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Linguistic Justice on Campus
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION Founding Editor: Viv Edwards, University of Reading, UK Series Editors: Phan Le Ha, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA and Joel Windle, Monash University, Australia. Two decades of research and development in language and literacy education have yielded a broad, multidisciplinary focus. Yet education systems face constant economic and technological change, with attendant issues of identity and power, community and culture. What are the implications for language education of new ‘semiotic economies’ and communications technologies? Of complex blendings of cultural and linguistic diversity in communities and institutions? Of new cultural, regional and national identities and practices? The New Perspectives on Language and Education series will feature critical and interpretive, disciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives on teaching and learning, language and literacy in new times. New proposals, particularly for edited volumes, are expected to acknowledge and include perspectives from the Global South. Contributions from scholars from the Global South will be particularly sought out and welcomed, as well as those from marginalized communities within the Global North. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION: 96
Linguistic Justice on Campus Pedagogy and Advocacy for Multilingual Students Edited by
Brooke R. Schreiber, Eunjeong Lee, Jennifer T. Johnson and Norah Fahim
MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Jackson
DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/SCHREI9493 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Schreiber, Brooke R., editor. | Lee, Eunjeong, editor. | Johnson, Jennifer T., editor. | Fahim, Norah, editor. Title: Linguistic Justice on Campus: Pedagogy and Advocacy for Multilingual Students/Edited by Brooke R. Schreiber, Eunjeong Lee, Jennifer T. Johnson and Norah Fahim. Description: Bristol, UK; Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Multilingual Matters, 2022. | Series: New Perspectives on Language and Education: 96 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book supports writing educators on college campuses to work towards linguistic equity and social justice for multilingual students. It demonstrates how recent advances in theories on language, literacy, and race can be translated into pedagogical and administrative practice in a variety of contexts within US higher educational institutions”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021032488 (print) | LCCN 2021032489 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788929486 (paperback) | ISBN 9781788929493 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788929509 (pdf) | ISBN 9781788929516 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States. | English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching (Higher)—Foreign speakers. | Multilingual persons—Education (Higher)—United States. | Education, Higher—United States. | Multilingualism—United States. Classification: LCC PE1405.U6 L56 2022 (print) | LCC PE1405.U6 (ebook) | DDC 808/.042071173—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032488 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032489 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-949-3 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-948-6 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: Ingram, Jackson, TN, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2022 Brooke R. Schreiber, Eunjeong Lee, Jennifer T. Johnson, Norah Fahim and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru and Chennai, India. Printed and bound in the UK by Short Run Press Ltd.
Contents
Contributors 1
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Introduction: Why Linguistic Justice, and Why Now? Eunjeong Lee, Jennifer T. Johnson and Brooke R. Schreiber
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Part 1: Translingual and Antidiscriminatory Pedagogy and Practices 2
Locating Linguistic Justice in Language Identity Surveys Shanti Bruce, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard and Deirdre Vinyard
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Autoethnographic Performance of Difference as Antiracist Pedagogy Zhaozhe Wang
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Dis/Locating Linguistic Terrorism: Writing American Indian Languages Back into the Rhetoric Classroom Rachel Presley
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Audience Awareness, Multilingual Realities: Child Language Brokers in the First Year Writing Classroom Kaia L. Simon
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Part 2: Advocacy in the Writing Center 6
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Valuing Language Diversity through Translingual Reading Groups in the Writing Center Sharada Krishnamurthy, Celeste Del Russo and Donna Mehalchick-Opal Beyond Welcoming Acceptance: Re-envisioning Consultant Education and Writing Center Practices Toward Social Justice for Multilingual Writers Hidy Basta Embracing Difficult Conversations: Making Antiracist and Decolonial Writing Center Programming Visible Marilee Brooks-Gillies
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Social (Justice) Media: Advocating for Multilingual Writers in a Multimodal World Emma Catherine Perry and Paula Rawlins
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Part 3: Professional Development 10 Combatting Monolingualism through Rhetorical Listening: A Faculty Workshop Alexandra Watkins and Lindsey Ives 11 Grassroots Professional Development: Engaging Multilingual Identities and Expansive Literacies through Pedagogical–Cultural Historical Activity Theory (PCHAT) and Translingualism Cristina Sánchez-Martín and Joyce R. Walker 12 Looking Beyond Grammar Deficiencies: Moving Faculty in Economics Toward a Difference-as-Resource Pedagogical Paradigm Kendon Kurzer 13 Afterword Shawna Shapiro Index
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Contributors
Hidy Basta is an Instructor of English and the Writing Center Director at Seattle University, Seattle, Washington. She is a former director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and directed the writing programs at Antioch University in Seattle. Her research and teaching interests include language ideology and policy, multilingual identity, writing in the disciplines, genre theory and narrative analysis. Her recent research and teaching focus on writing consultants’ education toward social justice and antiracist pedagogy. Marilee Brooks-Gillies is an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of the University Writing Center at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. She currently serves as President of the East Central Writing Centers Association and on the IWCA Inclusion and Social Justice Task Force. Her scholarship is situated within cultural rhetorics and writing center studies with an emphasis on place-making in communities of practice. Her work has been published in the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, The Peer Review and enculturation. She is an editor of Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines as well as special issues of Across the Disciplines and Harlot. Shanti Bruce is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication, Media and the Arts at Nova Southeastern University. Her books have won awards from the International Writing Centers Association, she has given numerous peer-reviewed and invited national and international presentations and she has co-chaired multiple conferences. Celeste Del Russo is an Associate Professor in Writing Arts and the Writing Center Director at Rowan University. Her research interests include tutor education and writing center issues around social justice, access and inclusion. Her work has been published in Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship and in forthcoming edited collections including Emotions and Affect in Writing Centers and Writing Centers and Learning Commons. Her favorite part of writing center work is collaborating with tutors and writing center friends. vii
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Norah Fahim is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and is Associate Director at the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking at Stanford University, USA. Her research areas include narrative inquiry, writing program administration and second language writing. With the aim of advocating for multilingual students’ needs within the classroom and beyond, Norah investigates the experiences of multilingual students as well as the experiences of non-TESOL trained instructors working with an increasingly multilingual student population. Lindsey Ives is an Associate Professor of Composition and Writing Program Director at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, where she teaches writing courses at all levels. Her research focuses on secondlanguage writing, WAC/WID, graduate communication support and the relationship between language and privilege in a variety of contexts. Her work has appeared in journals such as Across the Disciplines, Rhetoric Review and TESOL Quarterly and in the collection WAC and Second Language Writers: Research Towards Linguistically and Culturally Inclusive Programs and Practices. Jennifer T. Johnson is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University, USA. Her research focuses on applied linguistics, pedagogy, multimodal communication and the intersection of language and identities. Her work has been published in Composition Forum, L2 Journal and Applied Linguistics. Sharada Krishnamurthy is a doctoral candidate in Language and Literacy Education, working on her dissertation on translingual literacies and antiracist practices in writing centers. Her teaching experience includes education courses such as Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Teaching Linguistically Diverse Students and Human Exceptionality, as well as First-year Writing and Composition. Shaped by her experiences as a former writing center director and tutor, her research interests include challenging monolingual ideologies, and creating equitable and inclusive spaces for language minoritized students in higher education. Kendon Kurzer is currently the Associate Director of Undergraduate Writing Across the Curriculum in the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis. He is primarily interested in supporting multilingual students throughout their educational experiences and beyond. His research interests include the intersection of WAC and multilingual writing and written corrective feedback. His publications include articles that appeared in the TESOL Quarterly, Assessing Writing and Foreign Language Annals.
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Eunjeong Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at University of Houston, USA. Her research concerns issues of inequities and inequalities in literacy education for multilingual students and politics of language. Her work has appeared in Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, World Englishes, Journal of Multicultural Discourses and other edited collections. Rebecca Lorimer Leonard is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on language diversity, literacy studies, and research methods. She has published in College English, Journal of Language, Identity, & Education, Journal of Second Language Writing and Research in the Teaching of English, among others. Her book Writing on the Move: Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy won a 2019 CCCC Outstanding Book Award. Donna Mehalchick-Opal is a doctoral student at Rowan University. She serves as the multilingual coordinator in the writing center and works as an adjunct in First-year Writing. Her research interests include writing center theory and pedagogy as well as the politics of language. She is particularly interested in the topics of class, gender, disability, race constructions and their representations. Emma Catherine Perry is a poet and doctoral candidate in the English department at the University of Georgia. In her capacity as Assistant Director of the UGA Writing Center, her research interests include advocacy strategies for linguistic justice and working with graduate student and multilingual writers. She also studies the intersections of creative and critical writing pedagogies and the implications of artificial intelligence for posthuman rhetoric and composition. Rachel Presley is an Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Theory in the Departments of Writing Studies and Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. As a critical rhetorician with training in cultural studies and political philosophy, her primary research and teaching interests engage issues of social movement and resistance rhetorics, (trans) national citizenship and belonging and postcolonial/decolonial/anticolonial theory. Her work makes use of rhetorical criticism, historiography, critical qualitative methods and sound studies to assess the ways in which marginality is both represented and resisted, especially from panIndigenous perspectives. Paula Rawlins is the Assistant Director of the Yale College Writing Center at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. She is interested in how
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writing centers can advocate for antiracist writing assessment and best serve their surrounding communities through literacy education. Cristina Sánchez-Martín is assistant professor of English at the University of Washington (Seattle). Her teaching and research are at the intersections of language and writing, specifically around transnational and de/anticolonial approaches to education. Her work appears in Journal of Second Language Writing, Journal of Multilingual Education Research and other edited collections. Brooke R. Schreiber is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Baruch College, CUNY, USA. Her research focuses on second language writing, pedagogy and teacher training, as well as global Englishes and translingualism. Her work has appeared in TESOL Quarterly, ELT Journal, Journal of Second Language Writing, Composition Studies and Language Learning and Technology. Shawna Shapiro is an Associate Professor of writing and linguistics at Middlebury College. Her research focuses on college transitions and innovative pedagogies for multilingual/L2 writers. Shapiro’s work appears in peer-reviewed journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English and Composition Studies. Her first book is Fostering International Student Success in Higher Education (TESOL/NAFSA) and her second is Educating Refugee-background Students: Critical Issues and Dynamic Contexts (Multilingual Matters). She is working on a new book, Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom, under contract with Routledge. Kaia L. Simon is an Assistant Professor in the English department at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, where she teaches courses in writing, rhetoric and literacy. She is also the director of the Blugold Seminar, the university’s First-Year Writing Program. Her research on multilingual refugee women’s literacy has been published in Literacy in Composition Studies and in College Composition and Communication. Deirdre Vinyard is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of Washington Bothell, where she teaches fi rst-year composition, specializing in working with multilingual students. She has taught writing and English as a Second/Foreign Language in the US, Canada, Japan and Haiti. Her research focuses on broadening our understanding of multilingual writer identities and the implications for composition pedagogy. Joyce R. Walker is an Associate Professor at Illinois State University in Normal, IL, USA. She teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in Rhetoric and Writing Studies. Her research involves studying how
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people engage with new literate activities as part of their daily lives, in a wide range of life situations and settings. Her work has been published in Kairos, Pedagogy, Computers and Composition, Harlot, MLA Profession and a range of edited collections in education, linguistics and writing studies. Zhaozhe Wang is an Assistant Professor of Writing Studies at the University of Toronto, where he teaches writing and communication. His work, broadly exploring multilingual literacy and non-Western/digital/ public rhetorics, has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Composition Forum, Rhetoric Society Quarterly and WPA: Writing Program Administration. He is also co-editor of Reconciling Translingualism and Second Language Writing. Alexandra Watkins is an Adjunct Professor at Austin Community College. Her interests include linguistic justice, multilingualism and technical and professional writing.
