It turns out that multilingualism has implications for readers too. Bruce Horner calls it translingualism: beyond simply describing a writer or speaker’s state of affairs (i.e., multilingualism means that Chloe speaks more than one language and therefore writes like someone who speaks more than one language, as evidenced by certain specific patterns, errors, etc. in the form and content of her work,) translingualism is an “approach [that] sees difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening” (Horner 303). Translingualism is about Chloe reading her student's work with an eye to difference as a productive meaning maker. It is the opposite of our hemisphere’s heritage of linguistic violence, described by Baca: “When European combatants invaded they were equipped with an enduring Aristotelian syndrome, the rhetorical art of reinventing the cultural Other as a periphery that is declared as such from the colonizing center” (230).
I suppose it is essentially what the minds behind the CCCC’s Students’ Rights to Their Own Language policy had envisioned when they “affirm[ed] strongly that teachers must have the experience and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language” (Explanation of Adoption) in 1974. There’s a certain ethically-driven burden of responsibility bound up in all of this, a sense that fluent readers and writers of Standard Written English, Edited American English, educated English, and all manner of Academese are not off the hook. They (we!) are, in fact, very much on the hook: while my level of comfort with SWE (and my naïve enjoyment of all of its attendant social privileges – subtle or blatant –) automatically places me in a position of relative rhetorical power, my linguistic education, if I am to be truly translingual and respectful of my future students’ right to their own languages, is far from complete. The SRTOL statement above specifies the need for training and experience. Clearly, the protection and nurturing of students’ rights to their own language requires work on the teacher’s end.
I’m curious about this word “experience.” I can’t imagine that this article is claiming that new or inexperienced (in the just-graduated sense, perhaps) teachers cannot encourage students in the right to their language. Is this talking about experience in the worldly sense? I am wary of prescribing “street cred” here, though—I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with the claim that only native (or very comfortable) speakers of a certain dialect are qualified to teach students with backgrounds in the same dialect. SRTOL certainly does not make that claim; quite the contrary, in fact. Powell makes clear the extent to which translingualism is an against-the-grain endeavor: “It is [the] sublimation of ethnicity [on which the US’s scholarly legitimation of narrative is predicated] that leads to a kind of ‘we’re all the same inside’ mentality that ultimately shuts down and erases difference” (5). Given that the sublimation of ethnicity and the erasure of difference is the systemic state of things, translingualism requires effort. And bravery, perhaps? Or at least innovation. Experience lies therein, I think. Experience is a question of doing.
One slightly off-topic question that haunted me while reading: all of this talk of negotiating borders between dialects and learning other dialects for the sake of transligualism made me wonder, Ok, but aren’t there certain dialects that white, Midwestern girls will never be allowed to speak? How do I know what they are? Who decides that? Inherent in the phrase “a student’s right to her own language” is a fine line between wanting all people to be comfortable with all dialects for the purpose of enabling communication and comprehension without the imposition of an unfair, arbitrary standard, while simultaneously respecting the right of certain people/groups to claim absolute agency over a dialect (and, most often, its lexicon). What do we make of this?
Baca, Damian. “Rethinking Composition, Five Hundred Years Later.” JAC 29.1-2 (2009): 229-242. Print.
Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, & John Trimbur. “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach.” College English 73.3 (2011): 303-320. Print.
Powell, Malea. “Blood and Scholarship: One Mixed-Blood’s Story.” Race, Rhetoric, & Composition. Ed. Keith Gilyard. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999.
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