Crossing borders, addressing diversity

Abstract

This paper presents a story of applied linguistics from my personal vantage point as a multilingual scholar whose career began outside the centers of research and scholarship. The article explains the assumptions and practices characterizing the foundation of the discipline in modernist discourses, and delineates the changes resulting from globalization towards postmodern discourses that question positivistic inquiry and homogeneity. As applied linguistics evolves to address diversity as the norm, the article identifies the different schools that have gradually moved the field in that direction – e.g., variationist applied linguistics (VAL), critical applied linguistics (CAL), postmodern hybridity, and translingual practice. Through these movements, the field has also evolved fromlinguistics applied (LA)to a more theoretically plural and, currently, to a more agentive relationship with other disciplines. Rather than simply borrowing from other disciplines, applied linguists have begun to make their own contributions to those disciplines on language-related issues.

Teaching Translingual Agency in Iteration: Rewriting Difference

“…1 Both such efforts have been salutary in countering deficit notions of the language practices of minoritized groups and in countering the treatment of members of those groups as somehow cognitively deficient in light of differences in their language practices. But those efforts have been founded on assumptions about languages, relations between languages, and relations between languages and their users that scholarship in these fields and in the contributing and intersecting fields of bilingualism, English as a lingua franca, World Englishes, intercultural rhetoric, sociolinguistics, and second language acquisition is increasingly calling into question (Baker 2013;Belcher 2014;Blommaert 2010;Calvet 1999Calvet , 2006Canagarajah 2011Canagarajah , 2016Firth and Wagner 1997;Heller 2007;Khubchandani 1998;Leung 2005Leung , 2013Leung , Harris, and Rampton 1997;Matsuda 1997;Parakrama 1995;Pennycook 2010). In a critique of these assumptions, Bruce Horner and John Trimbur have observed that composition courses themselves emerged out of a chain of reifications of language, social identities, and the links between them whereby individuals are assumed to have only a single social identity tied to a single language (e.g., "Chinese"), competence with which develops in a linear fashion toward mastery (Horner and Trimbur 2002, 596).…”

Introduction: Crossing Divides: Exploring Translingual Writing Pedagogies and Programs

“…1 Both such efforts have been salutary in countering deficit notions of the language practices of minoritized groups and in countering the treatment of members of those groups as somehow cognitively deficient in light of differences in their language practices. But those efforts have been founded on assumptions about languages, relations between languages, and relations between languages and their users that scholarship in these fields and in the contributing and intersecting fields of bilingualism, English as a lingua franca, World Englishes, intercultural rhetoric, sociolinguistics, and second language acquisition is increasingly calling into question (Baker 2013;Belcher 2014;Blommaert 2010;Calvet 1999Calvet , 2006Canagarajah 2011Canagarajah , 2016Firth and Wagner 1997;Heller 2007;Khubchandani 1998;Leung 2005Leung , 2013Leung , Harris, and Rampton 1997;Matsuda 1997;Parakrama 1995;Pennycook 2010). In a critique of these assumptions, Bruce Horner and John Trimbur have observed that composition courses themselves emerged out of a chain of reifications of language, social identities, and the links between them whereby individuals are assumed to have only a single social identity tied to a single language (e.g., "Chinese"), competence with which develops in a linear fashion toward mastery (Horner and Trimbur 2002, 596).…”

Crossing, or Creating, Divides? A Plea for Transdisciplinary Scholarship

“…in light of differences in their language practices. But those efforts have been founded on assumptions about languages, relations between languages, and relations between languages and their users that scholarship in these fields and in the contributing and intersecting fields of bilingualism, English as a lingua franca, World Englishes, intercultural rhetoric, sociolinguistics, and second language acquisition is increasingly calling into question (Baker 2013;Belcher 2014;Blommaert 2010;Calvet 1999Calvet , 2006Canagarajah 2011Canagarajah , 2016Firth and Wagner 1997;Heller 2007;Khubchandani 1998;Leung 2005Leung , 2013Leung , Harris, and Rampton 1997;Matsuda 1997;Parakrama 1995;Pennycook 2010). In a critique of these assumptions, Bruce Horner and John Trimbur have observed that composition courses themselves emerged out of a chain of reifications of language, social identities, and the links between them whereby individuals are assumed to have only a single social identity tied to a single language (e.g., "Chinese"), competence with which develops in a linear fashion toward mastery (Horner and Trimbur 2002, 596).…”