1 Introduction: Why Linguistic Justice, and Why Now? Eunjeong Lee, Jennifer T. Johnson and Brooke R. Schreiber
Over the past two decades, as the population of multilingual and language-minoritized students on US college campuses has been steadily increasing, scholars in language and literacy education have worked to theorize language difference away from harmful monolingual ideologies that enforce and reify ‘standard’ English (i.e. Canagarajah, 2013; Horner et al., 2011; J.W. Lee, 2017; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). These efforts have resulted in a robust set of scholarly theorizations about language heterogeneity, including translanguaging and translingualism, plurilingualism and cosmopolitanism (Donahue, 2018; García & Li, 2014; You, 2016). Despite this theory-building, in practice, writing classrooms and other campus spaces are still dominated by a deficit and racist perspective toward language-minoritized students. These attitudes – visible in incidents like the one at Duke university, where Chinese students were scolded for speaking Chinese in campus spaces – echo a legacy of policies and beliefs which instantiate universities as white, monolingual spaces (Wan, forthcoming), even as universities claim to desire and value linguistic and cultural diversity (Tardy, 2015). In fact, our current sociopolitical climate – characterized by resurging white nationalism and political polarization, on the one hand, and largescale movements for racial justice, on the other – makes it imperative for us to reckon with our role as educators. We have seen our students and colleagues with different linguistic, cultural and racioethnic backgrounds and migration histories under various threats that deny their belonging in the US: travel bans, deportation, the revocation of visas and repeated attempts to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and most recently, police brutality on Black lives and Anti-Asian hate crimes, all fueled by white supremacy, sometimes masquerading as an ‘Americafi rst’ mentality. Our communities of color have also been threatened under the current public health crisis. As we worked on this collection 1
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during the last two years, the world has been grappling with the COVID19 pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other racialized communities in health, economy and education, owing in part to unequal access to health care and technologies (Chotiner, 2020). Our international students have also been the target of the xenophobic and racist rhetoric and policy. As shown by the quickly overturned edict from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, international students were required to take in-person instruction or be forced to leave the US, a harsh measure targeted at the estimated 90% of international students (Whitford, 2020) who remained in the US after the pandemic owing to travel restrictions to and from their home countries. All of these realities show that our students are unequally and inequitably served by existing social structures, including our educational spaces, even those intended to be egalitarian. In other words, the learning and well-being of our racialized and language-minoritized students, many of whom are already linguistically stigmatized, are continuously and significantly compromised by inequities and injustice in the educational system. Under these conditions, it is imperative that we as writing educators foreground justice in our pedagogy, while simultaneously working against and beyond the harmful ideologies and structures that (re)produce educational and societal inequities. The vital question for us is then: what can educators do, in these circumstances, to build more equitable and just learning spaces for our multilingual students? How can educators create more just classrooms and campuses for multilingual writers, who continue to be the targets of hate crimes and violence in the midst of nationalist, xenophobic and racist ideologies? The purpose of this book is to support writing educators on college campuses to break through these entrenched ideologies, and to work toward linguistic justice for language-minoritized students in writing classes, writing centers and professional development. We bring together examples of how recent advancement of theories on language, literacy and race can be translated into practice in the higher educational contexts across the US. By offering research-based examples of countering linguistic racism, promoting language pluralism, creating space for negotiating language standards and cultivating these practices through teacher training and other writing program administration work, we aim to highlight the work of educators who enact antiracist and translingual pedagogies across campuses and support educators with commitments to linguistic justice. Justice: What, How, for Whom?
For scholars of language and literacy research and education, ‘justice’ has been a contentious term, despite its ubiquitous usage. As scholars and educators, our research and praxis are often driven by what we believe is fair, right and just for our students. Yet defi ning ‘justice’ or understanding
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what is ‘just’ is not an easy task, as such a question does not have a clearcut answer nor can it be resolved with an ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach (Avineri et al., 2019). In the introduction to their edited collection, Language and Social Justice in Practice, Avineri and her colleagues (2019: 2) rightly point out, ‘[social justice] remains to be realized rather than a pragmatic challenge that can be reconciled in any straightforward way’. In other words, the notion of ‘justice’ is multifaceted, with varied assumptions and approaches as to what, how and for whom justice needs to be brought about, which at times can seem incommensurable (Tuck & Yang, 2018). It is perhaps in this sense that Bell (2007) poses that social justice needs to be understood as a process as much as a goal – a point that Kinloch et al. (2020) also acknowledge by emphasizing their work toward justice (2020: 6, emphasis in the original). With these difficulties aside, social justice has been understood as ensuring distribution of, and therefore access to, various forms of resources and practices (Avineri et al., 2019). Because differential degrees of distribution, access and recognition reflect inequities and inequalities in different domains (e.g. socioeconomic, cultural and political), scholars have frequently emphasized the role of social structures in individuals’ experience of (in)justice. A political philosopher, Young (2011: 79), for example, distinguishes structural injustice from individual moral wrong, explaining that structural injustice occurs when social processes put large groups of persons under systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities at the same time that these processes enable others to dominate or to have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising capacities available to them.
In other words, social justice concerns how different social structures recognize, value and organize different bodies and their ways of being, knowing and living in various social spaces. These social structural processes then shape our everyday sociocultural, material, affective and political experiences of, as well as access to, various forms of resources and capitals, including language. Therefore, dismantling structural oppression is an important goal of social justice (Young, 1990). While working toward a change in institutional structure can be slow and frustrating, it is crucial to remember that both our students and we, language and literacy educators, also shape the system and therefore can work to change it from within through individual actions. Young (2011: 96), for instance, argues for ‘a social connection model of responsibility’ by which anyone whose actions contribute to maintaining structural processes that result in unjust outcomes has ‘an obligation to join with others who share that responsibility’ for working toward justice. The work of achieving social justice therefore requires a collective effort and persistent, interconnected approaches to different forms of oppression.
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Following scholars who view justice as a process and a goal with multifaceted dimensions that require a shared responsibility and action against structural oppression (Avineri et al., 2019; Bell, 2007; Tuck & Yang, 2018; Young, 2011), this volume presents efforts geared toward both individual and structural changes that are necessary to make our campuses more linguistically just places for our multilingual students. As educators and researchers, we believe at the core of justice work should lie our ‘choice away’ from any praxis that pathologize our students and their communities’ way of being (Tuck & Yang, 2018: 5; emphasis in the original). Showcasing different scales of actions of linguistic justice for multilingual writers across campus spaces, the collection as a whole demonstrates our commitment to a shared responsibility central to combating structural injustices with a hope that this effort brings us one step closer to a more linguistically just society. Language, Ideologies and Justice for Multilingual Writers
Language has long been viewed as a critical resource that not only indexes sociocultural and racioethnic identities but also mediates individuals’ participation in social life and access to other forms of capital (Avineri et al., 2019; Bourdieu, 1991; Heller & McElhinny, 2017; Piller, 2016). How we perceive language varieties and practices that individuals draw on in their social participation has never been neutral, but is ideological, laden with values that constitute ‘linguistic stratification’ (Piller, 2016: 7; see, also, Lippi-Green, 2012). Thus, Piller (2016: 222) argues that ‘understanding and addressing linguistic disadvantage must be a central facet of the social justice agenda of our time’, as knowledge gained from this agenda can shape the work of building more equitable and just social structures. Put another way, transformation of social structures, particularly the educational structure, could take place in and through language, including the way we work with language (Avineri et al., 2019: 145). In this way, discourses about and our labor with language can serve as a central site for justice work for language-minoritized communities (Horner & Alvarez, 2019). As many critical sociolinguists have pointed out, the European and US colonial history greatly influenced the way we conceptualize, practice and value language (Heller & McElhinny, 2017; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). Monolingual ideologies, as a byproduct of European nation-building and colonial projects, have naturalized the connection between one’s language and racioethnic identity, favoring white men as ideal ‘native’ speakers. Particularly in the US, a monolingual ideology, along with a standard language ideology (Lippi-Green, 2012), has been linked to ‘tacit Englishonly policies’ (Horner & Trimbur, 2002), further reinforcing the view of language as a stable and monolithic entity with clear boundaries. In a self-perpetuating cycle, the reifi cation of ‘standard’ English and a
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homogenous group of speakers (white, middle-class, male) as the idealized form and speaker of communication has been used as a way to determine what our students need to succeed in educational settings (Baker-Bell, 2020; Davila, 2016; Inoue, 2015). Despite myriad critiques of the colonial history of English, the legacy of racist and monolingual ideologies is still prevalent, continuously shaping language-minoritized students’ daily experiences of language and literacies. Calling such condition linguistic racism, Lippi-Green (2012: 66) contends, ‘We do not, cannot under our laws ask a person to change the color of their skin, her religion, her gender, her sexual identity, but we regularly demand of people that they suppress or deny the most effective way they have of situating themselves socially in the world’ – their language. Flores and Rosa (2015) explain further, noting that race, as one of the organizing principles within the colonial matrix of power and contemporary transnational society, has been understood as a proxy for language, by way of its conaturalization. Calling the ideological consequence of this conaturalization ‘raciolinguistic ideologies’, Flores and Rosa (2015: 151) argue that one’s language practice is perceived through a racialized lens. To move beyond, they contend that the ‘white listening subject’, ‘an ideological position and mode of perception’ that listens to languageminoritized individuals’ language through the white gaze needs to be interrogated and dismantled. Indeed, the education system in the US has historically operated on colonial logic, upholding dominant language ideologies and continuously racializing language-minoritized students, including those institutionally recognized as multilingual students (Patel, 2016; Rosa & Flores, 2017). These ideologies are reflected in a deficit perspective that views language-minoritized students as ‘lacking’ and ‘deficient’ in their communication and cognitive abilities, and therefore ‘needing’ language. The US college writing classroom, also historically conceived as a space exclusively for young white men, can inadvertently perpetuate the racialization of multilingual students and view their language use and ownership from a deficit perspective (Horner & Trimbur, 2002; E. Lee & Alvarez, 2020; Strickland, 2011). The historical and ongoing structural harm caused by racializing English-only, monolingual ideologies provides a compelling reason for educators to take up a responsibility to engage in justice work for and with multilingual writers. To this end, many have recently called for more activism grounded in principles of linguistic pluralism and antiracism, beyond simply tolerating language difference (Mihut, 2019; Watson & Shapiro, 2018). Linguistic justice work then must be grounded in efforts to recognize, sustain and advocate for students’ relationships, experiences and histories with different languages and literacies, away from the racializing and monolingual ideologies. Beyond continuously building on students’ existent rhetorical sensitivities, as educators we must center students’ embodied experiences across different language varieties and practices and facilitate their
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reflections on and interrogations of power relations interwoven in their experiences. In this way, we recognize that our multilingual students do and can advocate for their own and other linguistically marginalized students’ language practices. In our work toward linguistic justice for multilingual students, we cautiously situate this project as following the efforts of scholars who have theorized language and literacy grounded in Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other racialized students’ experiences of linguistic injustices and exclusion (e.g. Baker-Bell, 2020; de los Ríos & Seltzer, 2018; Kynard, 2013; San Pedro, 2017). In making this claim, we are deeply aware that terminology such as multilingualism, language diversity and even people of color have sometimes been used in ways that obscure ‘different differences’ across racialized students’ language (Alvarez & E. Lee, 2020). More specifically, they have been used as ‘race-neutral umbrella terms’ that serve to erase specificities of Black experiences from discussions of language (Baker-Bell et al., 2020). As Gilyard (2016) has argued, it is problematic to treat all language differences and students’ experiences in these differences as equal. We pose that justice work for multilingual students should not, in any sense, be built on or benefit from anti-Black linguistic racism; rather, the work of linguistic justice for multilingual students must aim to dismantle white language supremacy and anti-Black linguistic racism. We thus follow April Baker-Bell’s (2020: 18) call for frameworks that ‘interrogate and examine the specific linguistic oppressions experienced by linguistically marginalized communities of color and account for the critical distinctions between their linguistic histories, heritages, experiences, circumstances, and relationships to white supremacy’. Dismantling Linguistic Injustice: The Work of Linguistic Justice Praxis
