Literacy as Translingual Practice

Between Communities and Classrooms

Suresh Canagarajah, Suresh Canagarajah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136320316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The term translingual highlights the reality that people always shuttle across languages, communicate in hybrid languages and, thus, enjoy multilingual competence. In the context of migration, transnational economic and cultural relations, digital communication, and globalism, increasing contact is taking place between languages and communities. In these contact zones new genres of writing and new textual conventions are emerging that go beyond traditional dichotomies that treat languages as separated from each other, and texts and writers as determined by one language or the other.

Pushing forward a translingual orientation to writing—one that is in tune with the new literacies and communicative practices flowing into writing classrooms and demanding new pedagogies and policies— this volume is structured around five concerns: refining the theoretical premises, learning from community practices, debating the role of code meshed products, identifying new research directions, and developing sound pedagogical applications. These themes are explored by leading scholars from L1 and L2 composition, rhetoric and applied linguistics, education theory and classroom practice, and diverse ethnic rhetorics. Timely and much needed, Literacy as Translingual Practice is essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners across these fields.

1

INTRODUCTION

A. Suresh Canagarajah

The best way to understand the term translingual is by focusing on the prefix. What does “trans” do to language? Firstly, the term moves us beyond a consideration of individual or monolithic languages to life between and across languages. Sociolinguists might go to the extent of defining “language” itself as constituting hybrid and fluid codes that earn their labels only in the context of ownership ideologies (see Blommaert, 2010). Despite such labels and ideologies, language resources always come into contact in actual use and shape each other. From this perspective, we have to consider all acts of communication and literacy as involving a shuttling between languages and a negotiation of diverse linguistic resources for situated construction of meaning. Secondly, the prefix encourages us to treat acts of communication as involving more than words. We have to treat communication as an alignment of words with many other semiotic resources involving different symbol systems (i.e., icons, images), modalities of communication (i.e., aural, oral, visual, and tactile channels), and ecologies (i.e., social and material contexts of communication).

There are good reasons why scholars are currently re-envisioning writing and literacy through the translingual lens. Before I articulate the shifts involved for literacy, and the new research challenges and pedagogical implications they raise, I must emphasize that the neologism “translingual” is indeed needed. Existing terms like multilingual or plurilingual keep languages somewhat separated even as they address the co-existence of multiple languages. From their point of view, competence involves distinct compartments for each language one uses. Similarly, in literacy, different languages may occupy different spaces in texts. However, the term translingual enables a consideration of communicative competence as not restricted to predefined meanings of individual languages, but the ability to merge different language resources in situated interactions for new meaning construction. Competence is not an arithmetical addition of the resources of different languages, but the transformative capacity to mesh their resources for creative new forms and meanings. Similarly, the term translingual treats textual practices as hybridizing and emergent, facilitating creative tensions between languages. The term also helps us go beyond the dichotomy mono/multi or uni/pluri. These binaries may give the impression that cross-language relations and practices matter only to a specific group of people, i.e., those considered multilingual. However, the term translingual enables us to treat cross-language interactions and contact relationships as fundamental to all acts of communication and relevant for all of us. In this sense, the shift in literacy is not relevant for traditionally multilingual students/subjects alone, but for “native” speakers of English and “monolinguals” as well.

Despite the novelty of the term, we mustn’t think of the types of competence and practices implied by the term translingual as having merely pedantic or academic interest. The urgency for scholars to address translingual practices in literacy derives from the fact that they are widely practiced in communities and everyday communicative contexts, though ignored or suppressed in classrooms. Social relations and communicative practices in the context of late modernity—featuring migration, transnational economic and production relationships, digital media, and online communication—facilitate a meshing of languages and semiotic resources. Bazerman’s chapter (ch. 2) outlines the social conditions which call for a literacy beyond separate languages and communities. However, we must remember that these practices are not new or recent. Translingual literacies have always characterized the practices of diverse communities in the past. Mao (ch. 5) and Morris Young (ch. 6) define the indigenous or the local as always creolized. Reyhner (ch. 7) and Cushman (ch. 8) show how different Native American communities have developed traditions of education and literacy that involve a meshing of language and cultural resources, including those of the colonizer. This orientation is backed by historiographical research on precolonial practices in South Asia (Khubchandani, 1997) and Africa (Makoni, 2002). Postcolonial communities such as Lebanon (Bou Ayash, ch. 9) and Kenya (Milu, ch. 10) are drawing from local translingual traditions to absorb colonizing languages and fashion creative literate and communicative practices. The objective of this book is to learn from these community practices—whether the late modern West or precolonial orient, and many traditions and places in between—to enhance literacy education in pedagogical contexts. Translingual literacies are not about fashioning a new kind of literacy. It is about understanding the practices and processes that already characterize communicative activity in diverse communities to both affirm them and develop them further through an informed pedagogy.

