Toward Translingual Realities in Composition: (Re)Working Local Language Representations and Practices

Toward Translingual Realities in Composition is a multiyear critical ethnographic study of first-year writing programs in Lebanon and Washington State—a country where English is not the sole language of instruction and a state in which English is entirely dominant—to examine the multiple and often contradictory natures, forces, and manifestations of language ideologies. The book is a practical, useful way of seriously engaging with alternative ways of thinking, doing, and learning academic English literacies.
 
Translingualism work has concentrated on critiquing monolingual and multilingual notions of language, but it is only beginning to examine translingual enactments in writing programs and classrooms. Focusing on language representations and practices at both the macro and micro levels, author Nancy Bou Ayash places the study and teaching of university-level writing in the context of the globalization and pluralization of English(es) and other languages. Individual chapters feature various studies that Bou Ayash brings together to address how students act as agents in marshaling their language practices and resources and shows a deliberate translingual intervention that complicates and enriches students’ assumptions about language and writing. Her findings about writing programs, instructors, and students are detailed, multidimensional, and complex.
 
A substantial contribution to growing translingual scholarship in the field of composition studies, Toward Translingual Realities in Composition offers insights into how writing teacher-scholars and writing program administrators can more productively intervene in local postmonolingual tensions and contradictions at the level of language representations and practices through actively and persistently reworking the design and enactment of their curricula, pedagogies, assessments, teacher training programs, and campus-wide partnerships.

Nancy Bou Ayash is associate professor of language and rhetoric at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on examining the workings and effects of the politics of language in writing instruction and research within the transnational higher education landscape. She is the recipient of the 2014 CCCC James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award.