toward Translingual Realities in Composition

(Re)Working Local Language Representations and Practices

Nancy Bou Ayash

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781607329039
• eBook ISBN: 9781607329046
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1

Language Ideologies in Teaching Writing

A Language Representations and/as Practices Perspective

DOI: 10.7330/9781607329046.c001

Of direct relevance to the close explorations of postmonolingual conflicts of language ideologies in university-level writing, its teaching, and its learning that the current book undertakes is a long scholarly tradition, particularly in linguistic anthropology, that recognizes that the particularly uneasy notion of language ideologies1 does not concern “just language” alone (Blommaert 1999, 429; cf. Woolard and Schieffelin 1994, 55–65; Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998, 3; Woolard 2004, 58). In fact, language ideologies always “envision and enact” the complex linkage and intersection of language with fundamental social conceptualizations of “identity, power, aesthetics, morality and epistemology” (Woolard 1998, 3). This take on language ideologies2 that I adopt throughout this book’s analyses—as underpinning and mediating strong connections between language structure and form and the wider sociopolitical and sociocultural forces of domination among individuals, communities, or institutions—is useful in capturing the rootedness, embeddedness, and spatio-temporal locatedness of language. Studying language ideologies from this perspective, therefore, brings to light the nature of local3 understandings and conceptions of language and its use as firmly situated in time and space and inseparable from the particular identities, contexts, histories, hierarchies, and injustices that bring them into being and grant them their particular significance.

Looking at language ideologies through a locally sensitive lens, this book does not cast them as autonomous, totalizing entities, as commonly perceived, but rather seeks to project them as having tangible material effects—although not always the kind of desired effects envisioned generally by those in positions of power—in their own local ecologies. Put differently, this book reveals the impact of different local language ideologies on everyday language negotiations in the teaching and learning of university-level writing not so much as clearly defined intellectual properties of individuals, communities, or academic institutions or as transcendental ideas and metaphysical forces creating in and of themselves particular effects on literate individuals and their immediate practices4 but rather as socioculturally situated, construed, and embodied sets of rationalizations about language and language-in-use. In fact, it is part of this book’s goal to emphasize a dimension of human agency, intervention, and activism (as we shall see further in chapter 5) in its explorations of the nature and consequences of the ideologies of language, its use, and literate learning that circulate locally at diverse institutions of higher education and their writing programs in the United States and other parts of the world.

Bringing out both the sociality of language and language-ideological matters and the attendant potential for change in linguistic realities, French linguist Louis-Jean Calvet (2006, 243) observes that the notion of languages and the ideologies that construe and determine their specific connections to broader sociocultural processes and structures do not exist in a vacuum like “real, tangible objects.” Instead, they are social “abstraction[s]”, which “rest on the regularity of a certain number of facts, of features, in the products of speakers” (Calvet 2006, 241) and learners or, say, their concrete practices as well as the way they come to think of and imagine them in every interaction, namely, their representations. Under Calvet’s (2006, 57, 137, 7) ecological approach to the study of the interaction of languages among themselves and with their immediate surroundings, languages are not “well-oiled mechanisms” independent of their local ecologies; in fact, being “simply a set of practices and representations” in a given social and historical context, they “exist only in and through” their users and learners, always “reinvented, renewed and transformed” in every act of oral or written communication. On the side of practices, we find everyday language users’ and learners’ actual, repeated, and observable doings involving language and the way they negotiate, accommodate, and adapt these doings to changing affordances in the communicative ecology. Loosely defined, language representations refer to the ideas, perceptions, images, and metaphors language users and learners entertain about their own (or other individuals’ or group of individuals’) language resources and the value they grant to the way they (or others) utilize them. Specifically, language representations are themselves concrete ways of acting, among many others, inseparable from their sociolinguistic realities. In this sense, Calvet (2006, 153) firmly emphasizes the “importance of representations” in influencing patterns of linguistic action and change. As he further observes, language representations “act on practices and are one of the factors of change” in that they “produce in particular security/insecurity” of language form, identity, and status among language users and learners, thereby leading them to adopt and exhibit particular types of “behavior that transform practices” (Calvet 2006, 241; emphasis in original) with language and literacy. In a similar vein, second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign language learning (FLL) scholarship that draws on an ecological perspective has brought to our attention the fact that language representations, more accurately dubbed “beliefs”5 in SLA/FLL, can serve as “mediational means”, with a considerable “effect on learners—or teachers—and their actions” (Barcelos and Kalaja 2011, 281; emphasis in original; cf. Peng 2011).6 In this sense, language representational practices, I argue, need to be fully integrated into and taken seriously for a rigorous understanding of and productive intervention in the nature and workings of local language ideologies in the teaching and learning of university-level writing.

