Official language and literacy curricula are often presented as technical suggestions for teaching and learning. In contrast with this framing of curriculum, in this presentation, I discuss how official language and literacy education is first and foremost an instrument in discourse control through monoglossic textual practices in centralized educational structures. Official pedagogical and assessment practices are mainly interested in homogenizing society by the means of discursive assimilation of minoritized students, including immigrants that need to adopt the language of their host nations. In order to illustrate how learners of additional languages resist this assimilation process, I discuss an ethnographic study of the writing practices of three plurilingual writers in Toronto, Canada. I focus on the translingual practices that the participants engaged with and show how those practices enriched their writing processes and products. I will explain how these writers’ translanguaging was a complex process with five dimensions: (1) lexical, (2) syntactic, (3) rhetorical, (4) conceptual, and (5) presentational (how to share and disseminate texts). I will highlight how translingual writing helped the writers maintain their intellectual identities by creating discursive continuity in their writing trajectories.
This talk was given by Dr. Amir Kalan on February 10th, 2023 and hosted online by Carleton University.