It is not surprising, however, that scholars are still struggling to define these literacies and implement relevant pedagogies. Having defined literacy according to monolingual ideologies since modernity, they have to now revise their understanding to conceive of literacy as translingual. With hindsight, scholars have now started analyzing how ideologies that territorialized, essentialized, and circumscribed languages came into prominence around the enlightenment and romanticism, especially in the thinking of those like Johannes Herder and John Locke (see Bauman & Briggs, 2000; Blommaert & Verscheuren, 1992). With the colonial enterprise, these ideologies have also migrated to other parts of the world, often imposed as literacies more conducive to science, rationality, development, and civilization, threatening diverse local translingual practices. This ideological work of monolingualism is still unfinished, displaying feverish and concerted efforts in countries like the United States, as linguist Michael Silverstein (1996) has shown. With the monolingualist paradigm becoming difficult to sustain under the fascinating technological developments and irrepressible social mobility which engender different communicative practices, we are now ready to travel back in time or to other places to reconstruct new scholarly constructs.

Compositionists started theorizing these literacies from a product-oriented perspective earlier. The hybridity of texts in community and student writing understandably attracted their attention and called for a different explanation. Labels like ALT DIS (Schroeder, Fox, & Bizzell, 2002), hybridity (Bizzell, 1999), and code-meshing (Young, 2004) that dominated discussion in composition circles were an attempt to understand the politics and poetics of such texts. Though these textual products still have a lot of resonance to certain communities (i.e., African American, Hispanic, and postcolonial), there has also been some questioning as to the extent to which they are desirable for others. Some communities fear that such hybridization of codes will lead to the dilution of their language resources and identity and threaten their sovereignty (as Lyons, 2009 has argued on behalf of Native American communities). Some argue that the values attached to the vernacular and the dominant languages are different in their communities, and express a desire to reserve different codes for different functions, rather than meshing them (as Milson-Whyte argues in ch. 11). More importantly, valorizing difference in texts has created the impression among students and scholars from dominant communities (Anglo-American, in the U.S. context) that a text in standard English lacks creativity or voice (as addressed in Lu and Horner (ch. 3) and Bou Ayash (ch. 9) in this volume). Minority students might also go away with the impression that something approximating dominant conventions are disempowering.

While code-meshing will remain important for certain students and communities for voice (and the chapters by Milu (ch. 10) and Bou Ayash (ch. 9) show that it will continue to be practiced in postcolonial communities and characterize popular media such as hiphop and social networking sites) and will generate more debates on its politics and pragmatics (as we feature in Part III of this book, with a spirited defense of code-meshing by Vershawn Young (ch. 13)), some scholars feel motivated to develop a paradigm of translingual relations that moves beyond valorizing hybrid texts. A translingual orientation emphasizes that what we treat as “standard English” or “monolingual” texts are themselves hybrid. These labels are ideological constructs that mask the diversity inherent in all acts of writing and communication. Consider that in each act of communication the semiotic resources we use are recontextualized for the purposes and participants in that activity, with their own resonance. If code-meshing draws attention to difference, the translingual orientation also emphasizes difference-in-similarity. That is, it makes us sensitive to the creativity and situatedness of every act of communication, even in seemingly normative textual products. In this sense, “translingual practice” is emerging as a term that accommodates hybrid practices without ignoring the inherent hybridity in products that appear on the surface to approximate dominant conventions. The orientation thus enables us to discern agency and voice of both multilingual and monolingual writers in textual products that have varying relationships to the norm.

