Languaging about Language in an Interdisciplinary Writing-Intensive Course

WAC Clearinghouse. Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523. Tel: 970-491-3132; Web site: http://wac.colostate.edu

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14

Foreign Countries; Writing (Composition); Translation; Bilingual Education; Bilingualism; Literature; Curriculum Design; Writing Assignments; Bilingual Students; Metalinguistics; Freshman Composition

1554-8244

This article gives an account of creating and delivering a (trans)disciplinary writing-intensive course focused on translation and translingual writing. The course, offered in a comparative literature program at a Canadian university, was co-created by an applied linguist, a literature professor, and a curriculum theorist, and was inspired in part by the translingual approach to teaching and understanding writing and language in general. In this article, we first discuss the development of the course and its assignments. We then examine written work produced by multilingual students, reflecting on the development of their metalinguistic, disciplinary, and writing-related knowledge. We aim to show that a course like this, which uses translingual "content" as the basis for a writing-intensive course, can be beneficial for students' knowledge of language, literacy, and literature, and can encourage metalinguistic reflection that may allow student writers to recognize their linguistic repertoires as resources for academic writing in English.

As Provided

23

2018

EJ1195891