Modern Languages Commons^™

Critical Race Theory And Caring As Channels For Transcending Borders Between An African American Professor And Her Latina/O Students, Jacqueline B. Koonce

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

This reflective essay uncovers ways in which critical race theory and caring are key to crossing racial, cultural, and linguistic borders between professors and their students. Many scholars have noted how critical reflection relates to effective teaching, especially when taking into account student learning. Reflecting upon archival data and participant observation, the author describes, through various stories, how she uses critical race theory and caring to connect with her students in spite of their differences. The author also provides examples of how her students reciprocate her care in extravagant ways.

No Language Policy Without Translation Policy: A Comparison Of Flanders And Wales, Reine Meylaerts, Gabriel González Núñez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

A major challenge for authorities in the modern world is the linguistic integration of minorities. In this context, language policies play a key role as authorities are increasingly faced with the challenge of adjusting their language policies in order to secure the linguistic rights and thus the integration of their multilingual populations. In multilingual democracies, these language policies must include choices about the use or non-use of translation. These choices, when they are systematic, become policies of their own in terms of translation. Thus, translation policies arise in part as a consequence of language policies, and there can be no …

Traducciones Para Y Por Los Españoles Americanos: El Papel De Los Traductores En La Independencia De Hispanoamericana / Translation For And By Spanish Americans: Translators’ Role During Spanish America’S Struggle For Independence, Gabriel Gonzalez Nunez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

As is well known, political independence in the Americas was gained through a long, violent process in which colonies broke away from their colonial centers. Different revolutionaries, patriots, and liberators acted within their immediate colonial context; nonetheless, a shared trove of ideas existed in all of the Americas which helped, above all, to justify their actions. These ideas (largely emanating from Europe’s Enlightenment and in the Americas originally practiced in England’s former North American colonies) spread throughout the region, in part, thanks to the efforts of several translators. These were men who traveled to different places for different reasons. In …

Crossing Linguistic Borders: Teaching Writing Skills In Two Languages To Translators-In-Training, Gabriel Gonzalez Nunez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

This paper argues that linguistic borders are cultural borders without sharp lines of demarcation. They become a middle space where cultural and linguistic elements from two different cultures meld into an interculture. One of the traits of this interculture as found in Brownsville, Texas, is a high incidence of natural bilingualism. A number of naturally bilingual students walk into translation classes at UTRGV. They have a basic building block for becoming translators, which is their ability to switch back and forth between languages. Other important translator competences include the ability to write professionally in at least two languages. This ability …

Finding Home In Memory: Stories Of Immigration, Diaspora And Dis/Location, Miryam Espinosa-Dulanto

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Review Of Conceding Composition: A Crooked History Of Composition's Institutional Fortunes, Andrew Hollinger

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Compositionists (a community in which I include myself) often work with a chip on our shoulders. Perhaps we find the chip during grad school or when we are asked to teach an overload or when a literature professor’s summer course does not make and they demand a section of first year writing instead or because so many of us remain contingent faculty. Whenever and however the chip appeared, many of us have felt or discussed its presence: we, and our courses, are the misunderstood and much maligned. In fact, this is “the field’s conventional historical narrative, [that] composition is marginalized …

Javier Sicilia: Advocate Of Deliberative Democracy In The Americas, Lyon Rathbun

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

When Javier Sicilia’s son was killed by cartel assassins in 2011, he transformed into a civic activist, with a mass following sufficiently large for Time Magazine to recognize him in 2011 as one of its “Protestors of the Year.” His very success mobilizing public opinion against cartel violence overshadows his more fundamental role as an advocate for deliberative democracy in the Americas. Sicilia’s historical importance lies in his recognition that only civic dialogue within the transnational public sphere that includes Mexico and the United States can heal the social pathologies unleashed by globalization and by the war on drugs. His …

What Is Teacher Agency?, Alcione N. Ostorga

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Advancing A Transnational, Transdisciplinary And Translingual Framework: A Professional Development Series For Teaching Assistants In Writing And Spanish Programs, Alyssa G. Cavazos, Marcela Hebbard, José Esteban Hernández, Crystal Rodriguez, Geoffrey Schwarz