For more equitable literacy education in the US, educators and researchers have worked to address a wide range of both individual and structural issues from classroom pedagogies to institutional structural issues such as language policies, curriculum, assessment and available expertise and resources to promote and sustain student multilingualism. Educators and researchers in K–12 settings specifically have been at the forefront to advance justice and advocacy work for language-minoritized students (e.g. García et al., 2017; Kinloch et al., 2020; Paris & Alim, 2017; Seltzer, 2019). While varied in focus and methodologies, these scholars’ work collectively points to how language and literacy instruction can highlight and amplify our students’ voices to sustain their different ways of doing language and literacies. The core of this work lies in the importance of cultivating a disposition to language and literacy that sees and hears our students’ languaging away from the white gaze or ‘white listening subject’ (Flores & Rosa, 2015), as well as the monolingual assumption of everyday
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language and literacy practices and learning. Providing a comprehensive review on what linguistic justice work has been done so far is beyond the scope of this chapter; however, in the following paragraphs we sketch a brief outline of three lines of work that our book aims to build on. As Bruce et al. will argue in this volume, an important fi rst step in dismantling harmful ideologies is to recognize how they drive our practices of naming and identifying students. The labels that institutionally categorize and govern multilingual speakers (cf. Flores, 2013) circulate beyond K–12 settings, becoming a shared discourse among instructors, administrators and even students in college settings. Scholars in language and literacy research have long problematized numerous terms related to language identities, such as monolingual, native/non-native speakers, English as a Second Language/English as an Additional Language/English as a New Language speakers/writers, English Language Learners, students with Limited English Proficiency and Long-Term English Learners. Research has unequivocally shown that these labels obscure the complexity and multidimensionality of multilingual students’ language and literacy experiences, practices and identities as well as ignoring varied ways of using language and literacies (Brooks, 2017; Flores et al., 2015; Kibler & Valdés, 2016). Such naming practices reflect the English-only, monolingual ideology that only sees students as ‘deficient’ speakers and writers who need access to ‘full’ proficiency rather than bilingual or multilingual in their own communicative rights. Moreover, as ‘discursive demarcations’, this language borderization or gatekeeping in educational discourse reinforces social hierarchies and furthers sociopolitical divides (Valdés, 2017). While we acknowledge that the term multilingual has its own ideological baggage and history, we adopt this term given its wide acceptance and inclusivity among educators and researchers, while also using the term language-minoritized to emphasize the structural and ideological nature of marginalization commonly experienced among our racialized students more broadly (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Along with the critique of the field’s simplistic rendering of multilingual students’ identities, language and literacy practices, another important line of linguistic justice work has been in theorization of language and literacy practices from multilingual students’ perspectives, away from the English-only, monolingual ideologies and toward a decolonial approach. In order to move away from a difference-as-a-deficit approach, scholars have argued that we should recognize students’ multilingual repertoire as an important communicative resource (Canagarajah, 2006). The recent development of the translingual approach posits that language difference across and within named languages should be recognized as a communicative norm. What this means for writing pedagogies is then to read students’ writing with openness and curiosity for their languaging – understand what meaning students are trying to make and how the language difference works for meaning making as a whole while
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encouraging students to draw on their entire communicative repertoire across multiple languages and modalities in their meaning making (Canagarajah, 2013; García & Li, 2014; Howell et al., 2020; Gonzales, 2018). The efforts to reconceptualize language and literacy away from the colonial ideologies in scholarship on translingualism have been recognized as what Mignolo (2000) calls ‘de-linking’ from the European mode of thought, and therefore, an important means of pursuing a decolonial option (Cushman, 2016; García & Alvis, 2019). Recent work on raciolinguistics and other work driven by antiracist frameworks have highlighted the importance of attending to the racial nature in approaching multilingual writers and language difference. Flores and Rosa (2015) problematize the ‘appropriateness-model’ – the idea that our language-minoritized students’ home languages are not considered appropriate for academic communication, and therefore, they need to learn the ‘standard’ English as an appropriate language for school (similar to what other scholars have called code-switching pedagogy as Young (2004) has critiqued). Flores (2020) has argued that the model falsely reinforces the home and school/academic language binary, which is used as a way to continue to marginalize students of color. Inoue (2015) also contends that the ‘white racial habitus’ of our classroom assessment ecology is conditioned to unfairly evaluate writings of our students of color as always deviant from the ‘standard’ written English. Building on Flores and Rosa, Howell et al. (2020) call for a ‘raciolinguistic justice’ in subverting ‘racism’s hold on language use in the classroom and beyond’, especially around language policing of these so-called standards. The challenge against the English-only, monolingual and racist ideologies and the theoretical advancement helps us to imagine more equitable writing education. However, such rethinking requires actual labor in order to transform the way we teach and work with multilingual writers. An increasing number of teacher-scholars have shown what this labor can look like in both writing classrooms and writing teacher education, focusing on increasing critical awareness of multilingual realities, disrupting the monolingual native-speakerism and cultivating translingual dispositions (Alvarez & E. Lee, 2019; J.W. Lee & Jenks, 2016; Schreiber, 2019; Watson, 2018). Emerging work also looks to ways to center multilingual writers’ agency in teaching and programmatic designs (Shapiro et al., 2016) and serve multilingual writers beyond classrooms through writing center tutor education (Blazer & Fallon, 2020) and collaborative professional development opportunities (Cavazos et al., 2018). This is much needed labor, and yet translating theoretical advancement into pedagogical practice remains to be a challenge for many, especially when faced with material and ideological constraints. We recognize that it takes more than ‘a’ writing classroom and ‘a’ teacher education course to bring our imagination of equitable and just learning experiences for multilingual writers into a shared reality. As Diab
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et al. (2017: 26) remind us, ‘Equity work is always incomplete and involves always striving. It is everyday and local, while systematic and institutional’. It is to this ‘incomplete’ and ‘always striving’ work that we contribute our book. We aim to build on the continuous work of teacher-scholars who have contributed to classroom pedagogies and assessment practices that foreground linguistic pluralism and antiracism that aims to foster students’ critical awareness of our multilingual realities and linguistic racism. The chapters in this volume bring attention to this very ‘everyday and local, while systematic and institutional’ on-going equity work for multilingual students, as situated in different institutional spaces and positionalities, and aim to go beyond theorizing inclusive antiracist and translingual approaches to demonstrating how we might try to enact change in our praxis. Overview
Recognizing the importance of concerted efforts across different spaces involved in writing instruction and administration (Watson & Shapiro, 2018; Howell et al., 2020), we organized our book into three thematic sections: translingual and antidiscriminatory pedagogy, advocacy in the writing center and professional development. Translingual and antidiscriminatory pedagogy and practices
The chapters in this section draw on a wide range of frameworks, but share a common goal of promoting practices and assignments that make the first-year writing classroom – and the writing program that surrounds it – a space that forwards, supports and honors multilingualism and that fights against white language supremacy. First, as discussed above, working toward linguistic justice can begin with a move away from the narrow and stereotypical understandings of who multilingual students are reflected in institutional labels. Shanti Bruce, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard and Deirdre Vinyard’s chapter ‘Locating Linguistic Justice in Language Identity Surveys’ highlights the limitations of institutional surveys in describing multilingual students’ complex language identities and writing repertoires. The chapter illustrates how students co-opt or challenge generalized language identity labels which fail to represent their fluid use of discursive resources, and argues that institutional identity surveys may in fact ‘perpetuate the monolingual ideologies’ that they are often presumed to combat (p. 32). Moving further into the recognition of multilingual students’ fluid language resources, Zhaozhe Wang argues that instructors must create space for students to see and reflect on language difference as relative and emergent, both to develop students’ sense of linguistic justice, and to work against a ‘neoliberal discourse of diversity’ (p. 42), which essentializes
10 Linguistic Justice on Campus
students’ language differences for marketing purposes without truly valuing them. In his chapter ‘Autoethnographic Performance of Difference as Antiracist Pedagogy’, Wang details how such reflection can be achieved by discussing a case study of a multilingual writer and her autoethnography writing, through which she shows her evolving relationships with English and Chinese, and ultimately, develops critical awareness of what she can do with and through language difference. ‘Dis/Locating Linguistic Terrorism: Writing American Indian Languages Back into the Rhetoric Classroom’, by Rachel Presley offers a pedagogical approach that accounts for the violence done to Indigenous people via geographically emplaced decolonial work. Presley reviews historical examples of linguistic terrorism, including the infamous Carlisle Indian School, before proposing a sequence of multimodal activities which expose the coloniality of place names and map-making and center Indigenous languages and history, and critically connecting students to surrounding networks of rhetorical ecologies. The fi nal chapter in this section, ‘Audience Awareness, Multilingual Realities: Child Language Brokers in the First Year Writing Classroom’, by Kaia L. Simon, demonstrates how child language brokers (children who translate for their parents and community members) develop vital rhetorical skills and strategies in navigating the power hierarchies and emotional labor of adult conversations. Aligning with a translingual approach, Simon describes pedagogical choices where her students learn from former child language brokers’ expertise in moving across languages, challenging both monolingual and multilingual students’ deficit perspectives. Advocacy in the writing center
The chapters in the next section focus on writing center work that combats institutional discourses privileging standard language ideologies and strives toward inclusive practices valuing cultural and linguistic practices of multilingual students. As a whole, the authors show us that changing from assimilation, difference-as-deficit perspectives (i.e. ‘improving’ student writing to meet a ‘standard’) to antiracist, decolonial approaches require writing centers to do work across various institutional contexts such as engaging with campus stakeholders, centering reflexive, critical approaches in consultant training and providing support for writing instructors. In the fi rst two chapters, two writing center directors discuss programmatic changes that more fully enact their writing centers’ commitment to inclusivity. Focusing on re-envisioning consultant education, Sharada Krishnamurthy, Celeste Del Russo and Donna Mehalchick-Opal in ‘Valuing Language Diversity through Translingual Reading Groups in the
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Writing Center’ discuss how translingual reading groups that cultivate consultants’ awareness of languaging and diverse writing practices can push beyond the narrative of ‘we don’t do grammar’ (p. 89). Analyzing tutor reflections from reading group discussions and client report forms, the authors demonstrate how a pedagogy oriented by translingualism in consultant education leads to an increase in consultants’ understanding and acceptance of students’ diverse translingual practices, but they also fi nd that this understanding is sometimes in tension with a ‘persistence of standard tutoring norms’ (p. 98). Also focusing on writing consultant education, Hidy Basta, in ‘Beyond Welcoming Acceptance: Re-envisioning Consultant Education and Writing Center Practices Toward Social Justice for Multilingual Writers’ offers pedagogical approaches that draw on multilingual and translingual frameworks and examine monolingual ideologies embedded in writing center materials and policies. In her analysis of reflections from consultants, she demonstrates how the pedagogy that uses linguistic diversity as threshold concepts fosters new ways of thinking about writing by disrupting our ‘internalized linguistic prejudices’ (p. 118). Marilee Brooks-Gillies, in ‘Embracing Difficult Conversations: Making Antiracist and Decolonial Writing Center Programming Visible’, traces her writing center’s shift in enacting ‘a multidimensional pedagogy for radical justice’ (Diab et al., 2012). She shares the transformative effects of her writing center’s ‘Difficult Conversation Series’ programming focused on cultivating relationships with different campus stakeholders through conversations around themes such as mental health, multilingual writers, access and equity. These conversations, she states, ‘cannot be an add-on but must emerge from intention and care to building a community focused on linguistic and cultural justice’ (p. 134). Shifting our attention to writing center work that supports writing instructors, Emma Catherine Perry and Paula Rawlins, in their chapter ‘Social (Justice) Media: Advocating for Multilingual Writers in a Multimodal World’, share how they build a broad social media presence to help instructors center antiracist and translingual approaches in their pedagogy. The authors trace their process of creating and publishing digital resources on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, focused on engaging instructors with discussions of race and white supremacy, providing examples of translingual and antiracist instruction and valuing linguistic diversity in assessment and course design. Professional development
The chapters in this section offer models of practical strategies for teacher educators who want to dismantle harmful monolingual ideologies, both with composition instructors and with faculty across the curriculum.