However, there are different facets to the term translingual that need to be unpacked. Initially, some scholars presented the term translingual as an orientation to writing and literacy (see Horner et al., 2011; and Lu & Horner, ch. 3 this volume). From this perspective, it is not a text but an approach to texts. This definition is sufficiently broad as to accommodate the metalinguistic and cognitive awarenesses involved in such literacy. It emphasizes the attitudes and perspectives that need to be cultivated toward cross-language relations in literacy. For teachers, it encourages a way of looking at the implications for writing and teaching from an awareness that languages are always in contact and complement each other in communication.

As we proceed to narrow down this orientation, we have started focusing on the practices that constitute translingual literacies. We have started asking what strategies characterize the construction and negotiation of meaning in such forms of literacy. Monolingual ideologies have relied on form, grammar, and system for meaning-making, motivating teachers and scholars to either ignore strategies and practices or give them secondary importance. A translingual orientation requires an important shift to treating practices as primary and emergent, as form is so diverse, fluid, and changing that it cannot guarantee meaning by itself. The focus is now on social agents who give meaning to language resources (of course, building on the traces of meanings they bring from their prior use) in situated literacy practices. Such meaning has to be constructed and negotiated through strategic practices, as intelligibility and success depend a lot on collaboration. Many of these practices are developed through socialization and are often intuitive to all of us. Hanson (ch. 19) develops a pedagogy to tap into these intuitive strategies by encouraging her “native speaker” students to decode multilingual websites for their research. Strategies such as guessing the meaning from contexts and other semiotic cues (such as fonts and images) reflect those that multilinguals use in other contact situations (see Canagarajah, 2007). Lorimer (ch. 15) and Wible (ch. 4) discuss other such strategies from their research. We have only scratched the surface in understanding the practices of trilingual literacy. More progress in this front will help us devise practice-based pedagogies that don’t focus on codes and norms, but strategies of production and reception of texts.

We need to focus on practices rather than forms because the translingual orientation treats heterogeneity as the norm rather than the exception. In monolingual ideologies, meaning is guaranteed by the uniform codes and conventions a homogeneous community shares. When we move beyond bounded communities and consider communication at the contact zone (whether in precolonial multilingual communities or postmodern social media spaces), we are unable to rely on sharedness for meaning. It is practices that help people negotiate difference and achieve shared understanding. Practices therefore have an important place in translingual literacy. Ratcliffe’s (1999) notion of rhetorical listening is an insightful articulation of the listening/reading strategies one has to adopt in order to communicate across difference. We need more knowledge on the speaking/writing strategies to facilitate such negotiation.

Just as these negotiation strategies are developed through socialization in contact zones and multilingual communities, we are also finding that people are bringing certain dispositions that favor translingual communication and literacy. These dispositions—similar to Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus—constitute assumptions of language, attitudes toward social diversity, and tacit skills of communication and learning. Examples of such dispositions include an awareness of language as constituting diverse norms; a willingness to negotiate with diversity in social interactions; attitudes such as openness to difference, patience to co-construct meaning, and an acceptance of negotiated outcomes in interactions; and the ability to learn through practice and critical self-reflection. Lorimer uses the term “rhetorical attunement” (ch. 15) to describe such dispositions among her multilingual subjects. Wible also shows how a different set of attitudes and orientations comes into play in the World Social Forum where people can simultaneously use their own languages and still achieve semantic and social understanding. Pedagogical reports of others like Lu and Horner (ch. 3), Hanson (ch. 19), and Krall-Lanoue (ch. 21) also demonstrate how these dispositions help their students to negotiate cross-language relations without teachers having to instruct them on such negotiation strategies. What we are finding is that even native/monolingual students are socialized into such dispositions in networking sites and online interactions which compel them to negotiate language diversity effectively (see Williams, 2009). As we discover more of these dispositions and formulate them in a systematic manner, we may gain new insights into pedagogical possibilities. Teachers don’t have to assume that translingual literacy has to be taught afresh to their students. They can tap into the dispositions of their students for such interactions and explore ways to scaffold them for further development. Among students who lack adequate socialization into multilingual and contact zones encounters, teachers may consider working at the level of attitudinal shifts and language awareness to prepare them for such interactions.

