Nancy Bou Ayash (she/her/hers)

Areas of Specialization

Rhetoric and Composition, Translingual and Transcultural Literacies, Second and/or Foreign Language Writing

Research Interests

Translingual and transcultural literacy education, language politics and policy in multilingual educational settings, politics of composition research across linguistic and national borders, World Englishes/English as a Lingua Franca, theory and practice of translation.

My research mainly focuses on examining the problematics and possibilities of pursuing cross-language and cross-cultural relations in writing instruction and research. I am particularly interested in exploring the complex relationships between language policy in multilingual societies (the U.S. and elsewhere), sociolinguistic landscapes, geopolitical relations and the globalizing economy, and the implications on writing pedagogy and the design of undergraduate writing curricula. My last major research project was an investigation of how monolingualist ideologies compete with translingual realities in the treatment of language at the level of language perceptions, policies, and pedagogical practices in higher education contexts. I’ve explored the relevance of teaching English as a language of translingual practice for multilingual writers, who are constantly forced to negotiate tensions between monolingualist assumptions about language that dominate curricular and pedagogical designs in college writing courses on one hand and the realities of language use in sociolinguistic landscapes on another. My current research presents translation as a site for working against a monolingualist ideology in U.S. college composition instruction and moving toward valued translingual dispositions. More specifically, I am interested in examining the relevance of theories and practices of translation in the design and development of writing curricula aligned with a translingual orientation to language and language difference.