12 Linguistic Justice on Campus
In their chapter, ‘Combatting Monolingualism through Rhetorical Listening: A Faculty Workshop’, Alexandra Watkins and Lindsey Ives introduce a two-part faculty development workshop for humanities instructors aimed at problematizing language standards based on implicit cultural biases, in particular the push to teach and enforce Standard Edited American English. Drawing on Krista Ratcliffe’s (2005) theory of rhetorical listening, the workshops invite participants to reflect on the racism inherent in language standards, and move past guilt and defensiveness to concrete changes in their teaching practice. Next, Cristina Sánchez-Martín and Joyce R. Walker draw our attention to the transformative power of engaging with multilingual instructors’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds at a pedagogical and programmatic level. Their chapter, ‘Grassroots Professional Development: Engaging Multilingual Identities and Expansive Literacies through Pedagogical–Cultural Historical Activity Theory (PCHAT) and Translingualism’, traces two examples of international teaching assistants’ identity trajectories during their first semesters of teaching, considering the translingualism instantiated in their course projects and in the program’s writing research journal. The authors conclude that translingual and CHAT-informed paradigms foster social justice (Cushman, 2016) by attending to how sociocultural and ecological factors shape people’s literate activity, and thus, offer opportunities for individual agency. Kendon Kurzer’s chapter ‘Looking Beyond Grammar Deficiencies: Moving Faculty in Economics Toward a Difference-as-Resource Pedagogical Paradigm’ presents details from the Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing Across the Disciplines (WAC/WID) literature and from a study of multilingual students’ experiences in an undergraduate economics program to outline the expectations placed on students in economics, including a heavy focus on grammatical correctness. He then offers pedagogical suggestions to help economics instructors work against racist barriers and practices move toward viewing students’ multilingualism as resources in the economics classroom. Finally, in her Afterword Shawna Shapiro invites the readers to reflect on the common themes that the contributors have focused on throughout the book, pointing out the major points of convergence and areas that need more collective actions. She concludes by calling for continuous reflexivity and collaborations across the disciplines and the institution as we move forward with linguistic justice work. Conclusion: Toward Linguistic Justice for Multilingual Writers
As we discussed at the beginning of this chapter, our efforts to labor toward linguistic justice are always constrained by different material and ideological conditions, particularly so in times of precarity and uncertainty – the conditions significantly exacerbated under the current COVID-19
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pandemic. However, the material and ideological challenges cannot be a roadblock that stops our work. Quite contrary, it is precisely these challenges, which continue to uphold inequitable writing education, that make it imperative that we must continue working toward linguistic justice for multilingual students. The work we feature in our book shows how commitment to linguistic justice can be actionable, and more importantly, how alternative ways of teaching and learning writing are possible. As we continue to learn about injustices and inequalities in our students’ experiences, it is important to acknowledge our own hindsight. To this end, we recognize that our book too is bounded by its ableist framework. We humbly recognize the labor and efforts by scholars in disability studies, and acknowledge that conversations of access and inclusion for multilingual students must include an awareness of ability and bodily diversity and recognize the convergence of ableism and racism that perpetuates monolingual practices and harmful language policies (Cedillo, 2018; Gonzales & Butler, 2020). In this regard, we believe the future work of linguistic justice must more productively engage in the question of ‘what justice entails in different contexts for different bodies’ (Gonzales & Butler, 2020). In closing, we forward our belief that building a more linguistically just campus is a step toward building a more linguistically just society. As language and literacy educators, we have a duty to disrupt the inequitable education system and create an unapologetically inclusive, accessible and humanizing writing ecology where multilingual students can amplify their voices and grow as ethical, reflexive and critical writers. This book is one small effort to join other scholars who have led this fight long before us and expand linguistic justice work for multilingual students on campus, and we hope that our readers will too join us in continuously thinking and acting on work toward linguistic justice for multilingual writers. References Alvarez, S.P. and Lee, E. (2020) Ordinary diff erence, extraordinary dispositions: Sustaining multilingualism in the writing classroom. In J.W. Lee and S. Dovchin (eds) Translinguistics: Negotiating Innovation and Ordinariness (pp. 61–72). New York: Routledge. Avineri, N., Graham, L.R., Johnson, E.J., Riner, R.C. and Rosa, J. (eds) (2019) Language and Social Justice in Practice. New York: Routledge. Baker-Bell, A. (2020) Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Baker-Bell, A., Williams-Farrier, B.J., Jackson, D., Johnson, L., Kynard, C. and McMurtry, T. (2020) This ain’t another statement! This is a demand for Black linguistic justice! Conference on College Composition and Communication Statement on Anti-Black Racism and Black Linguistic Justice. See https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/ demand-for-black-linguistic-justice (accessed 9 August 2020). Bell, L.A. (2007) Theoretical foundations for social justice education. In M. Adams, L.A. Bell and P. Griffi n (eds) Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice (pp. 1–14). New York: Routledge.
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Blazer, S. and Fallon, B. (2020) Changing conditions for multilingual writers: Writing centers destabilizing standard language ideology. Composition Forum, 44. See https://compositionforum.com/issue/44/changing-conditions.php Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brooks, M.D. (2017) How and when did you learn your languages? Bilingual students’ linguistic experiences and literacy instruction. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 60 (4), 383–393. Canagarajah, A.S. (2006) The place of world Englishes in composition: The pluralization continued. College Composition and Communication 57 (4), 586–619. Canagarajah, A.S. (2013) Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. New York: Routledge. Cavazos, A.G., Hebbard, M., Hernández, J., Rodriguez, C. and Schwarz, G. (2018) Advancing a transnational, transdisciplinary, and translingual framework: A professional development series for teaching assistants in writing and Spanish programs. [Special issue on transdisciplinary and translingual challenges for WAC/WID.] Across the Disciplines 15 (3), 11–27. Cedillo, C.V. (2018) What does it mean to move?: Race, disability, and critical embodiment pedagogy. Composition Forum, 39. See http://compositionforum.com/issue/39/ to-move.php Chotiner, I. (2020) The coronavirus and the interwoven threads of inequality and health. The New Yorker, 14 April. See https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-coronavirus-and-the-interwoven-threads-of-inequality-and-health (accessed 8 August 2020). Cushman, E. (2016) Translingual and decolonial approaches to meaning making. College English 78 (3), 234–242. Davila, B. (2016) The inevitability of ‘standard’ English: Discursive constructions of standard language ideologies. Written Communication 33 (2), 127–148. de los Ríos, C.V. and Seltzer, K. (2018) Translanguaging, coloniality, and English classrooms: An exploration of two bicoastal urban classrooms. Research in the Teaching of English 52 (1), 55–76. Diab, R. Godbee, B., Ferrel, T. and Simpkins, N. (2012) A Multi-Dimensional Pedagogy for Racial Justice in Writing Centers. English Faculty Research and Publications, vol. 95. Diab, R. Ferrel, T. and Godbee, B. (2017) ‘Making commitments to racial justice actionable’ has rich conversations about social justice. In F. Condon and V.A. Young (eds) Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication. Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse. Donahue, C. (2018) Rhetorical and linguistic flexibility: Valuing heterogeneity in academic writing education. In D. Martin (ed.) Transnational Writing Education (pp. 21–40). New York: Routledge. Flores, N. (2013) The unexamined relationship between neoliberalism and plurilingualism: A cautionary tale. TESOL Quarterly 47 (3), 500–520. Flores, N. (2020) From academic language to language architecture: Challenging raciolinguistic ideologies in research and practice. Theory into Practice 59 (1), 22–31. Flores, N. and Rosa, J. (2015) Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review 85 (2), 149–171. Flores, N., Kleyn, T. and Menken, K. (2015) Looking holistically in a climate of pariality: Identities of students labeled long-term English language learners. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 14, 113–132. García, O. and Alvis, J. (2019) The decoloniality of language and translanguaging: Latinx knowledge-production. Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics 1, 26–40. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism, and Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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García, O., Johnson, S.I. and Seltzer, K. (2017) The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon. Gilyard, K. (2016) The rhetoric of translingualism. College English 78 (3), 284–289. Gonzales, L. (2018) Sites of Translation: What Multilinguals Can Teach us about Digital Writing and Rhetoric. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Gonzales, L. and Butler, J. (2020) Working toward social justice through multilingualism, multimodality, and accessibility in writing classrooms. Composition Forum 44. See https://compositionforum.com/issue/44/embracing.php Grande, S. (2018) Refusing the university. In E. Tuck and K.W. Yang (eds) Toward What Justice?: Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education (pp. 47–65). New York: Routledge. Heller, M. and McElhinny, B. (2017) Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Horner, B. and Alvarez, S.P. (2019) Defi ning translinguality. Literacies in Composition Studies 7 (2), 1–30. Horner, B. and Trimbur, J. (2002) English only and US college composition.College Composition and Communication 53 (4), 594–630. Horner, B., Lu, M.Z., Royster, J.J. and Trimbur, J. (2011) Language difference in writing: Toward a translingual approach. College English 73 (3), 303–321. Horner, B., Selfe, C. and Lockridge, T. (2015) Translinguality, transmodality, and difference: Exploring dispositions and change in language and learning. Intermezzo. See http://intermezzo.enculturation.net/01/ttd-horner-selfe-lockridge/index.htm Howell, N.C., Navickas, K., Shapiro, R., Shapiro, S. and Watson, M. (2020) Embracing the perpetual ‘but’ in raciolinguistic justice work: When idealism meets practice. Composition Forum 44, Summer. Inoue, A.B. (2015) Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. WAC Clearinghouse. Kibler, A.K. and Valdés, G. (2016) Conceptualizing language learners: Socioinstitutional mechanisms and their consequences. The Modern Language Journal 100, 96–116. Kinloch, V., Burkhard, T. and Penn, C. (eds) (2020) Race, justice, and activism in literacy instruction In V. Kinloch, T. Burkhard and C. Penn (eds) Race, Justice, and Activism in Literacy Instruction (pp. 1–9). New York: Teachers College Press. Kynard, C. (2013) Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies studies. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Lee, E. and Alvarez, S.P. (2020) World Englishes, translingualism, and racialization in the US college composition classroom. World Englishes 39 (2), 263–274. Lee, J.W. (2017) The Politics of Translingualism: After Englishes. New York: Routledge Lee, J.W. and Jenks, C. (2016) Doing translingual dispositions: Considerations from a US–Hong Kong Partnership. College Composition and Communication 68 (2), 317–344. Lippi-Green, R. (2012) English with an Accent. Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States (2nd edn). New York: Routledge. Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (eds) (2007) Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Mignolo, W.D. (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mihut, L. (2019) Linguistic pluralism: A statement and a call to advocacy. Refl ections 18 (2), 66–86. Paris, D. and Alim, H.S. (2017) Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World. New York: Teachers College Press. Patel, L. (2016) Decolonizing Educational Research: From Ownership to Answerability. New York: Routledge. Piller, I. (2016) Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Ratcliffe, K. (2005) Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Rosa, J. and Flores, N. (2017) Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society 46 (5), 1–27. San Pedro, T.J. (2017) ‘This stuff interests me’: Re-centering Indigenous paradigms in colonizing schooling spaces. In D. Paris and H.S. Alim (eds) Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (pp. 99–116). New York: Teachers College Press. Schreiber, B.R. (2019) ‘More like you’: Disrupting native speakerism through a multimodal online exchange. TESOL Quarterly 53 (4), 1115–1138. Seltzer, K. (2019) Reconceptualizing ‘home’ and ‘school’ language: Taking a critical translingual approach in the English classroom. TESOL Quarterly 53 (4), 986–1007. Shapiro, S., Cox, M., Shuck, G. and Simnitt, E. (2016) Teaching for agency: From appreciating linguistic diversity to empowering student writers. Composition Studies 44 (1), 31–52. Strickland, D. (2011) The Managerial Unconscious: In the History of Composition Studies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University. Tardy, C. (2015) Discourses of internationalization and diversity in US universities and writing programs. In Transnational Writing Program Administration. (pp. 243–262). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. (2018) Introduction: Born under the rising sign of social justice. In E. Tuck and K.W. Yang (eds) Toward What Justice? Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education (pp. 1–18). New York: Routledge. Valdés, G. (2017) Entry visa denied: The construction of symbolic language borders in educational settings. In O. García, N. Flores and M. Spotti (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society (pp. 321–348). New York: Oxford University Press. Wan, A. (forthcoming) Strangers in a strange land: ‘The foreign student’ at US universities after World War II. In X. You, D. Martins and B.R. Schreiber (eds) Writing Education and Resistance to Isolationism. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Watson, M. (2018) Sociolinguistics for language and literacy educators. Composition Studies 46 (2), 163–185. Watson, M. and Shapiro, R. (2018) Clarifying the multiple dimensions of monolingualism: Keeping our sights on language politics. Composition Forum 38. See http://compositionforum.com/issue/38/monolingualism.php Whitford, E. (2020) International students banned from online-only instruction. Inside Higher Ed, 7 July. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/07/07/departmenthomeland-security-rule-bans-international-students-online-only#:~:text=The%20 new%20Department%20of%20Homeland,instruction%20model%20for%20the%20 fall (accessed 8 August). You, X. (2016) Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Young, I.R. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, I.R. (2011) Responsibility for Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Young, V.A. (2004) Your average nigga. College Composition and Communication 55 (4), 693–715.