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Considering the need for writing and language programs to develop translingual and transdisciplinary pedagogies for teacher development at the graduate level (Canagarajah, 2016; Williams & Rodrigue, 2016), the authors examine the design of a multilingual pedagogy professional development series for first-year Spanish and Writing teaching assistants (TAs). As designers of and participants in the series, the authors explore the benefits and challenges inherent in transdisciplinary and translingual conversations and discuss implications for teaching and research in language and writing instruction and teacher development. In order to advance transdisciplinary and translingual approaches as a new normal in composition studies (Tardy 2017; …

Abrazando Nopales—Prickly Embrace: Undocumented Women’S Life Stories/Poetic Performance Narratives, Miryam Espinosa-Dulanto

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

I chose poetic performance narratives to create a provocative piece offering a glimpse of the reality, tragedies, dreams, and hopes lived daily by more than 12 million people in the United States. These individuals are reported as unauthorized, undocumented immigrants by the U.S. Census Bureau. These specific stories were shared and collected ethnographically on the agricultural fields of the South East of the United States. My goal is to have “captured” readers to be seduced into the “uncomfortable” world of undocumented people and have the poems/performance narratives become not only representation of the events but, as Renato Rosaldo said, “the …

“You Live In The United States, You Speak English,” Decían Las Maestras How New Mexican Spanish Speakers Enact, Ascribe, And Reject Ethnic Identities, Katherine Christoffersen, Naomi L. Shin

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

New Mexico’s unique linguistic and ethnic heritage is the result of a complex history of colonization characterized by oppression. This chapter examines how, in this context of oppression, New Mexican Spanish speakers negotiate ethnic identities through bilingual talk-in-interaction. The study takes an ethnomethodological approach to identity as something that people ‘do’ (Widdicombe, 1998) and analyzes how New Mexican Spanish speakers ‘do’ ethnic identities. The present analysis is based on a subset of the New Mexico and Colorado Spanish Survey (Vigil & Bills, 2000), including 30 fully transcribed audio-recordings of semi-structured interviews with New Mexican Spanish speakers. A positioning analysis of …

Latino Youth’S Out-Of-School Math And Science Experiences: Impact On Teacher Candidates, Maria E. Diaz, Kathy Bussert-Webb

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

This qualitative study examines the learning and interaction processes between Latino/a teacher candidates (TCs) and youth during a community service-learning program involving science and math. Knowing and affirming nondominant youth‟s strengths are essential from funds of knowledge and Third Space perspectives. Participants were 11 TCs and their tutees, 30 youth in first through tenth grades. The study took place in a Texas border colonia, or unincorporated settlement lacking basic services. Data sources were participant observations, youth‟s interviews and TCs‟ pre- and final reflections, rapport- building analyses, a focus group, and lesson plans. We found TCs incorporated the youth‟s funds to …

Multimodal Pedagogical Approaches To Public Writing: Digital Media Advocacy And Mundane Texts, Sarah Warren-Riley, Elise Verzosa Hurley

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

With the proliferation of digital media and other forms of technologically mediated communication, this article argues that critical multimodal pedagogical approaches to public writing—particularly through interrogating mundane, everyday texts—have the potential to engage students with advocacy and its role in shaping public discourse. In this article, we propose a pedagogy that views multimodal composition as advocacy. Because all texts are embedded with advocacy, encouraging students to recognize their own advocacy practices, and teaching them to carefully approach how they construct texts, we argue, may better prepare our students to be more social-justice minded public writers and rhetors in the future.

A Novice Bilingual Teacher’S Journey: Teacher’S Noticing As A Pathway To Negotiate Contradictory Teaching Discourses, Sandra I. Musanti

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

This qualitative case study investigates a fourth grade novice bilingual teacher’s repertoire of practice during her first year of teaching. Drawing on recent work on teacher noticing, the study explores how the teacher negotiates prevailing bilingual education discourses. Two themes are discussed: how this novice teacher embraced bilingual teaching while questioning practices and policies and how she negotiated contradictions through multiple attempts to redefine her teaching practices. Findings show how the teacher’s ability to notice framed her possibility to bridge her understandings about teaching, her critical pedagogical discourse, and the contextual contradictory discourses predominant in her school about bilingual education.

