Department
of Linguistics - Simon Fraser University
Colloquium
Series
Department of English
University of Louisville
Thursday, June 23, 2011
11:30 am, RCB 6152
Abstract
Translingual literacy has been promoted as a way to foreground writers’ agency in meaning making, and their need, desire, and efforts to re-negotiate asymmetrical power relations along linguistic as well as social, historical, cultural lines. However, pedagogies advancing translingual literacy have been understood as beneficial only for multilingual, not English monolingual students. We argue that neglect of the potential a translingual literacy pedagogy holds for English monolinguals requires that we learn to recognize difference in what appears to be the “same” or mere “repetition” (Pennycook, Language). This requires a shift in reading practices from a focus on glossodiversity to semiodiversity, and a view of language not as a self-evident pre-existing entity but rather as a dynamic process, with language and its users understood as mutually constitutive. Such a shift enables us to recognize writerly agency not only in writers’ seeming deviations from linguistic norms but also in their imitation of standardized forms and meanings, for both represent active engagement in the formation and transformation of language, identity, social relations, and worlds. We use our initial representation of students’ effort to revise a non-standardized form, “can able to” (Lu, “Professing”) and the critical reception given that representation, to illustrate the ways in which approaching imitation or repetition in terms of semiodiversity, and hence as also about difference, might advance our efforts to promote translingual literacy.