2 Locating Linguistic Justice in Language Identity Surveys Shanti Bruce, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard and Deirdre Vinyard
College writing programs play a central role in students’ general education, administering an array of courses to teach them, in essence, how to write in college. At their best, writing programs support college students whose writing practices and preparation range widely across languages. However, in writing courses, both instructors and students can find themselves ignoring, or even actively suppressing, rich and complex literacy backgrounds in pursuit of the production of monolingual texts in standard academic English (Horner & Trimbur, 2002; Watson & Shapiro, 2018). Instructors may adhere to institutional discourses that conceive of language competence in non/native terms and perpetuate deficit views of multilingual writers (Marshall & Marr, 2018). A pragmatic understanding of this situation concedes that often instructors, administrators and students themselves simply may not be aware of students’ full language repertoires. However, a more critical understanding moves beyond recognizing students’ language backgrounds to actively push against the institutional practices that make this recognition so complex. This chapter reports on a mixed-methods research study that sought to understand the recognition of linguistically diverse writers in both generous and critical terms. Through fi ne-grained analysis of both survey and focus group results, we show the ways in which institutional language surveys reify or fi x language backgrounds in the labeling act. While language surveys are often conducted to understand changing populations, they may constrain language identities more complex than institutional language allows. Aware of the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s (2014) ‘Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers’ call to ‘actively seek to determine the language use and language backgrounds’ of students and recognizing that our universities gather little data on student language backgrounds, we designed a study to understand the complexity of our students’ language repertoires and thereby ‘actively’ push forward our 19
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Part 1: Translingual and Antidiscriminatory Pedagogy and Practices
writing programs’ abilities to change the writing conditions for students’ from a range of language backgrounds. Like many in our field, we designed a survey to understand how our student population was changing and to capture how students experience our curricula (Benda et al., 2018; Lawrick, 2013; Ruecker & Ortmeier-Hooper, 2017; Schneider, 2018). However, during survey analysis and especially in collecting focus group data, we found that the available language for talking about language offers survey designers and respondents a limited discourse for describing writers’ language repertoires. We designed our survey questions to capture what contemporary research and theory tells us about language and literacy backgrounds: multilingual writers draw on resources formed through life experiences in and out of school (Canagarajah, 2006; Lorimer Leonard, 2014; Rounsaville, 2014); they draw on the whole of their multicompetence rather than switching among individually bounded languages (Cook, 1999, 2016; García & Li, 2014); they develop literate skills and practices in a variety of modes on and offline (Fraiberg & You, 2012; Lam, 2013); they identify (and are identified by institutions) variously as English as a Second Language (ESL), international, multilingual, second language, non-native and native, and these identifications impact how they experience writing and school writing in particular (Flores et al., 2015; Goen et al., 2002). However, while our language survey did indeed capture broad demographic data, the survey results did not capture what many of those who design language surveys perhaps hope to see: the rich and nuanced affiliations, value systems and personal histories that shape how multilingual writers identify themselves, or in other words, the actual contours of the repertoires that writers use to compose. In this chapter, we show the limitations of the institutional language survey, arguing that while survey data is meaningful, the demographic generalizations that surveys produce are not necessarily meaningful to the students taking the surveys or to scholars seeking to understand the lived language realities of college writers. Taking up a social justice lens that centers experiences of linguistic injustice, the chapter features rather than obscures student resistance to the survey, highlighting as a fi nding the ways that students co-opt, adopt and resist the institutional language identity we supply to them. While our study is more a cautionary tale than a model of linguistic justice, our results – by centering the tensions inherent in the survey act – can point toward a pragmatic reframing of the impulse to gather data on students’ language backgrounds. The sections below describe how we came to these conclusions. First, we review the theoretical framework that informed our research questions and data collection and analysis. Second, we share data results that highlight both what our survey could and could not capture, including openresponse survey data that show students challenging the language identities we offered to them. Finally, we offer focus group data excerpts
Locating Linguistic Justice in Language Identity Surveys
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that exemplify the language dimensions that surveys can and cannot see. In the end, the chapter recognizes the utility of static identifiers like labels but also offers strategies for a more holistic mapping of students’ dynamic language practices. Socially Just Language Labels
As noted by scholars across fields pursuing social justice, achieving social justice does not just mean the eradication of injustice, but rather means beginning with ‘envisioning what a just society would look like’ (Reisch, 2014: 1). Language, of course, must play a role in this vision. As Ingrid Piller (2016) posits in her book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: ‘Understanding and addressing linguistic disadvantage must be a central facet of the social justice agenda of our time’ (2016: 6). For Piller (2016) this means ‘systematically’ understanding how linguistic diversity is imbricated in social inequality, domination and imparity. Such work can help us envision the ways we can ‘change our social and linguistic arrangements in ways that make them more equitable and just’ (Piller, 2016: 222) by starting with a close and careful examination of the social consequences of linguistic sorting mechanisms: who does or does not benefit from justice-minded inquiries around linguistic diversity; and how linguistically diverse students negotiate access to institutional resources in the midst of these inquiries (Piller, 2016: 3). Language surveys are one of these linguistic sorting mechanisms, and thus must be handled with care. Even if the language survey is motivated by a desire to change the ‘linguistic arrangements’ of a writing program – attending to students’ full language backgrounds to offer more relevant, accessible and just writing courses and assessment practices – surveys seek to neatly sort. They may disallow linguistic complexity. Thus, we designed a mixed-method study in conversation with scholarship that considers how institutional data-gathering impacts multilingual students’ articulations of their language backgrounds. Scholars working in second language writing, developmental and basic writing, and writing assessment have long argued that language identities gathered at institutional gatekeeping moments may result in student labeling or course placement that may mischaracterize or even deny students’ linguistic backgrounds. Scholars have sought to understand labels under which students are grouped (Friedrich, 2006; Harklau et al., 1999; Roberge et al., 2009; Starks, 2010), which students prefer or resist (Braine, 1996; Chiang & Schmida, 1999; Flores et al., 2015; Saenkhum, 2016) or which impact their success or self-efficacy (Blanton, 1999; Costino & Hyon, 2007). For example, Ortmeier-Hooper (2008) importantly shows that a label like ‘ESL’ is not simply a neutral institutional designation but an identity, complete with assumptions about language proficiency, educational preparation and social belonging, all of which, she says, ‘have a profound
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effect on how they defi ne themselves in the college classroom and in their writing’ (2008: 393). Forcing anyone to choose just one identity label ‘without considering, context, nor consequences’ is a form of disempowerment (Rinderle, 2005: 311; also see Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, UNESCO Executive Board, 1996). Importantly, scholars also show that language identifications are not stable or linked to any consistent writing course, residency status, length of time studying English or spent in country, but instead shift over time and can vary based on students’ differing interpretations of the terms in the labels themselves. For international students in particular, the label ‘international’ is often used so generally that it has little descriptive potential, missing much of students’ exposure to Englishes, and certain forms of English composition instruction, prior to college in the US (Lawrick, 2013; Schneider, 2018). So while language labels can act as a decipherable common language for institutions to organize and categorize students’ multilingualism, contemporary theory in several fields shows that the complexity of language identity exceeds what can be captured in institutional language labels. Therefore, the cross-institutional research study on which this chapter reports was designed with dynamism in mind, seeking to complicate the notions of language identities that are gathered and represented during institutional processes of data collection. This pursuit is informed by scholarship that shows that multilingual identities are as fluid as all identities, but also comprise specific kinds of complexities – multiple and overlapping linguistic, racial, economic and ethnic affi liations that reveal power relations (Ball & Ellis, 2008; Shuck, 2006). In other words, writing involves language identities because it is inescapably a social practice in which ‘the value and meaning ascribed to an utterance are determined in part by the value and meaning ascribed to the person who speaks’ or writes (Norton & Toohey, 2002: 115). For this reason, our approach to language repertoires includes considerations of these lives. We use language repertoires to mean not static containers of competence or skills, but instead the totality of ‘biographically assembled patchworks of functionally distributed communicative resources’ (Agnihotri, 2014: 28) that reflect language experiences gathered across the ‘rhythms of actual human lives’ (Blommaert & Backus, 2012: 8). In analyzing such resources, we include ‘the social and cultural itineraries followed by people, how they maneuvered and navigated them, and how they placed themselves into the various social arenas they inhabited or visited in their lives’ (Agnihotri, 2014: 26). Following these theories, we assume that uneven learning opportunities do not limit users’ skills but instead shape existing strengths in different ways: what might be assumed to be an incomplete or lacking repertoire we treat as a lived repertoire in process. To capture these lived repertoires, including students linguistic ‘experience of injustice’, we aimed in the survey questions and focus group
Locating Linguistic Justice in Language Identity Surveys
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conversations to methodologically center students’ self-conceptions of their language identity as shaped through their lived experiences (Piller, 2016: 5). Methodology
The larger project from which this data is drawn was designed through a mixed methods approach (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017) in order to understand two research questions: (1) What are the discursive resources that comprise our fi rst-year writers’ language repertoires? (2) How do these discursive resources map onto those that are assumed by our institutions? The fi rst research question was designed to serve a census function. In essence, we wanted to know what language backgrounds and experiences existed on our campuses before moving forward to investigate curricular change, placement innovations and differently conceived professional development. The question’s use of ‘discursive resources’, calls on MinZhan Lu’s (2004) theory of discursive resources: ‘Intersecting as well as competing templates on how one should speak, read, write, think, feel, look (appear and view), act, viscerally respond to and interact with others and the world … spawned by participation in, affiliation with, or bond to a broad but constantly changing range of social domains (societies, institutions, or life worlds)’ (Lu, 2004: 27). This defi nition guided our design of the survey and focus group questions but also informed our data analysis as explained below. The second question was designed to then place those resources in an institutional context. We wondered how students positioned themselves linguistically given how institutions positioned them through different language labels – how did the map of their linguistic lives appear or disappear when layered over the map of their campus. Put another way, we wanted to know how multilingual writers worked within, pushed against and benefited from institutions’ assumptions about them. Like Flores et al. (2015) we aimed to look for matches and mismatches between students’ holistic identities and the deficit views reproduced in available language labels. The research sites were the three North American universities where we worked as faculty and administrators in the writing programs and writing centers: North State University, a public R1 land grant institution enrolling 19,000 undergraduates (27,000 with graduate students); South Private University, an independent, not-for-profit, research university that enrolls 6000 undergraduates, including 1200 international students from 116 countries, (28,000 total students); and British Columbia University of the Arts, a public art and design school in Canada, with an undergraduate population of 1600 (total enrollment approximately 1850).