Another direction in the effort to unpack the translingual orientation is the realization that this kind of literacy is intrinsically rhetorical. Multilingual words gain their logic and uptake in relation to the rhetorical objectives, participants, setting, and interests concerned. In fact, uptake is primarily about persuasion—i.e., persuading listeners/readers on the appropriateness of one’s semiotic choices for one’s purposes. Wible (ch. 4), Mao (ch. 5), and Morris Young (ch. 6) consider how we can better understand the rhetoric of translingual communication. Such a rhetoric involves certain ethical values suitable for negotiating difference (not dissimilar to the notion of dispositions introduced above) and certain negotiation strategies (also discussed earlier) for reception and interpretation. In terms of production, this rhetoric involves processes such as recontextualization, whereby semiotic resources from diverse languages and cultures are reconfigured for one’s purposes. As these are rhetorical processes, we are compelled to treat translingual literacy beyond the narrow bounds of language norms or textual structures and situate them in larger contexts of history, culture, and social relations.

A particularly important construct such rhetorical considerations are developing for translingual literacy is the constitutive and emergent role of place/space. Place is important in a definition of translingual literacy, for several reasons. As we move away from considering literacy as shaped by grammatical norms and formal considerations, with their own intrinsic logic or meanings guaranteed by an autonomous structure, we have to ask what we can ground such forms of communication and literacy on. In this exploration, we are now beginning to see the material context that was earlier bracketed off as insignificant emerging as constitutive of meaning. The material context shapes literacy and communication in profound ways. While geographical/physical place contextualizes literacy, even more influential are the social negotiations and rhetorical encounters that create alternative spaces for creativity and understanding. Wible (ch. 4), Mao (ch. 5), and Morris Young (ch. 6) treat these spaces as characterized by recontextualization, co-construction, and creolization, as people from subjugated backgrounds find voice through an appropriation and reconfiguration of conflicting norms and values. The fact that certain places are colonized doesn’t prevent social agents from constructing rhetorical and translingual spaces for renegotiating power relationships.

In defining the semiotics and rhetoric of translingual literacy, there is still room to understand the multimodality of texts. Applied linguists have coined the term alignment to characterize the manner in which diverse communicative ecologies, modalities, and symbol systems are configured by multilinguals in meaning-making activity (see Atkinson Churchill, Nishino, & Okada, 2007). Alignment draws attention away from grammar or language system as the locus of meaning, and points to the activity of social agents in putting together diverse semiotic resources for meaning. Hanson (ch. 19) suggests the value of this approach by unveiling the strategies students (surprisingly, “native” speakers in this case) adopt to align different modalities and symbols to guess the meaning of multilingual websites for their research. The many studies in this volume from communicative domains such as hiphop (Milu, ch. 10), folk songs (Mao, ch. 5; Morris Young, ch. 6), public signs (Milson-Whyte, ch. 11), urban interactions (Bou Ayash, ch. 9), graffiti (Morris Young, ch. 6), and digital communication (Hanson, ch. 19; Scenters-Zapico, ch. 17) have the potential for further interpretation beyond language for the way in which diverse modalities and semiotics contribute to both the production and reception of texts.

While our efforts in defining translingual literacy and understanding its communicative potential will continue at the theoretical level, such an orientation also offers new directions for research. The value of this shift in orientation is that even traditional research methods can be revised to yield new findings. Donahue (ch. 14) discusses how she revised a study she undertook from a comparative perspective on student writers from different communities with new outcomes. The translingual orientation makes her look at her research subjects from France and the United States as not compartmentalized into their different language and cultural backgrounds, but inhabiting contact zones that show the mediation and reconstruction of their texts. Since it is the compartmentalization of disciplines in modernity that led to the definition of language and literacy in monolingual, formalist, and autonomous terms, we can understand why the translingual orientation is bringing disciplines together for new research. The translingual orientation has motivated scholars to merge resources not only from different disciplines but also from different academic communities. We find that the dominance of occidental communities in modernist knowledge construction has led to a reductive perspective on literacy and communication. The rediscovery of vibrant tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Premises
• Part II Community Practices
• Part III Code-Meshing Orientations
• Part IV Research Directions
• Part V Pedagogical Applications
• List of Contributors
• Index