Wild Zeitung—Translanguaging above and below the fold

Abstract

Many discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion recognize that language students from underrepresented groups often do not see themselves mirrored in the target culture. In addition, they may not see themselves represented, except in a course on multiculturalism in German literature, in the language classroom. Recently, there have been a number of articles and studies designed to address this issue (Anya, 2020;Criser & Malakaj, 2020;Von Esch et al., 2020) and many instructors are actively working on the issue of inclusion. With the exception of a few articles (cf. Layne, 2020), a discussion of what types of activities an instructor can use in the classroom to foster agency for the students in the target language has been absent. In this article, we present a project for an upper-division writing course that fosters student-centered learning. We aim for the students to be able to envision themselves as successful participants in the target culture. This can be accomplished through translanguaging (cf. Canagarajah, 2020). TRANSLANGUAGINGTranslanguaging research is popular in the fields of Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) and bilingual education, but the concept has only recently been transferred to the teaching of foreign language writing (Yang & Fan, 2022). Translanguaging refers to the process by which speakers use more than one linguistic code to make sense of and interact with the world around them. Vogel and García (2017) argue that rather than speakers having autonomous systems for each dialect or language, they have a unitary linguistic repertoire, which they use strategically to navigate their environment. In and outside of the classroom, students are encouraged to use their full linguistic repertoire without regard to the social or political dominance of one language variety over another (García & Wei, 2014). In this manner, translanguaging has been successfully used to address decolonization in the foreign language classroom, particularly the issue of language discrimination. Translanguaging provides an opportunity for students to express their varied identities and view their backgrounds as a resource to construct meaning as they encounter the multifaceted target culture(s). Further, translanguaging frees the students from the pressure to conform to the idea of a monolingual native speaker of the standard language (Milroy & Milroy, 1985, p. 19), a goal widely deemed unrealistic, impossible