Building Bridges: Changing a Globalized Society Through Writing

RM 215

The internationalization of the university systems across the globe has left incoming L2 writers alone as they encounter difficulties in becoming socialized into the practices of written academic discourse. Canagarajah (2013) has advocated for translingual approaches and pedagogies to teach writing to multilingual and multidialectical students in the university. Canagarajah posits that a translingual approach incorporates linguistic variances, and that readers and writers co-construct texts by using envoicing, recontextualization, interactional, and entextualization strategies. Readers and writers navigate through ambiguous linguistic spaces to co-construct the text itself. Because academic institutions still expect students to participate and be able to use academic practices that do not invite students to use their first language or variances of the “standard” language, this forces writing centers to act as spaces for language socialization, particularly when the university does not accommodate students working in their second language. For the purposes of this discussion, I will discuss the current writing center scholarship about L2 writers and analyze the implications that a translingual approach would have in tutoring sessions with non-native writers, and how navigating through linguistic ambiguity would give students “their right to their own language,” and how tutors can co-construct texts with second language writers, even if tutors have to build bridges between languages. By negotiating languages, tutors can help incorporate translingual approaches to writing outside of the classroom in ways to scaffold and guide students as they write in the target language, and yet addresses the needs and realities of a globalized society and university.