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Data collection
The larger study was designed to follow the two-part construction of our research questions. A cross-institutional language survey captured the breadth of possible language repertoires on three very different campuses, and follow-up focus groups gathered deep experiential data on the language activities of individual writers. While the survey aimed to address the first research question and the focus groups to address the second, a mixed methods approach also was chosen to allow for triangulation and rigor in understanding the research questions, optimally yielding cross-institutional and also local depictions of multilingual writers on our campuses. Appropriate to qualitative research, we used purposeful rather than random sampling to gather data that would produce information-rich insight (Patton, 1990). Across the three campuses, a 21-question survey was administered to 1948 first year writing students with a total of 1870 respondents (see Appendix 2.1). A majority of the respondents attended North State University (n = 980, 52%) while approximately a third attended South Private University (n = 582; 31%). British Columbia University of the Arts had 308 student respondents. We then conducted focus groups on each campus, using a protocol designed to elucidate survey responses, eventually speaking with 32 participants in total. We aimed to foreground in the focus groups the ways language labels ‘matter for the people who have learned them’ (Blommaert & Backus, 2012: 26). Thus, questions posed to participants concerned their multilingual and individual language practices, their experiences with and considerations of language labels and identities, and their own understanding of their language proficiencies.
Data analysis
We followed a common analytical approach to these data, using descriptive statistical analysis for the survey and thematic qualitative analysis for the focus groups. We worked with two consultants at South Private University to carry out descriptive statistical analyses of the survey data from the three research sites. These analyses provided a census-like picture of students’ discursive resources, the broad-strokes demographics, language backgrounds and language activities that comprised students’ literate repertoires that were immediately useful to our institutions’ writing programs. We then performed thematic analysis of our focus group data by combining the transcriptions into a single cross-institutional dataset and inductively coding themes and patterns that spoke to our second research question. We engaged in several rounds of open and focused coding both individually and collaboratively: (a) each researcher performed their own open coding of all described discursive resources in the dataset, building their own coding scheme; (b) in conversation, we
Locating Linguistic Justice in Language Identity Surveys 25
discussed our individual coding schemes, and eliminated, combined and adopted several codes in pursuit of a single collaborative coding scheme; (c) we then used this collaborative scheme for individual focused coding in light of our individual institution’s assumptions about its multilingual writers and according to our own analytical interests and needs. As we triangulated our focus group analysis with our descriptive survey results to respond to our research questions, we encountered complicated mismatches between what the survey results showed numerically and what the focus groups demonstrated discursively. Therefore, we decided to apply Cheryl Geisler’s (2004, 2018) systematic qualitative analysis to the open responses to one survey question to unearth this unrecognized complexity. Following but refi ning Costino and Hyon’s (2007) list of language labels, our survey question asked students to check whether they identified as a second language writer, ESL, multilingual writer or monolingual writer. The question ended with an open blank which asked students why they identified with the descriptions they checked. We treated these open responses as a qualitative dataset, segmenting participant responses at the clause in order to capture claims and descriptions participants made about their language identities. We then developed a coding scheme based on Min-Zhan Lu’s (2004) theory of discursive resources defined above. Our scheme used three coding dimensions drawn from Lu’s defi nition – self-evaluations, language affi liations, language practices – to categorize several codes (see Appendix 2.2). Results
Results from our three forms of data analysis (descriptive statistical analysis, systematic qualitative analysis and thematic qualitative analysis) applied to three sets of corresponding data (numerical survey data, written open responses and focus group transcripts) highlight the tension between fi xed depictions of language identities and direct challenges to those depictions by participants seeking to accurately describe their full language repertoires. Below we put this tension on display by featuring survey results that directly answer our research questions and those that do not, showing how students co-opt, adopt and resist the institutional language identity we supplied to them. By including resistance as data, we are able to see this analytical tension at work. Below we present three sections of data results – results from two survey questions and a set of focus group statements – that show what the survey could and could not reveal about our research questions. Discursive resources exceeding the whole
In response to our first research question – ‘What are the discursive resources that comprise our first-year writers’ literate repertoires?’ – descriptive
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analysis shows that surveys can indeed capture a general overview of the discursive resources students bring to first year writing. For example, over 73% of respondents report having lived their whole lives in the US or Canada, with 10% reporting having lived for ‘more than six years but not their whole lives’ and 6% having lived in the US or Canada for less than one year. This time-of-arrival information is helpful for challenging our assumptions about students’ length of exposure to academic English and US or Canadian schooling conventions. Similarly, results from questions regarding language practices illustrate that most respondents learned English from formal classroom instruction (18%) followed by interacting with friends and family at home (17%) and with people outside of the home (17%). Results like these can help us fine tune curricular decisions and especially early professional development for new instructors. Beyond such tidy data, participant responses produced a fascinating array of complexity that our survey could not account for as designed. For example, in a question asking respondents to select what percentage of the day they use their languages (25, 50, 75 or 100%), many participants chose more than one language for the same percentage of the day (e.g. 75% Spanish and 75% English). While the intention of this question was to acknowledge the multiplicity of languages used across domains and capture the relative time students spent engaging in this multiplicity in a day, such responses added up to far more than 100%. For example, one respondent reported spending 100% of the day using English, 75% of the day using Spanish and 75% of the day using French. Exceeding 100% in this way was not an incidental response: in fact, 349 respondents described using multiple languages in percentages of more than 100%, meaning nearly half of the 747 respondents who identified as multilingual transcended the bounds of a day. It should be clear that respondents were not employing faulty addition but were indicating the overlap and simultaneity of their languages, a fact that our theoretical framework accounts for but our survey design could not. As our focus group data concur below, students are often calling upon more than one language to respond to an academic or social encounter. Results to this survey question show how respondents challenged the assumptions behind the question in order to accurately capture their lived language experiences. The intended snapshot of a day divided into neat percentage increments not only was ignored by respondents but was made meaningful: in challenging the boundaries of a day they actually challenged the discrete separation of their languages. Because their languages co-occur, respondents had to move beyond the percentages the survey offered them, showing that students’ resources exceed what many language surveys can capture. In rejecting the premise of the survey item (that daily language must add up to 100%), the respondents revealed their rejection of the underlying monolingual orientation as well. The question unwittingly ignored the intertwined and overlapping ways in which multilinguals actually use their linguistic resources.
Locating Linguistic Justice in Language Identity Surveys 27
Discursive resources: Label uptake and resistance
Results from another survey question illuminate participants’ resistance with even more specificity. We designed one survey question to understand how students’ self-identified language backgrounds interface with institutional labels that dictate placement, course naming and institutional programming. The results show that 1.6% identify as a dialect writer (n = 30), 7.8% identify as an ESL writer (n = 149), 30.2% identify as a monolingual writer (n = 581), 17.9% identify as a multilingual writer (n = 343) and 7.8% identify as a second language writer (n = 149). These results are unsurprising given the largely monolingual population of the largest student population of participants. However, the higher percentage of respondents identifying as multilingual over ESL is noteworthy, as is the very low percentage of respondents identifying as dialect writers. Further, correlations show that respondents who identify as ESL and second language writers perceive the greatest proficiency in English across modes (reading, writing, speaking and listening), while those who identify as ESL writers perceive the greatest proficiency in Mandarin for reading and writing and Cantonese for speaking and listening. Analysis of correlations among ethnicity and race and these language labels also provide insight into these percentages in that self-identified White, multiethnic and Indian respondents identified most with a monolingual writer label (41, 32, 33 and 31% respectively), while Chinese (27%) and Korean (43%) respondents identified most with the label of second language writer (see Table 2.1). However, perhaps more importantly, results from this survey question show that a full quarter of respondents checked the option that they ‘do not Table 2.1 Language label correlations with ethnicity and race White
Multiethnic Hispanic Black
Chinese
Indian
Korean
n
n
n
n %
n
%
%
n
%
%
%
%
ESL
22
2.6
6
3.0
Second language writer
20
2.4
10
5.0
Multilingual writer
81
9.6
37
18.6
345 40.8
64
32.2
8
5.1 20 20.2 19 18.8 9 31.0
2
7.1
1.3
5
2.5
1
0.6
260 30.8
47
I don’t know what 106 12.5 these terms mean
30
Monolingual writer Dialect writer I don’t identify with any
11
5
n
3.2
0
0.0 20 19.8 1
3.4
29 18.6
2
2.0 27 26.7 0
0.0 12 42.9
60 38.5 13 13.1 19 18.8 9 31.0
1
6 21.4
3 10.7
1.0
1
1.0 0
0.0
0
0.0
23.6
27 17.3 41 41.4
9
8.9 4 13.8
2
7.1
15.1
26 16.7 22 22.2
6
5.9 6 20.7
3 10.7
Note: Only ethnic or racial identifications that made up 1% or more of the original sample were used.
