Crossing Divides: Exploring Translingual Writing Pedagogies and Programs

Translingualism perceives the boundaries between languages as unstable and permeable; this creates a complex challenge for writing pedagogy. Writers shift actively among rhetorical strategies from multiple languages, sometimes importing lexical or discoursal tropes from one language into another to introduce an effect, solve a problem, or construct an identity. How to accommodate this reality while answering the charge to teach the conventions of one language can be a vexing problem for teachers. Crossing Divides offers diverse perspectives from leading scholars on the design and implementation of translingual writing pedagogies and programs.

The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1 outlines methods of theorizing translinguality in writing and teaching. Part 2 offers three accounts of translingual approaches to the teaching of writing in private and public colleges and universities in China, Korea, and the United States. In Part 3, contributors from four US institutions describe the challenges and strategies involved in designing and implementing a writing curriculum with a translingual approach. Finally, in Part 4, three scholars respond to the case studies and arguments of the preceding chapters and suggest ways in which writing teachers, scholars, and program administrators can develop translingual approaches within their own pedagogical settings.

Illustrated with concrete examples of teachers’ and program directors’ efforts in a variety of settings, as well as nuanced responses to these initiatives from eminent scholars of language difference in writing, Crossing Divides offers groundbreaking insight into translingual writing theory, practice, and reflection.

Contributors: Sara Alvarez, Patricia Bizzell, Suresh Canagarajah, Dylan Dryer, Chris Gallagher, Juan Guerra, Asao B. Inoue, William Lalicker, Thomas Lavelle, Eunjeong Lee, Jerry Lee, Katie Malcolm, Kate Mangelsdorf, Paige Mitchell, Matt Noonan, Shakil Rabbi, Ann Shivers-McNair, Christine M. Tardy

Bruce Horner is Endowed Chair in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville, where he teaches courses in composition, composition pedagogy and theory, and literacy studies. His work has received the Braddock Award, the Winterowd Award, the CCCC Outstanding Book Award, and many other recognitions.

Elliot Tetreault is assistant professor in the English department and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University at Albany, SUNY. He also served as assistant director of the University Writing Center at the University of Louisville, is the recipient of the Mina Shaughnessy Prize and the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award, and has published in Enculturation, QED, Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, Computers & Composition Online, and Peitho.