Building on such theorizations of the influential role of representations in the way language(s) and inter- and intra-language relations are put into action in literate learning situations, I approach language representations in the present work as telling us something crucial about how language learners and writers in two different geographic and institutional settings make sense of, negotiate, and act in relationship to a complex network of language ideologies in their local academic and nonacademic milieus. More important, I adopt the concept of language representations as socially situated practices themselves, constantly shaping and reshaping subsequent language and literate practice and decision-making, and tag it onto the cluster construct of language ideology itself as one of its ubiquitous manifestations. In doing so, I anchor the operative language ideologies of what I term here dominant monolingualism, alternative multilingualism, and counterhegemonic translingualism in writing and its teaching in actual, observable, and particularly salient practices as opposed to treating them as mystical, amorphous, and elusive forces.

Monolingual, Multilingual, and Translingual Language Representations and/as Practices in Teaching Writing

My approach is to teach them the standard and not necessarily accept the nonstandard or broken English. We’re resistant to tolerating it in writing because that’s what they’re going to face in the outside business world unless the world changes.

Kathy, Summer 2012, interview transcript

It’s not that I’m doing it wrong, it [practice of constructing long sentences deemed acceptable in written Spanish] just doesn’t fit this language . . . In English, most people won’t be okay with it, will find it too confusing or overwhelming or categorize it as bad writing skills. So I tell [students]—it’s not that the way you write is wrong, it just doesn’t follow the rules of English writing.

Alicia, cited in Leonard 2014, 234

I tell my students: The [English] language is yours. Bend it, twist it, curse if you must, if doing so will take you to the point of familiarity, of ease, where the written language becomes your vehicle too, your conduit to the expression of your reality. Do it for your own sake. Do it for the world’s sake.

Nuñez 2000, 44

Pitted against each other, these perspectives from writing teachers laboring on opposite sides of the globe rest on different representations and views of language and its literate use and therefore demonstrate opposing pedagogical responses to perceived differences between student writers’ language practices and the institutionalized practices and conventions of Standard Written English (SWE). Inspired by monolingualist perceptions of the commodification of SWE as the gate to all upwardly mobile trajectories, one of my native English-speaking Anglo-American teacher participants in Beirut echoes a valorization of conformity to standardized English rules and usages. Any difference from what is imagined to constitute static, universal attributes of academic reading and writing is viewed as technical failings and, as described in the first excerpt, “nonstandard” or “broken” language practices in grave need of fixing and correction. On the other hand, challenging such dominant deficit orientations toward what students do with and to language in their writing, the second teacher—one of Rebecca Leonard’s (2014) informants, an English as a second language (ESL) migrant teacher in the midwestern United States—demonstrates more acceptance and accommodation of the rich, meaningful experiences with language difference students bring with them into the writing situation. However, despite revealing her multilingual orientation to complex literate negotiations across languages through attuning her own students to the normalcy of language difference in their writing, she still retains monolingualist perceptions of languages (in this specific case, English and Spanish) and language practices as stable, definable, and siloed and their boundaries as secure and impervious. Hence her characterization of students’ ways of using language as either successfully “fit[ing]” or “in” one particular language sphere or not.

In contrast, the teacher in the last excerpt shows more advocacy for a translingual ideology, which is radically distinct from the dominant monolingualist orientations echoed in the first excerpt and traditional multilingualist perspectives depicted in the second excerpt in its representations and treatments of language as malleable, negotiable, and changeable. More specifically, in her description of her pedagogical aims, Elizabeth Nuñez (2000) seems to echo a willingness to acknowledge and encourage students’ ownership over the language of the academy and their agency in fashioning and refashioning it and tinkering with the putatively impenetrable boundaries shielding its presumed purity and separation from other languages and language practices, with all the challenges this process entails. Seeing and addressing language and language relations from a significantly different angle and perspective than the teachers in the first and second excerpts, Nuñez treats students’ actual labor of “bend[ing],” “twist[ing],” and transforming written English in relation to their changing social realities as essential not only for their own personal, intellectual development and growth but also and especially, as she puts it, for increasing opportunities for collaboration, peace, and linguistic and social justice among all literate individuals in the world.