Beyond Us-Centered Multicultural Foundations On Race, James C. Jupp, Miryam Espinosa-Dulanto

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

Our conceptual essay begins with the recognition of the U.S. racialized tragedy and embattled discussions on race. Within this tragedy and embattled discussion, we attempt to renew and reinvigorate authentic, dialogic, and vulnerable exchanges on race. With this focus, we critique yet further advance multicultural foundations’ notions of racial identity predominant in the academy and in broader national discussions on race. Critiquing yet advancing multicultural foundations, we emphasize conceptual content from five books on race and power by Cornel West. Working through West’s conceptual content, we emphasize complex and historicized identifications and relationalities as key concepts in the present moment.

Translation As A Rhetoric Of Meaning, Jose M. Davila-Montes

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

From early romanticism to more recent post-structuralist and post-colonial studies, all the possibilities and impossibilities that are inherent in translation have fueled debate about authorship, intent, readership, functional equivalence, world view, the building of national literatures, power differentials, ethics, and gender issues—among many others. And, of course, about the nature of “meaning,” as the alleged sole legal tender of “all things translation.” Translation has less often been scrutinized as a form of rhetorical transaction: fundamentally, all translations are attempts, in and of themselves, to persuade their readership about some degree of correspondence with their source. However, the relationship between Translation …

Beginning From The Border, Kip Austin Hinton

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

Abstract

In this essay, Educational Borderlands: A Bilingual Journal (EBBJ) is introduced in relation to borderlands, in South Texas and beyond. The journal’s purpose is explained, beginning with its inception as part of the bilingual mission at a majority Mexican American university, then placed within educational, political, and linguistic contexts. Each of EBBJ’s threads is situated in relation to hybridity, intersectionality, bilingualism, translanguaging, transnationalism, and the border itself. The journal seeks to apply these to the study of curriculum, instruction, special education, dual language bilingual education, and research across various interdisciplinary fields.

Resumen

En este ensayo, Educational Borderlands: A Bilingual …

Critical Mirrors: Diverse College Students' Perspectives On Stereotypes Depicted In Popular Films About College Life, Elena M. Venegas, Lakia M. Scott, Karon N. Lecompte, Toby Zhu, Mia Moody-Ramirez

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

This qualitative study explored diverse college students’ perspectives on the portrayal of college life in recent popular films. Results from this study suggest that White college students dismiss stereotypes as comedic satire whereas their non-White peers readily identify the influence of negative media representations upon their academic and ethnic identities. These findings exemplify the need to promote positive representations of college students from racially and culturally diverse backgrounds. Findings suggest the need for Critical Media Literacy education to help young adults dismantle stereotypes in mainstream society while developing cultural competence.

Law And Translation At The U.S.-Mexico Border: Translation Policy In A Diglossic Setting, Gabriel González Núñez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Language regimes adopted by states can favour one group over all the others in a way that undermines minority groups. In essence, when multilingual societies are administered through a one-language regime, inequalities arise. This growing understanding has led States to come up with varying solutions, which in turn create a wide array of language policies. One aspect that all these policies have in common is that they involve choices about translation. Hoping to contribute to our understanding of such translation policies, this chapter describes translation policies as found in the judiciary and local government in Brownsville, Texas, USA. This can …

The (Un)Hero In The American West: Reexamining The Male/Female Binary Of Nineteenth Century Travel Diaries, Monica Reyes

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Roles Of Digital Literacies And Critical Literacy For Black Adolescent Females, Jacqueline B. Koonce

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

The purpose of this conceptual thought paper is to argue for critical digital literacies instruction for all students, particularly students from marginalized populations. In this paper, the lived experiences of Black adolescent female avid readers were analyzed because of the complex nature of their discrimination due to their race and gender. Research questions included: What are the technologies and practices used by Black adolescent female avid readers? How and why do they use them? What are the implications for educators? To answer these questions, the voices of Black adolescent female readers from this author’s previous study were used to explore …

