ENGL 569 A: Topics In Language And Rhetoric

Bridging first and second language writing scholarship, this seminar takes an interdisciplinary approach in exploring arising societal, educational, and scholarly concerns in the 21st century, such as multilingualism and multilingual education, translingual/ transcultural literacies, the ethnography of “superdiverse” language landscapes, the sociolinguistics of writing, etc.  In doing so, we will be investigating specific ways in which ideologies of language underpin various tacit and/or explicit language-in-education policies as well as past and current institutional responses to and treatments of language/cultural difference in writing.  In our explorations, we will be paying particular attention to the nature and repercussions of relationships between such official policies and practices, on one hand, and on another hand, on-the-ground language (and by implication literacy) practices that negotiate, appropriate, resist, and transform these.

This seminar also functions as a language professionalization and socialization course that prepares future writing teacher-scholars for the challenging yet promising task of laboring across difference through making more visible and transparent the multiplicity and contention among diverse language ideological orientations guiding the teaching and learning of writing in national and transnational contexts.  In this sense, the final project encourages seminar participants to critically examine local ideas about and understandings of language, its practice and learning in their own families, communities, classrooms, programs, or campuses. Building on and expanding such local knowledge, participants are invited to develop potentially relevant and engaging instructional materials and practices. 

Readings:
Canagarajah, Suresh A. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. Milton Park: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Horner, Bruce. Rewriting Composition: Terms of Exchange. Carbondale : Southern Illinois UP, 2016.

Kroskrity, Paul. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research P, 2000. Print.

Makoni, Sinfree, and Alastair Pennycook, eds.  Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Buffalo UP, 2007. Print.

Mar-Molinero, Clare, and Patrick Stevenson. Language Ideologies, Policies and Practices: Language and the Future of Europe. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.

Prendergast, Catherine. Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2008.