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identify with any of these terms’, and 11% of respondents checked that they ‘do not know what these terms mean’. Such results show that 36% of respondents do not identify with or may not understand the meaning of language identity terms frequently used by faculty and administrators for high-stakes decisions like course placement. In the open response that completed the survey question – ‘Why do you identify with the description(s) you checked?’ – respondents supplied a rich corpus of qualitative data describing the familial, school, national and hybrid language affiliations beyond the survey’s optons for language labels. For example, respondents who identified as ‘monolingual writers’ explained their identification saying, ‘Since I live in the US, I only know how to speak English’, suggesting a monolingual ideological perspective that links language and national identity and ‘because my level of writing in Spanish is not equivalent to my writing in English’, reflecting a unidirectional view of language proficiency and identity (Watson & Shapiro, 2018). A respondent who checked ‘second language writer’ elaborated their choice by saying, ‘I have been going to school in US since high school. However, I still have trouble to write and speak English in correct grammar. I can speak fluently but I have limited vocabularies’. It is notable that in these examples, the respondents seem to echo a ‘discourse of partiality’ (Benesch, 2008) by not claiming English as their own despite the myriad ways in which they employ it in their lives. A respondent who identified as ‘multilingual writers’ wrote, ‘I write in different language every date about different things, so I deem myself as a multilingual writer’; another who checked ‘multilingual’ explained, ‘My mother language is Portuguese since I am Brazilian, however, my fluency in English is the same as the one of my fi rst language. I am also able to speak, read and write in Spanish since my father was a Spaniard’. Analysis of this corpus using the systematic qualitative methods described above illuminates the vast complexity that the survey’s language label options simply cannot capture. For example, our coding of ideological affiliations unearthed respondents’ powerful attachments of English to the US and dominant languages to specific nation-states, while evocations of ‘mother tongue’ languages rooted explanations about language numeracy or order. Our analysis further traced respondents’ selfevaluations of fluency, correctness or equivalent ‘levels’ among language proficiencies alongside their ideological affi liations, showing how ideological affi liations contribute to positive or negative self-evaluations, which in turn add up to a seemingly simple language label like ‘second language writer’. Our qualitative analysis of these open responses makes it clear that while this survey question could reveal the ‘functional distribution’ of writers’ discursive resources (Blommaert & Backus, 2012), it also prompted student resistance to that functional distribution. In fact, a survey question that asks for students’ self-identifications with institutional language labels is epitomic of students’ needs to push beyond the
Locating Linguistic Justice in Language Identity Surveys
29
capacities of what a language survey can gather in order to accurately represent themselves through it. Discursive resources: Articulations of complexity
To further elaborate this analytical tension, we end with excerpts from three participants from British Columbia University of the Arts whose self-identifications give depth and contour to the broad strokes of our survey. British Columbia University of the Arts, located in a culturally and linguistically diverse Canadian city, enrolls a highly multilingual student body (40% at the time of the study.) Student writers from British Columbia University of the Arts thus especially highlight the complexity of navigating across languages in places rooted in linguistic multiplicity. Alice, a fi rst-year student at British Columbia University of the Arts, shared in her focus group how her lived experiences of language cannot be fully accounted for with simple labels available to her in the survey. Born in Winnipeg to parents who immigrated from China, Alice identified herself as a child between two languages when she began school: ‘I was actually born here [Canada/Winnipeg] but um, I was treated as like, ESL student for six years in school’. She demonstrated the resistance she felt to this label, explaining to the focus group, ‘My Chinese is defi nitely not as strong as my English but um, I kind of weird, because I’m from like, born here, and everyone thinks I can’t understand’. Alice’s contribution illustrates how institutions position White, monolinguals as the ‘unmarked societal norm’ (Flores et al., 2015: 118) and therefore undervalue (or disregard) the language practices of non-Whites. Alice was given a deficit label owing to her race and ethnicity despite her linguistic skill in two languages. Further, Alice’s language identities shifted over time: ‘I was an ESL writer at one point, but I don’t think I am one today’. Her focus group data demonstrate the ways that school settings not only conflate linguistic and racial identities, mischaracterizing student experience, but also cannot account for how identities shift over time and space. In contrast to Alice, Sara, a second-year student, reported that she had lived her life split equally between two countries – Canada and Korea – explaining that she felt that she was in a ‘50–50’ state, culturally and linguistically. She reported, ‘It’s like, I feel like I’m kinda like, nothing? Like I’m right in between where I’m not perfectly good at English, but at the same time not perfectly good at Korean? So like, we say Konglish’. In defining Konglish, Sara clarified, ‘I speak in Korean but sometimes I put in some English words? However, when I’m speaking in English I like process stuff in Korean and then say it quick?’ Sara details her overlapping literate repertoire, describing how she makes meaning as a multicompetent writer. However, her use of the word ‘nothing’ to describe her cultural and linguistic status suggests her struggle as a person between languages and countries. In the focus group discussion, she similarly labeled herself and her
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peers with other terms pointing to a duality or double-ness framed in the negative, including ‘banana’ and ‘white-washed’. Although Sara appeared not to resist the language labels she chose in her survey – selecting ‘ESL Writer’ and ‘Second Language Writer’ and indicating in the open response that she saw them as synonymous – her own self-labeling demonstrated negative characterizations of these identifications. Further, she repeatedly racialized language, referring to English dominant (or monolingual) Canadians as ‘Caucasian’, a reference that is striking in a city as diverse as this one where the White population is less than 50%. Sara’s focus group descriptions of her language experiences and identity detail processes of language standardization, subordination and racialization, none of which is captured by a check on a survey (Lippi-Green, 2012). So, while Sara deftly negotiated the shifting linguistic and cultural spaces between her two homes (Korea and Canada), she adopted negative self-labeling of a ‘50–50’ language state, echoing an institutional lens of partiality offered to her on the survey (Benesch, 2008). This discourse of partiality places Sara never fully in one place linguistically or culturally, marginalized in every setting. The linguistic skill she marshalled was at times overshadowed by social and school settings that framed this split as deficit, and Sara often seemed resigned to don the negative institutional garb. Finally, focus group insights from Cornelia, a first-year international student from Indonesia, unpack the transnational geopolitical contexts hiding beneath simple language labels. In the open response portion of the survey, Cornelia described the desire for students going abroad to develop excellent English skills, writing, ‘Before I came here, people in my country always give a standard “how good are you in English?” They will see it if you have to take ESL class. In Indonesia a lot of student will avoid to be in those class because it’s kinda “embarrassing” for them’. In the focus group discussion, Cornelia reiterated this attitude, claiming that she felt this view was common not only in Indonesia but in Asia in general, a view reflected in the literature (Cheng, 2012). Surprisingly, Cornelia selected the label ‘ESL Writer’ on the survey, although much of her ensuing comments focused on her resistance to this label. Given the pressure students feel to be proficient in English, the linguistic labels offered to Cornelia seem to be ill-fitting, as demonstrated by her detailed discussion of the damage such labels wield. Discussion and Conclusion
A ‘realization-focused’ social justice agenda becomes pragmatic by ‘seeking solutions and exploring alternatives to existing problems and injustices’ (Piller, 2016: 5). Following Amartya Sen (2009), Piller (2016) helpfully imagines a social justice agenda that asks not simply ‘How could linguistic justice be advanced?’ but rather ‘What would be a perfectly just linguistic order?’ (Piller, 2016: 205). While our study is more a cautionary tale than a model of linguistic justice, our results – by centering the
Locating Linguistic Justice in Language Identity Surveys
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tensions inherent in the survey act – can point toward a pragmatic reframing of the impulse to gather data on students’ language backgrounds. First, regarding survey participants’ discursive resources, the study’s quantitative and qualitative results show the rich literate activities that comprise first-year writers’ language repertoires. The range of this activity – across domains, practices and discrete and meshed languages – gives dimension to the pervasively flat depictions of surveyed students’ language backgrounds. The language label question especially shows that while writers’ discursive resources are overlapping, inter-animating and emergent, they also are described by participants in the terms that institutions supply. In other words, students’ discursive resources are fluid in use, but fi xed in representation. When it comes to the second research question, then, first-year writers’ discursive resources map onto but also exceed those that are assumed by institutions. For example, all three of our institutions increasingly promoted a ‘global’ or ‘international’ campus while carrying out deficit attitudes toward linguistic diversity that promoted monolingual uses of academic English as the campus standard. Institutional language labels, such as those used by language surveys, and subsequent course placement or program names, miss much of the literate activity that comprises students’ language repertoires, thus exploiting for marketing the student language identities they are designed to deny. Further, if we include how students dealt with the survey as another kind of result, respondents’ writing around and resistance to the survey becomes legible as a kind of social justice resource. Considered in numerical terms, the survey could not capture the complex language histories that comprise writers’ language repertoires. In other words, while data triangulation in our study indicates a problem – the survey pigeon-holes individual experience into institutional structures – this problem also reveals a resource that linguistically diverse students seem to have developed over time: many study participants both accepted the language label we supplied and then moved on to assert more complexity. In this way, the study’s results highlight the often-unrecognized discursive resource of responding to an institution that does not fully recognize you. The results above are also an important reminder that surveys are not benign. Taking a survey is an experience that students incorporate into their language identities; surveys are an occasion for students to make sense of themselves in the eyes of the institution. The formation of the affiliations that we traced in the language label question is connected to students’ perceptions of comfort, ease, support and care that can, in turn, support or trouble their willingness to participate in classes with which they do or do not affiliate, their ability to connect with other students to fi nd peer support and their eventual language acquisition. In sum, language surveys can indeed serve a descriptive institutional function. At their best, the results of such institutional research tools guide students to support systems or courses designed for them, helping
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them to choose or affiliate with a language label based on what they feel they or their writing might need. However, if scholars, teachers and administrators want to better understand their students’ language backgrounds, they might also productively reflect on the impulse to survey them. This study shows how language surveys can shape student selfidentification – students appear in the terms the survey supplies. The results above show that in supplying to students the available discourse, surveys may perpetuate the monolingual ideologies that they may have sought to move beyond in the first place. Student resistance and self-defi nition can be harnessed through pedagogy, of course. In order to gather more complex, specific and nuanced language information, we have moved beyond surveys to the classroom as one research ‘site where learners are offered the agency to develop a multilingual identity’, which necessarily includes facilitating a participative metalinguistic awareness of the capacity of that identification (Fisher et al., 2018: 2). At our own institutions, we have guided ourselves and the teachers we mentor to take seriously the supposed contradiction and confusion in the results above. We and instructors in our programs still share the power of pedagogy to enhance or dispel this confusion. In fact, our study results serve as a reminder that teachers might be best equipped to gather information on students’ full language repertoires by offering them opportunities to name and elaborate on the roles this repertoire plays in their life. Two examples of such opportunities include Nero’s (2005) Language Identity, Awareness and Development pedagogy, which aims to raise ‘awareness of students’ investment in, and use and knowledge of language as it correlates with their identities/affiliations’ (2005: 203–204), and Busch’s (2012) language self-portrait, a ‘multimodal biographic method’ designed to create language awareness for multilingual students. Busch’s (2012) self-portrait assignment leads students to become aware of how they are ‘perceiving, experiencing, feeling, and desiring’ in exploring their language repertoires (2012: 510), helping them consider the ways that linguistic resources ‘represent the experience and journey of a speaker’s life; operate in multiple spaces for each speaker; and reach backwards (through memory) and forward (with imagination)’ (2012: 520). Following these pedagogical leads, we have brainstormed together assignments that are not necessarily new, but aim to gather nuanced language information and support student identity development in the classroom. For example, instructors could include assignments that ask students to tell the story of their repertoire, which could be broader and more layered than the traditional literacy narrative. Students could explore where their repertoires come from by interviewing family members, contextualizing what they fi nd with course readings on multilingual repertoires. Students could be encouraged to try to create a multimodal language portrait that Busch (2012) explained should be ‘linked to the body’ and ‘represent the experience and journey of a speaker’s life’ (2012: 520).
