Suresh Canagarajah

This book is framed as a memoir of the author’s journey through a cancer diagnosis and resulting impairments, as he continued his teaching and research activities during and after medical procedures. The narrative weaves together theoretical debates, textual analyses, and ethnographic data from communicative practices to redefine language competence.The book demonstrates:the generative and resistant value of human vulnerabilitythe importance of vulnerability in motivating engagement with social networks and material ecologies for productive thinking, communication, and communitythe role of relational ethics in social and communicative lifea decolonizing orientation to disability studies and language competence.While language competence was traditionally defined as mentally internalized grammatical knowledge for individual mastery of communication, this book demonstrates the need for distributed, ethical, and embodied practice. The book is intended for graduate students and researchers in language and literacy studies. It would interest scholars outside these disciplines to understand what language studies can offer to address the role of disabilities, impairments, and debilities in embodied communication and thinking. In the context of the global pandemic, compounded by environmental catastrophes and structural injustices which disproportionately affect marginalized communities, the book helps readers treat human vulnerability as the starting point for ethical social relations, strategic communication, and transformative education.

This book responds to recent criticisms that the research and theorization of multilingualism on the part of applied linguists are in collusion with neoliberal policies and economic interests. While acknowledging that neoliberal agencies can appropriate diverse languages and language practices, including resources and dispositions theorized by scholars of multilingualism, it argues that a distinction must be made between the different language ideologies informing communicative practices. Those of neoliberal agencies are motivated by distinct ideological orientations that diverge from the theorization of multilingual practices by critical applied linguists. In addressing this issue, the book draws on the author’s empirical research on skilled migration to demonstrate how sub-Saharan African professionals in English-dominant workplaces in the UK, USA, Australia, and South Africa resist the neoliberal communicative expectations and employ alternate practices informed by critical dispositions. These practices have the potential to transform neoliberal orientations on material development. The book labels the latter as informed by a postcolonial language ideology, to distinguish them from those of neoliberalism. While neoliberal agencies approach languages as being instrumental for profit-making purposes, the author’s informants focus on the synergy between languages to generate new meanings and norms, which are strategically negotiated in pursuit of ethical interests, inclusive interactions, and holistic ecological development. As such, the book clearly illustrates that the way critical scholars and multilinguals relate to language diversity is different from the way neoliberal policies and agencies use multilingualism for their own purposes.

This book is framed as a memoir of the author’s journey through a cancer diagnosis and resulting impairments, as he continued his teaching and research activities during and after medical procedures. The narrative weaves together theoretical debates, textual analyses, and ethnographic data from communicative practices to redefine language competence.The book demonstrates:the generative and resistant value of human vulnerabilitythe importance of vulnerability in motivating engagement with social networks and material ecologies for productive thinking, communication, and communitythe role of relational ethics in social and communicative lifea decolonizing orientation to disability studies and language competence.While language competence was traditionally defined as mentally internalized grammatical knowledge for individual mastery of communication, this book demonstrates the need for distributed, ethical, and embodied practice. The book is intended for graduate students and researchers in language and literacy studies. It would interest scholars outside these disciplines to understand what language studies can offer to address the role of disabilities, impairments, and debilities in embodied communication and thinking. In the context of the global pandemic, compounded by environmental catastrophes and structural injustices which disproportionately affect marginalized communities, the book helps readers treat human vulnerability as the starting point for ethical social relations, strategic communication, and transformative education.

The literacy autobiography is a personal narrative reflecting on how one’s experiences of spoken and written words have contributed to their ongoing relationship with language and literacy. Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing is a cutting-edge study of this engaging genre of writing in academic and professional contexts. In this state-of-the-art collection, Suresh Canagarajah brings together 11 samples of writing by students that both document their literary journeys and pinpoint the seminal works affecting their development as translingual readers and writers. Integrating the narrative of the author, which is written as his own literacy autobiography, with a close analysis of these texts, this book: presents a case for the literacy autobiography as an archetypal genre that prepares writers for the conventions and processes required in other genres of writing; demonstrates the serious epistemological and rhetorical implications behind the genre of literacy autobiography among migrant scholars and students; effectively translates theoretical publications on language diversity for classroom purposes, providing a transferable teaching approach to translingual writing; analyzes the tropes of transnational writers and their craft in "meshing" translingual resources in their writing; demonstrates how transnationalism and translingualism are interconnected, guiding readers toward an understanding of codemeshing not as a cosmetic addition to texts but motivated toward resolving inescapable personal and social dilemmas. Written and edited by one of the most highly regarded linguists of his generation, this book is key reading for scholars and students of applied linguistics, TESOL, and literacy studies, as well as tutors of writing and composition worldwide.

The literacy autobiography is a personal narrative reflecting on how one’s experiences of spoken and written words have contributed to their ongoing relationship with language and literacy. Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing is a cutting-edge study of this engaging genre of writing in academic and professional contexts. In this state-of-the-art collection, Suresh Canagarajah brings together 11 samples of writing by students that both document their literary journeys and pinpoint the seminal works affecting their development as translingual readers and writers. Integrating the narrative of the author, which is written as his own literacy autobiography, with a close analysis of these texts, this book: presents a case for the literacy autobiography as an archetypal genre that prepares writers for the conventions and processes required in other genres of writing; demonstrates the serious epistemological and rhetorical implications behind the genre of literacy autobiography among migrant scholars and students; effectively translates theoretical publications on language diversity for classroom purposes, providing a transferable teaching approach to translingual writing; analyzes the tropes of transnational writers and their craft in "meshing" translingual resources in their writing; demonstrates how transnationalism and translingualism are interconnected, guiding readers toward an understanding of codemeshing not as a cosmetic addition to texts but motivated toward resolving inescapable personal and social dilemmas. Written and edited by one of the most highly regarded linguists of his generation, this book is key reading for scholars and students of applied linguistics, TESOL, and literacy studies, as well as tutors of writing and composition worldwide.

Winner of the AAAL Book Award 2015Winner of the Modern Language Association's Thirty-Third Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize Winner of the BAAL Book Prize 2014Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations introduces a new way of looking at the use of English within a global context. Challenging traditional approaches in second language acquisition and English language teaching, this book incorporates recent advances in multilingual studies, sociolinguistics, and new literacy studies to articulate a new perspective on this area. Canagarajah argues that multilinguals merge their own languages and values into English, which opens up various negotiation strategies that help them decode other unique varieties of English and construct new norms. Incisive and groundbreaking, this will be essential reading for anyone interested in multilingualism, world Englishes and intercultural communication.

Winner of the AAAL Book Award 2015Winner of the Modern Language Association's Thirty-Third Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize Winner of the BAAL Book Prize 2014Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations introduces a new way of looking at the use of English within a global context. Challenging traditional approaches in second language acquisition and English language teaching, this book incorporates recent advances in multilingual studies, sociolinguistics, and new literacy studies to articulate a new perspective on this area. Canagarajah argues that multilinguals merge their own languages and values into English, which opens up various negotiation strategies that help them decode other unique varieties of English and construct new norms. Incisive and groundbreaking, this will be essential reading for anyone interested in multilingualism, world Englishes and intercultural communication.

Most American students are expected to master standardized American English if they wish to succeed. This volume seeks to realign these conceptions through a series of provocative essays that explore enacted beliefs in the integrity of the many languages of the classroom and community.