Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms

Engaging the Rich Communicative Repertoires of U.S. Students

Kay M. Losey, Gail Shuck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000529432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

A much-needed resource on plurilingual pedagogies, this book counters the common dominant English-only approach found in writing and composition classrooms by identifying practices and pedagogies that support multilingual students. Providing a window into a range of contexts and classrooms where students' full identities are honored, contributors offer research-grounded strategies and pedagogies that allow students to harness all of their language resources in order to build on their strengths and develop their writing abilities. The specific examples in this book, drawn from high school and college writing contexts, demonstrate the value of embracing linguistic diversity in writing programs.

Presenting a wide range of models and strategies from top scholars that center students' linguistic repertoires as strengths, the volume addresses classroom teaching, assessment, curriculum, school administration, and more, all from an asset-based orientation. This book is ideal for courses in composition and second-language writing pedagogy as well as for students, scholars, and educators in second language writing, language and literacy education, and composition studies.

1 Plurilingualism for U.S. Writing Classrooms

Kay M. Losey and Gail Shuck

DOI: 10.4324/9781003257370-1

It is no secret that the U.S. high school and college student population is linguistically diverse. Indeed, not only have U.S. colleges and universities witnessed dramatic growth in the number of international students over the last decade (Institute of International Education, 2018), but they are also increasingly recognizing the presence of U.S.-resident students whose home language is not English. While these students have varying proficiency levels in the languages they identify with, most have access to at least some linguistic and communicative resources that those languages offer (Chiang & Schmida, 1999; Leung, Harris, & Rampton, 1997). Students such as these, who use multiple languages or varieties, draw on all of their communicative resources as they negotiate relationships with others in multiple modes (Cummins, 2007; Edelsky, 1982; García & Sylvan, 2011; Hornberger, 2007; Piccardo, 2013). Whether students are participating in fully bilingual conversations, interacting on social media using culturally specific visual and linguistic jokes, or coming up with an expression in one language and writing it in another, they are already communicating using multiple languages, varieties, and modalities. Students are thus well practiced in drawing from their diverse communicative repertoires.

However, in composition classrooms, whether mainstream or ESL, a tacit English-only approach has been dominant (Horner & Trimbur, 2002). Students are not widely invited to draw on their full repertoires within classrooms. Some instructors have classroom policies that forbid students to use their first languages, perhaps stemming from the belief that the first language is a hindrance to second-language learning. Other instructors may be convinced that English is the only language of success in the United States (or much of the world). Regardless of instructors’ reasons for excluding languages other than English, an English-only policy in a writing classroom positions multilingual learners of English as lacking—that is, such policies exemplify a deficit orientation to language and perhaps to language users. We believe, therefore, that a shift in perspective in the teaching of writing is needed—one toward recognizing and capitalizing on the many proficiencies students bring with them to the classroom (an asset orientation). This shift would also create a classroom climate of mutual respect and admiration, fostering self-efficacy and self-confidence in learners. Students’ full identities and backgrounds—to the extent that they choose to share them—would become an essential, honored part of the classroom community.

We argue that allowing students access to all of their language resources gives them more opportunity to build on their strengths, exert rhetorical agency with confidence, and develop their writing abilities. What is needed, then, is for writing teachers to determine effective ways to honor and draw on students’ well-practiced communicative abilities in more explicit ways. Instructors who do invite students’ full linguistic repertoires into the classroom are often delighted to discover the range of their students’ abilities and to learn the depth with which students can discuss their communicative choices when given the opportunity to do so. Such practices help students to build additional repertoires for use not only in school settings but also in their work, family, and civic lives. They can use those resources as they make arguments, share their experiences, take on leadership roles, and become agents of their own academic and professional development. Moreover, as the work of Fu (2009), Stille & Cummins (2013), and others has shown, bringing students’ first languages into second-language classrooms can offer significant support for second-language development.