Locating Linguistic Justice in Language Identity Surveys
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However, our study leaves us with the question of whether participants’ resistance to institutional language labels is a rejection of these terms or an assertion of the terms’ broader meanings. Understanding how students conceptualize their own language processes will help institutions revise and reimagine their language labels. In this way, we can locate official language identities as rising up from students’ perceptions, incorporating the language that students use to describe their language experiences into our descriptions of them. References Agnihotri, R.K. (2014) Multilinguality, education and harmony. International Journal of Multilingualism 11, 364–379. Ball, A.F. and Ellis, P. (2008) Identity and the writing of culturally and linguistically diverse students. In C. Bazerman (ed.) Handbook of Research on Writing (pp. 499–514). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Benda, J., Dedek, M., Gallagher, C.W., Girdharry, K., Leaner, N. and Noonan, M. (2018) Confronting superdiversity in US writing programs. In S.K. Rose and I. Weiser (eds) The Internationalization of US Writing Programs (pp. 79–96). Logann, UT: Utah State University Press. Benesch, S. (2008) ‘Generation 1.5’ and its discourses of partiality: A critical analysis. Journal of Language, Identity & Education 7 (3–4), 294–311. Blanton, L. (1999) Classroom instruction and language minority students: On teaching to ‘smarter’ readers and writers. In M. Roberge, M. Siegal and L. Harklau (eds) Generation 1.5 Meets College Composition: Issues in the Teaching of Writing to US-educated Learners of ESL (pp. 119–142). New York: Routledge. Blommaert, J. and Backus, A. (2012) Superdiverse repertoires and the individual, paper 24. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies. Braine, G. (1996) ESL students in fi rst-year writing courses: ESL versus mainstream classes. Journal of Second Language Writing 5 (2), 91–107. Busch, B. (2012) The linguistic repertoire revisited. Applied Linguistics 33 (5), 503–522. Canagarajah, A.S. (2006) Toward a writing pedagogy of shuttling between languages: Learning from multilingual writers. College English 68 (6), 589–604. Cheng, L. (2012) The power of English and the power of Asia: English as lingua franca and in bilingual and multilingual education. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 33 (4), 327–330. Chiang, Y.-S.D. and Schmida, M. (1999) Language identity and language ownership: Linguistic conflicts of first-year university writing students. In L. Harklau, K.M. Losey and M. Siegal (eds) Generation 1.5 Meets College Composition: Issues in the Teaching of Writing to US-Educated Learners of ESL. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Conference on College Composition and Communication (2014) CCCC Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers, position statement. See https://cccc.ncte.org/ cccc/resources/positions/secondlangwriting Cook, V.J. (1999) Going beyond the native speaker in language teaching. TESOL Quarterly 33 (2), 185–209. Cook, V. (2016) Premises of multi-competence. In V. Cook and L. Wei (eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Multicompetence (pp. 1–25). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Costino, K.A. and Hyon, S. (2007) ‘A class for students like me’: Reconsidering relationships among identity labels, residency status, and students’ preferences for mainstream or multilingual composition. Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2), 63–81.
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Creswell J.W. and Plano Clark, V.L. (2017) Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research (3rd edn). London: Sage. Fisher, L., Evans, M., Forbes, F., Gayton, A. and Liu, Y. (2018) Participative multilingual identity construction in the languages classroom: A multi-theory vertical conceptualization. International Journal of Multilingualism. See https://doi.org/10.1080/147 90718.2018.1524896 Flores, N., Kleyn., T. and Menken, K. (2015) Looking holistically in a climate of partiality: Identities of students labeled long-term English language learners. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 14 (2), 113–132. Fraiberg, S. and You, X. (2012) A multilingual and multimodal framework for studying L2 composing. EFL Teaching and Research 35 (3), 263–70. Friedrich, P. (2006) Assessing the needs of linguistically diverse fi rst year students: Bringing together and telling apart international ESL, resident ESL, and monolingual basic writers. WPA: Writing Program Administration 30 (1–2), 15-35. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Geisler, C. (2004) Analyzing Streams of Language: Twelve Steps to the Systematic Coding of Text, Talk, and Other Verbal Data. London: Pearson. Geisler, C. (2018) Coding for language complexity: The interplay among methodological commitments, tools, and workflow in writing research. Written Communication 35 (2), 215–249. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088317748590 Goen, S. et al. (2002) Working with Generation 1.5 students and their teachers: ESL meets composition. The CATESOL Journal 14 (1), 131–171. Harklau, L., Losey, K.M. and Siegal, M. (eds) (1999) Generation 1.5 Meets College Composition: Issues in the Teaching of Writing to US-Educated Learners of ESL. Mahwah, NJ: LEA. Horner, B. and Trimbur, J. (2002) English only and US college composition. College Composition and Communication 53 (4), 594–630. Lawrick, E. (2013) Students in the fi rst-year ESL writing program: Revisiting the notion of ‘traditional’ ESL. WPA: Writing Program Administration 36 (2), 27–58. Lam, W.E. (2013) Multilingual practices in transnational digital contexts. TESOL Quarterly 47 (4), 820–825. Lippi-Green, R. (2012) English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States (2nd edn). Abingdon: Routledge. Lorimer Leonard, R. (2014) Multilingual writing as rhetorical attunement. College English 76 (3), 227–247. Lu, M. (2004) An essay on the work of composition: Composing English against the order of fast capitalism. College Composition and Communication 56 (1), 16–50. Marshall, S. and Marr, J.W. (2018) Teaching multilingual learners in Canadian writingintensive classrooms: Pedagogy, binaries, and confl icting identities. Journal of Second Language Writing 40, 32–43. Nero, S. (2005) Language, identities, and ESL pedagogy. Language and Education 19 (3), 194–211. Norton, B. and Toohey K. (2002) Identity and language learning. In R.B. Kaplan (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics (pp. 115–123). New York: Oxford University Press. Ortmeier-Hooper, C. (2008) English may be my second language, but I’m not ‘ESL’. College Composition and Communication 59 (3), 389–419. Patton, M. (1990) Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods (pp. 169–186). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Piller, I. (2016) Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reisch, M. (ed.) (2014) Routledge International Handbook of Social Justice. Abingdon: Routledge.
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Rinderle, S. (2005) The Mexican diaspora: A critical examination of signifiers. Journal of Communication Inquiry 29, 294–316. Roberge, R., Siegal, M. and Harklau, L. (eds) (2009) Generation 1.5 in College Composition: Teaching Academic Writing to U.S.-Educated Learners of ESL. Abingdon: Routledge. Rounsaville, A. (2014) Situating transnational genre knowledge: A genre trajectory analysis of one student’s personal and academic writing. Written Communication 31 (3) 332–364. Ruecker, T. and Ortmeier-Hooper, C. (2017) Introduction: Paying attention to resident multilingual students. In T. Ruecker and C. Ortmeier-Hooper (eds) Linguistically Diverse Immigrant and Resident Writers: Transitions from High School to College (pp. 1–16). Routledge. Saenkhum, T. (2016) Decisions, Agency, and Advising: Key Issues in the Placement of Multilingual Writers into First-Year Composition Courses. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Schneider, J. (2018) Passages into college writing: Listening to the experiences of international students. Composition Forum 40. See https://compositionforum.com/issue/40/ passages.php Sen, A (2009) The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shuck, G. (2006) Racializing the nonnative English speaker. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 5 (4), 259–276. Starks, D. (2010) Being a Niuean or being Niue? An investigation into the use of identity labels. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 9, 124–138. UNESCO Executive Board. (1996) Universal declaration of linguistic rights. World Conference on Linguistic Rights: Barcelona Declaration. See https://unesdoc.unesco. org/ark:/48223/pf0000104267 Watson, M. and Shapiro, R. (2018) Clarifying the multiple dimensions of monolingualism: Keeping our sights on language politics. Composition Forum 38. See https:// compositionforum.com/issue/38/monolingualism.php
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Appendix 2.1 Survey Course information
1. Please check the courses you have completed and are now taking at Nova Southeastern University. A. COMP 1000: Basic Writing B. COMP 1500: College Writing C. COMP 2000: Advanced College Writing D. COMP 2020: Writing About Literature 2. Have you taken a composition/writing course at another college or university in the US? Yes/No 3. How many years have you taken classes at Nova Southeastern University? A. Less than 1 B. 1 C. 2 D. 3 E. 4 F. 5 or more 4. How many years have you taken classes at another college or university in the US? A. 0 B. Less than 1 C. 1 D. 2 E. 3 F. 4 G. 5 or more 5. Are you an international student on a student visa? Yes/No If yes, from where? Demographic information
6. What is your age? • Under 18 • 18–24 years old • 25–34 years old • 35–44 years old • 45–54 years old • 55–64 years old • 65 or older
Locating Linguistic Justice in Language Identity Surveys 37
7. What is your gender? A. Female B. Male C. I identify in another way. 8. How do you identify your ethnicity/culture? 9. I have lived in the US A. Less than 1 year B. 1–3 years C. 3–6 years D. More than 6 years but not my whole life E. My whole life 10. Thinking of all your years in school, from when you were young to today, how much of that was completed in the US? A. B. C. D. E.
Less than 1 year 1–3 years 3–6 years More than 6 years but not all of my schooling All of my schooling
Language background
11. Please check the descriptions you identify with and explain why. A. ESL writer B. Second language writer C. Multilingual writer D. Monolingual writer E. Dialect writer F. I do not identify with any of these terms. G. I do not know what these terms mean. 12. How have you learned English up to this point? (Check all that apply.) __Formal classroom instruction __Formal tutoring __On my own (e.g. reading, using translators and dictionaries, doing exercises) __Interacting with people outside of my home __Interacting with friends and family at home __Online social networking, chatting, messaging, emailing __From TV, music, movies, radio __Other, specify:
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Part 1: Translingual and Antidiscriminatory Pedagogy and Practices
13. In a typical day, which languages or dialects do you use for what percentage of the day? Language :