Writing Difference: Student Ideologies and Translingual Possibilities

Abstract

This dissertation study analyzes 15 multilingual students’ talk about language and identity in the first-year writing classrooms to uncover students’ language ideologies and their impact on student’s writing. This study tests translingual theory against students’ logics and experiences. Translingual literature has positioned itself as an antiracist orientation for writing studies that assumes a blending of dialects and languages for multidialectal and multilingual students, and therefore promotes code-meshing in the classroom. Using semi-structured interviews, ideological discourse analysis, and constructivist grounded theory, this project analyzes students’ responses to code-meshing and translingualism foreground multilingual student perspectives as they explain the frictions among their linguistic identities, translingualism, and code-meshing.

The participants in this study were interested in code-meshing, but articulated reservations about code-meshing in their own academic writing. Some objections were practical, such as their questions about whether their peers or instructors would need to be able to read multiple languages to read a code-meshed text. Other objections were based in linguistic difference, such as the hesitation expressed by some students that their languages do not follow the same grammatical patterns or use the same alphabet as American English, and therefore do not “naturally” blend. Many objections were ideological, such as the belief that Standard Edited American English is the best dialect for academic writing in the U.S. Some students who were interested in academic code-meshing reported that they did not have mastery of academic forms of their non-English languages and were not sure how to blend two different codes into a single academic discourse.

Throughout their interviews, students’ talk also revealed other ideological barriers to translingualism. All participants believed that academic writing should be impersonal and written in SEAE. Underlying these beliefs is the maintenance of ideologies that promote the academic value of standardized English over students’ home languages, and the implicit argument that students should suppress pieces of their cultural and linguistic identities in academic settings. While their language ideologies prompt their linguistic actions, students are not always aware of their deficit beliefs about their languages and identities. Translingual literature argues that students should be trained to use their language difference as a resource, but students don’t quite know when, how, or why to incorporate their differences.

Students also reveal that they are sometimes unable to participate in academic conversations because of cultural difference. For multilingual students, race is foundational in the creation, performance, and interpretation of their identities and languages in the writing classroom. As a part of the cultural construction of race, Americanness plays a central role in both defining and othering students’ identities and their access.

Ultimately, the implementation of a translingual ecology in the writing classroom depends upon ideological shifts. By centering linguistic and cultural difference as the expectation in the U.S. composition classroom, space is created for students to share and value their multilingual identities and competencies. This ideological shift requires a move away from U.S. cultural norms and audiences as the assumed target and a move toward transcultural and translingual negotiation and meaning-making.