This volume offers high school and college writing instructors specific examples of and strategies for building on students’ existing communicative strengths and encouraging students to engage in those discourse practices that are often excluded from academia. We have created this collection because, as college writing teachers in the United States, we need practices, assignments, and assessment methods for drawing on and valuing those abilities. Administrators of writing programs also need strategies for helping entire groups of faculty to recognize the positive effects of such instruction and curricula and to help them develop methods for implementing it. This volume offers specific examples of successful strategies that were intentionally designed to use the full range of linguistic and communicative knowledge that all students bring to our classes as a foundation for the teaching of writing.

Accessing students’ existing language experiences can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Indeed, several approaches that have been disseminated include the following: encouraging the use of multiple languages during the writing process and in small group and pair activities; offering an option for students to translate an academic article or story then exploring the process and outcomes (Kiernan, Meier, & Wang, 2016); and examining sentence-level choices with students, which creates possibilities for a new understanding of “error” (Stanley, 2013). The most well-known of all pedagogical strategies for drawing on students’ full linguistic repertoires in U.S. writing classrooms is to invite code-meshing—that is, the weaving together of multiple languages and varieties in a single text or spoken interaction (Canagarajah, 2013). These practices, along with those articulated in this collection, share an understanding of (1) the equal value of all languages, regardless of the dominance of one language, (2) the availability of all language resources in a person’s or community’s repertoire for use in making meaning, and (3) the recognition that language difference is a resource in academic and other spaces. With this collection, we are adding to the body of pedagogical scholarship that falls under this umbrella of language difference in the writing classroom. We share varied practices that could be used in different institutional contexts and with all our multilingual students, whether they are international, U.S.-resident, or refugee-background students.

Our focus in this book is U.S. college and secondary classrooms and programs, as the dominance of English is so strong in educational policy and practice at those levels that it can lead some of us not only to wonder how to invoke the full range of our students’ language skills and experiences in our teaching, but also to question if we even should invoke them. The prevalent assumptions in the U.S. of how English as an additional language should be taught and what language or languages should be used in the classroom consciously and unconsciously determine the decisions of teachers, administrators, and, indeed, students (Cook, 2007; Cummins, 2007). U.S. composition scholars have shaped the scholarship of language difference in writing and urged the field of composition studies to account for such difference (Canagarajah, 2013; Lu & Horner, 2013; Matsuda, 2006). Nevertheless, the high school and college writing programs in which we work remain staunchly English-dominant in their focus, and so it is particularly challenging for many of us to focus on anything but English. It is because of our unique and challenging context that we have limited the chapters in this book to pedagogies, curricula, and programs from the United States.

Plurilingual Pedagogies

In investigating alternatives to this English-only focus, we have found that research on plurilingualism has helped us to broaden our view of pedagogies that value multilingual students’ knowledge. The term plurilingualism has been used by the Council of Europe as the basis for the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, whose descriptors of proficiency levels inform language proficiency assessment in dozens of countries (Council of Europe, 2018). The concept of plurilingualism resonates with us, as it allows for all students to see themselves as able to draw on the whole set of their communicative resources to interact with each other and the world.

Research on plurilingual practices has taught us that creating space in classrooms for students to use all of their communicative knowledge has numerous benefits, not the least of which is supporting students’ writing development in English. The Council of Europe has detailed key principles of plurilingualism, which Cenoz & Gorter (2013) helpfully summarize for us as follows:

• [plurilingualism] is not an exceptional competence, it is a competence that can be acquired by all speakers;
• the linguistic repertoire does not have to be homogeneous and therefore can encompass different degrees of proficiency in the different languages;
• the linguistic repertoire is dynamic and changes over time;
• speakers use a repertoire of communicative resources for different functions and can use different varieties at the same time in code-switching;
• plurilingualism is a transversal competence and the teaching of different languages should be linked to one another; and
• plurilingualism also involves a cultural aspect and the development of pluricultural competence.

