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Shifting the Paradigm: Towards a Translingual Rhetoric of Writing

Suresh Canagarajah, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor, Penn State University
Maria Jerskey, Associate Professor, LaGuardia Community College/CUNY
Dorothy Worden, Writing Instructor, Penn State University

Scholars in rhetoric and composition have increasingly critiqued the monolingualist assumptions governing their disciplinary discourse and pedagogical practice and have called for in their stead a rhetoric of translingual writing. This paradigm shift has been fueled by rapid developments in globalization, new media literacies, and postmodern perspectives that have called attention to the transcultural flows of people and texts and to the hybridity and fluidity characterizing language. This workshop generates alternatives to the deterministic and essentialized orientations to texts and writers that have characterized traditional writing scholarship as we move toward identifying, cultivating, and practicing a rhetoric of translingual writing.

The monolingualist paradigm assumes that writers acquire rhetorical competence one language at a time; that rhetorical proficiency is made up of separate competencies for separate languages; that texts are informed by rhetorical values that are separate for the different languages in which they are composed; and that only one rhetorical tradition can provide coherence for a text at a time. By shuttling between theory and practice, participants in this workshop will move beyond notions that each language is informed by rhetorical assumptions belonging to a specific culture; that writers are conditioned by their cultures to appreciate only the rhetorical values they come with; and that it is difficult for writers to adopt a rhetorical mode practiced in a community outside their own. We will do this by:

The workshop also addresses pragmatic challenges to translingual writing by considering:

Co-leaders and participants will communicate prior to the workshop using a digital platform such as PBWorks or GoogleGroups. Participants will be asked to prepare and post responses to selected articles from Cross Language Relations in Composition (Southern Illinois University) edited by Bruce Horner, Min-Zahn Lu, & Paul Kei Matsuda, Translingual Writing in Academic Contexts (Routledge) edited by Suresh Canagarajah, and translingual texts from Dohra Ahmad’s anthology, Rotten English (W.W. Norton). Participants will be encouraged to post on our digital platform (or bring with them) examples of student writing, writing assignments, syllabi, and writing program mission statements that might serve as exemplars or challenges to translingual writing.

Finally, participants will have the opportunity to develop, present, and receive feedback on their own research questions on translingual writing. The digital platform will remain an active resource after the workshop.

Questions should be directed to Maria Jerskey at mjerskey@lagcc.cuny.edu

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