Literacy as Translingual Practice

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.

Suresh Canagarajah is Erle Sparks Professor and Director of the Migration Studies Project at Pennsylvania State University.

1. Introduction A. Suresh Canagarajah Part I: Premises 2. Global and Local Communicative Networks and Implications for Literacy Charles Bazerman 3. Translingual Literacy and Matters of Agency Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner 4. Rhetorical Activities of Global Citizens Scott Wible 5. Redefining Indigenous Rhetoric: From Places of Origin to Translingual Spaces of Interdependence-in-Difference LuMing Mao Part II: Community Practices 6. Neither Asian nor American: The Creolization of Asian American Rhetoric Morris Young 7. Confronting the Wounds of Colonialism Through Words Jon Reyhner 8. The Cherokee Syllabary: The Evolution of Writing in Sequoyan Ellen Cushman 9. Hi-ein, Hi ííä or ííä Hi? Translingual Practices From Lebanon and Mainstream Literacy Education Nancy Bou Ayash 10. Translingual Practices in Kenyan Hiphop: Pedagogical Implications Esther Milu Part III: Code-Meshing Orientations 11. Pedagogical and Socio-Political Implications of Code-Meshing in Classrooms: Some Considerations for a Translingual Orientation to Writing Vivette Milson-Whyte 12. It's the Wild West Out There: A New Linguistic Frontier in U.S. College Composition Paul Kei Matsuda 13. Keep Code-Meshing Vershawn Ashanti Young Part IV: Research Directions 14. Negotiation, Translinguality, and Cross-Cultural Writing Research in a New Composition Era Christiane Donahue 15. Writing Across Languages: Developing Rhetorical Attunement Rebecca Lorimer 16. Research on Multilingual Writers in the Disciplines: The Case of Biomedical Engineering Mya Poe 17. Transnational Translingual Literacy Sponsors and Gateways on the United States-Mexico Borderlands John Scenters-Zapico Part V: Pedagogical Applications 18. Literacy Brokers in the Contact Zone, Year 1: The Crowded Safe House Maria Jerskey 19. Moving Out of the Monolingual Comfort Zone and Into the Multilingual World: An Exercise for the Writing Classroom Joleen Hanson 20. When "Second" Comes First- ----- to the Eye? Sociolinguistic Hybridity in Professional Writing Anita Pandey 21. "And Yea I'm Venting, But Hey I'm Writing Isn't I": A Translingual Approach to Error in a Multilingual Context Aimee Krall-Lanoue 22. Afterword: Reflections From the Ground Floor Dorothy Worden