OPINION: Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach (original) (raw)

B r u ce H o r n e r is Endowed Chair in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville. Min-Zh a n Lu is professor of English and University Scholar at the same institution. Ja cq u e l i n e Jon es Royste r is Ivan Allen Chair and Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. J o h n Trim bu r is professor of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College in Boston. rowing numbers of U.S. teachers and scholars of writing recognize that traditional ways of understanding and responding to language differences are inadequate to the facts on the ground. Language use in our classrooms, our communities, the nation, and the world has always been multilingual rather than monolingual. Around the globe, most people speak more than one language. Indeed, they speak more than one variation of these languages. In addition, these languages and variations are constantly changing as they intermingle. The growing majority of English speakers worldwide-including substantial numbers within the United States-know other languages, and, through interaction, the Englishes they use vary and multiply. Traditional approaches to writing in the United States are at odds with these facts. They take as the norm a linguistically homogeneous situation: one where writers, speakers, and readers are expected to use Standard English or Edited American English-imagined ideally as uniform-to the exclusion of other languages and language variations. These approaches assume that heterogeneity in language impedes communication and meaning. Hence, the long-standing aim of traditional writing instruction has been to reduce "interference," excising what appears to show difference. We call for a new paradigm: a translingual approach. This approach 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. When faced with difference in language, this approach asks: What might this difference do? How might it function expressively, rhetorically, communicatively? For whom,