Abstract
This chapter describes an author study that took place in a secondary English Language Arts classroom in New York City. The author study was organized around translingual writers, or those who integrate different language practices in their work, and asked students to read not only for the content of the writing, but for the linguistic and rhetorical choices the authors made. After reading these translingual mentor texts, students were tasked with writing college essays that expressed their new understandings about language. Like their translingual mentors, students were invited to write their essays in ways that integrated their different language practices. Throughout this translingual author study, students brought to their readings their sophisticated understandings of language, resulting in rich conversations, connections, and debates. This chapter draws on excerpts of students’ classroom talk as well as from two students’ college essays and metalinguistic talk about their own writing to illustrate how the use of translingual mentors can bring to the surface the linguistic expertise, creativity and criticality (Li W, J Pragmat 43(5):1222–1235, 2011) that language minoritized students already have, but are often obscured in the English classroom.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
All names of participants and the school site are pseudonyms.
References
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute.
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by MM Bakhtin (E. Holquist & C. Emerson, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Ball, A. F. (1995). Text design patterns in the writing of urban African American students: Teaching to the cultural strengths of students in multicultural settings. Urban Education, 30(3), 253–289.
Canagarajah, A. S. (1997). Safe houses in the contact zone: Coping strategies of African-American students in the academy. College Composition and Communication, 48(2), 173–196.
Canagarajah, A. S. (2011). Translanguaging in the classroom: Emerging issues for research and pedagogy. Applied Linguistics Review, (2), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110239331.1
Canagarajah, A. S. (2015). Clarifying the relationship between translingual practice and L2 writing: Addressing learner identities. Applied Linguistics Review, 6(4), 415–440.
Crawford, J. (2000). At war with diversity: US language policy in an age of anxiety (Vol. 25). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Darder, A., & Uriarte, M. (2012). The politics of restrictive language policies: A postcolonial analysis of language and schooling. Postcolonial Directions in Education, 2(1), 6–67.
Flores, N. (2015, October 1). Is it time for a moratorium on academic language? Retrieved from https://educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2015/10/01/is-it-time-for-a-moratorium-on-academic-language/
Flores, N. (2016, March 25). What if we treated language-minoritized children like gifted sociolinguists? Retrieved from https://educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/what-if-we-treated-language-minoritized-children-like-gifted-sociolinguists/
Flores, N., & Rosa, J. D. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171.
Gándara, P. (2000). In the aftermath of the storm: English learners in the post-227 era. Bilingual Research Journal, 24(1–2), 1–13.
García, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley/Blackwell.
García, O., Johnson, S. I., & Seltzer, K. (2017). The translanguaging classroom: Leveraging student bilingualism for learning. Philadelphia, PA: Calson.
García, O., & Kleyn, T. (Eds.). (2016). Translanguaging with multilingual students: Learning from classroom moments. New York, NY: Routledge.
García, O., & Li, W. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gutierrez, K. D., Baquedano-Lopez, P., & Asato, J. (2000). “English for the children”: The new literacy of the old world order, language policy and educational reform. Bilingual Research Journal, 24(1–2), 87–112.
Horner, B., Lu, M.-Z., Royster, J. J., & Trimbur, J. (2011). Language difference in writing: Toward a translingual approach. College English, 73(3), 303–321.
Li, W. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5), 1222–1235. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.07.035
Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States. New York, NY: Routledge.
Lysicott, J. (2014). 3 ways to speak English. Retrieved from: https://www.ted.com/talks/jamila_lyiscott_3_ways_to_speak_english?language=en
Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A. (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Martinez, D. C. (2012). Expanding linguistic repertoires: An ethnography of black and latina/o youth transcultural communication in urban english language arts classrooms. (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation), University of California, Los Angeles.
Martínez, R. A., Orellana, M. F., Pacheco, M., & Carbone, P. (2008). Found in translation: Connecting translating experiences to academic writing. Language Arts, 85(6), 421–431.
Michael-Luna, S., & Canagarajah, A. S. (2007). Multilingual academic literacies: pedagogical foundations for code meshing in primary and higher education. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4(1), 55–77.
Morrell, E. (2003). Writing the word and the world: Critical literacy as critical textual production. Paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, New York, NY.
Morrell, E. (2008). Critical literacy and urban youth. New York, NY: Routledge.
Orellana, M. F. (2009). Translating childhoods: Immigrant youth, language, and culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Orellana, M. F., & Reynolds, J. F. (2008). Cultural modeling: Leveraging bilingual skills for school paraphrasing tasks. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(1), 48–65.
Paris, D. (2011). Language across difference: Ethnicity, communication, and youth identities in changing urban schools. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Perry, T., & Delpit, L. (Eds.). (1998). The real Ebonics debate: Power, language, and the education of African-American children. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Negotiating Academic Literacies, 171–185.
Rickford, J. R. (1998). The creole origins of African-American Vernacular English: Evidence from copula absence. African-American English, 154–200.
Rickford, J. R. (2006). Linguistics, education, and the Ebonics firestorm. In S. J. Nero (Ed.), Dialects, Englishes, creoles, and education (pp. 71–92). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Rosa, J. D. (2016). Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 26(2), 162–183.
Rymes, B. (2014). Communicating beyond language: Everyday encounters with diversity. New York, NY: Routledge.
Seltzer, K. (2017). Resisting from within: (re)imagining a critical translingual english classroom. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation), The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York.
Seltzer, K., & de los Ríos, C. V. (2018). Translating theory to practice: Exploring teachers’ raciolinguistic literacies in secondary English classrooms. English Education, 51(1), 49–79.
Shor, I. (1999). What is critical literacy? Journal of Pedagogy Pluralism and Practice, 1(4), 1.
Smitherman, G. (1993). “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice”: African american student writers and the national assessment of educational progress. In A. H. Dyson & C. Genishi (Eds.), The need for story: Cultural diversity in classroom and community (pp. 80–101). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Smitherman, G. (1999). Talkin that talk: Language, culture and education in African America. London, UK/New York, NY: Routledge.
Tan, A. (1990). Mother tongue. The Threepenny Review, 43, 7–8.
Uriarte, M., Tung, R., Lavan, N., & Diez, V. (2010). Impact of restrictive language policies on engagement and academic achievement of English learners in Boston public schools. In P. Gándara & M. Hopkins (Eds.), Forbidden language: English learners and restrictive language policies (pp. 65–85). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Valenzuela, A. (2010). Subtractive schooling: US-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture
Young, V. A. (2009). “Nah, We Straight”: An argument against code switching. JAC, 29, 49–76.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Seltzer, K. (2020). Translingual Writers as Mentors in a High School “English” Classroom. In: Lau, S.M.C., Van Viegen, S. (eds) Plurilingual Pedagogies. Educational Linguistics, vol 42. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36983-5_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36983-5_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-36982-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-36983-5
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)