In this section, I elaborate on and further discuss these fundamentally different ideological orientations of monolingualism, multilingualism, and translingualism, implicit in and discoverable from these three language and literacy teachers’ framings of actual pedagogical responses to potential moments of language difference in student writing. In my description of the three contending language ideologies that have impinged on the structure and design of writing curricula, pedagogies, and assessments in writing programs and classrooms both within and outside the United States, I identify the key tenets of each ideological orientation and the ways these are tied to and implemented in different approaches to teaching university-level writing amid language difference. Some of the salient principles and features of these three main linguistic-ideological orientations are displayed in table 1.1, which offers a summary of the discussion that will follow.

As table 1.1 indicates, these approaches to teaching writing echo differing conceptions and consequential treatments of language, language relations, and language difference in student texts and vary drastically in the status and value they attribute to standardized usages and conventions, on one hand, and the diverse language and semiotic resources in student writers’ repertoires, on another hand. As I’ll be arguing against some of these orientations to language and language difference in academic reading and writing, I will delineate the nature of the interrelated language representations and practices tied to these language-ideological debates underlying past and more contemporary approaches to teaching writing, as well as the central concepts and concerns that have motivated each. For the purposes of this chapter, however, my description of each approach is by no means a comprehensive survey of the field’s politically active intellectual history and vibrant literature on working with language (and by implication culture) and its diversity.

Table 1.1. Distinction among mono-, multi-, and translinguality in writing instruction

	MONO-	MULTI-	TRANS-
Language	Stable, discrete, objectifiable, pure and insular entity	Hybrid, heterogeneous; pluralized only numerically as accumulative sum of discrete, static, and impenetrable entities	Emergent, performative, complex, and fluctuating; with porous, blurred, and reworkable boundaries
Language relations	Myth of linguistic purity and homogeneity; Oneness of English	Acknowledgment of language contact; preservation of mono-centricity of SWE; unidirectionality of mechanical translation as always into SWE	Complexes of language resources as always and necessarily locally translated and translating; transcentricity and transdirectionality in language relations (see chapter 2)
Language difference in writing	Anomaly, technical failure to be quarantined, obliterated, and overcome	Right to be honored, celebrated, and accommodated only in readings and low-stakes writing	The norm for all language performance(s); resource to be constantly tapped into, rhetorically deployed, and capitalized on
Language standards and conventions	Readymade, objective, abstract, timeless, untouchable, and universal	Pre-constructed, uniform, and finite language forms and usages of the “culture of power”	Negotiated and negotiable; variable and varying; (re)constructed and sedimented through repeated social practice
Expectations for language practice in writing	Evidence of language competence: efficiency, correctness, automaticity, native-like proficiency, uniformity, transparency, and clarity	Valuation of all signs of language competence under dominant monolingualism in finished products; appropriateness of linguistic heterogeneity limited to informal reading and writing	Normalcy and legitimacy of the deployment of full multiplicity of language resources; negotiation, ambiguity, and tension as necessary requirements for unfinished labor of meaning making and translation
Pedagogical goals	Ensuring compliance with language standards and norms; eradicating all signs of erroneous language use and its alleged sources (e.g., negative interference from home languages or language varieties in one’s repertoire; literal translation)	Adding more languages when composing drafts and more readings that recognizably mesh and switch between languages and language varieties; “inviting” translation into SWE as complete...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Language Ideologies in Teaching Writing: A Language Representations and/as Practices Perspective
• 2. Working Translingual Language Representations and/as Practices
• 3. Unpacking Local Language Representations and/as Practices: Portraits of Postmonolingual Tensions from Beirut
• 4. Unpacking Local Language Representations and/as Practices Continued: Postmonolingualism in Seattle
• 5. Translingual Activism: Turning up the Volume of Critical Translation in Writing Pedagogy
• Conclusion: Lessons on Thinking and Doing Translinguality with Beirut and Seattle
• Appendix A: An Ethnography of Language Representations and/as Practices
• Appendix B: Profiles of Featured Participants
• Appendix C: Student Interview Protocol
• Appendix D: Teacher Interview Protocol
• Notes
• References
• About the Author
• Index