(p. 594)

This communicative knowledge includes the use of audio, visual, gestural, spatial, and linguistic forms, particularly supported by new technologies (Mina, 2016). This perspective helps us to realize that classrooms are plurilingual spaces in which teachers can draw on students’ full range of knowledge and experiences as resources for the teaching of writing.

Plurilingual pedagogies dovetail with the work of many language and literacy experts who have described multilingualism as a complex system that requires individuals to move not only among possible options available to them within their own individual repertoires in particular contexts (for example, wondering “Do I use Spanish or English with this person?”) but also between alternatives that signal particular identities (such as whether to use Anglicized vs. Spanish pronunciations of Spanish names). Language knowledge, these researchers argue, is not divided into discrete codes but is a single communicative repertoire that all individuals have at the ready, given the rhetorical need and communicative situation (Bucholtz, 2016; Cummins, 2007; García, 2009; Mazak & Carroll, 2017).

Many of these plurilingual principles have also been highlighted or implied in recent articles and special journal issues published in the United States. Considerable attention has been paid in composition studies and applied linguistics to theories of how languages are related, particularly with regard to how and in what contexts multilingual people write. See, for example, TESOL Quarterly’s (2013) special issue on Plurilingualism, edited by Taylor & Snoddon; College English’s (2016) special issue on Translingual Work in Composition, edited by Lu & Horner; and articles in the Journal of Second Language Writing that discuss the intersections among these approaches (Atkinson & Tardy, 2018; Gevers, 2018; and Schreiber & Watson, 2018).

Our purpose in this collection is to offer examples of pedagogical and administrative practices that draw on these principles to guide students in building on their strengths, thereby building their rhetorical repertoires. You will find in this book examples such as allowing space for using multiple languages when teaching different aspects of the writing process, analyzing and critiquing the ways that language hierarchies operate in students’ lives and the lives of others, engaging students in interpreting and producing multimodal texts, and supporting student agency in choosing to uphold or disrupt this English-only expectation. We hope teachers and administrators will honor the linguistic diversity in our classes and society and intentionally counter the forces that insist that standard English only is the best method for teaching multilingual students and for communicating in a multilingual society.

Our book is designed to meet the needs of practicing teachers in U.S. college-level ESL, developmental composition, and college composition classes as they support their student writers. It is also appropriate for secondary teachers of English and ESL. Teachers of students from international, immigrant, and/or refugee backgrounds will find applicable strategies throughout. We developed the book with pre-service teachers in graduate programs and their professors in mind as well. Our attention to curricular, program, and institutional issues in the book is also useful for directors of writing programs, writing centers, and student support services on college campuses. Because multilingual students exist in all types of writing classes at every level, this volume is appropriate for not only the TESOL community, but also members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Association for Bilingual Education.

Overview of the Book

Each chapter of our book is organized around a specific pedagogical strategy, curricular plan, or administrative program, providing theoretical and research foundations for the topic, descriptions of the students and institutional contexts, evidence of the success of the method, and concluding with a special section called Options and Opportunities. This section will provide readers with one or more of the following: suggestions for adapting the practice described for other contexts; possible variations on the practice; and/or resources for those who want further information or additional examples.

Contributors to this book have been selected based on their expertise and prominence in the field of second-language writing pedagogy and their unique, pedagogically oriented scholarship. Our contributors have had experience teaching multilingual students in a variety of types of institutions across the country.

Following this brief introduction, our volume is divided into two major sections: Part I—Classroom Teaching, Assessment Strategies, and Course Curricula, and Part II—Program and Institutional Landscapes. As you read through both parts, you will discover shared themes across many of the chapters and even across sections of the book.

A pervasi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor Biographies
• List of Contributors
• 1 Plurilingualism for U.S. Writing Classrooms
• Part I Classroom Teaching, Assessment Strategies, and Course Curricula
• Part II Program and Institutional Landscapes
• Index