Positional Verbs In Colonial Valley Zapotec, John Foreman, Brooke D. Lillehaugen

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

This paper describes the system of positional verbs (e.g., ‘be standing’ and ‘be lying’) in Colonial Valley Zapotec (CVZ), a historical form of Valley Zapotec preserved in archival documents written during the Mexican colonial period. We provide data showing that positional verbs in CVZ have unique morphological properties and participate in a defined set of syntactic constructions, showing that positional verbs formed a formal class of verbs in Valley Zapotec as early as the mid-1500s. This work contributes to the typological literature on positional verbs, demonstrating the type of morphosyntactic work that can be done with a corpus of CVZ …

Oooh, It’S Sooo Good!!!: Black Adolescent Females Experiencing The Delicacy Of Reading, Jacqueline B. Koonce

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

Black adolescent females have largely been neglected in the research literature on their avid reading. While Gibson (2010) explained that Black girls are often portrayed in the literature as struggling and even “remedial” readers, those Black adolescent females who are avid readers receive even less attention. The purpose of this study, then, was to investigate the voracious reading proclivities of this population in order to provide a balanced view of Black adolescent females’ reading lives. The findings of this phenomenological study indicate that these five participants go beyond loving reading; they crave it. The meaning of reading for these participants …

Promising Digital Practices For Nondominant Learners, Kathy Bussert-Webb, Laurie A. Henry

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

This case study took place during an after-school program in a public Texas school district along the U.S./Mexico border. We explore a focal participant’s technology access and use as part of our larger digital literacy research. We asked: What in- and out-of-school digital literacy skills, access, and experiences did Robot Boy (pseudonym) possess? How did he behave as a rhizome? Overarching theoretical frameworks were postmodernism and New Literacy Studies; within these theories, we focused on rhizomic principles and digital literacies. This research is part of a larger mixed methods research study (Bussert-Webb & Henry, 2016) focused on an exploration of …

Approaching Engagement In Audio Description, Nazaret Fresno

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Humans’ attraction to fiction is believed to respond to a search for pleasure, entertainment or enjoyment. Readers and film viewers engage with books and movies to participate in an experience that will provide some kind of gratification. However, the mechanisms that lead to engagement with written and audiovisual narratives are highly complex and not yet fully understood.

This paper constitutes a theoretical approach to engagement in audio description. Drawing on literature from Psychology and Media Studies, it will be argued that engagement is facilitated by comprehension and immersion. An insight on these intricate mental processes will be provided by dwelling …

Comparing Native Speaker Ratings And Quantitative Measures Of Oral Proficiency In Ielts Interviews, Katherine Christoffersen

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Research on second language acquisition has used various quantitative and qualitative measures to assess oral proficiency, yet there is little empirical research comparing these measures. Comparisons between quantitative measures and native speaker ratings are especially rare. Four of the most common quantitative measurements applied in L2 research include the type-token ratio as a measure of lexical diversity; the T-unit as a measure of syntactic complexity; the error-free t-unit as a measure of grammatical accuracy; and average speech rate as a measure of fluency. The present study compares these four quantitative measures of oral proficiency and one qualitative measure of oral …

What Students Do With Words: Language Use And Communicative Function In Full And Partial Immersion Classrooms, Katherine Christoffersen

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Over the past 35 years, language immersion programs have been steadily increasing in number throughout the U.S. The popularity of these diverse, linguistically complex educational programs has led to a rather extensive body of research on language immersion and dual language contexts. Research, however, has thus far focused primarily on the quantification of language use (the amount of target language versus first language use) in different settings and with different interlocutors. Very few studies have probed the interesting and significant sociolinguistic question of what students ‘do’ with languages in the classroom. The present study fills this research gap by investigating …

You’Re Going To Need This For College, Andrew Hollinger

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

When I first heard a teacher say, “You’re going to need this for college,” I was a high school student. I heard the phrase again when I began teaching 10th grade English, and I wondered, as a first-year teacher, whether that was the teacher version of “Because I said so,” or if, more tragically, it was what teachers said in response to the often asked, “Why do I have to learn this?” when they didn’t really know the answer. The teachers I worked with, however, were very smart and some of the most student-centered educators I’ve ever known, so it’s …

Developing Academic Literacy: What Novice Teachers Can Learn From The Case Of Teaching Latino/Bilingual Learners Science And Mathematics, Sandra I. Musanti, Sandra Mercuri

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Opening The Door For Cross-Disciplinary Literacy: Doing History And Writing In A High School To University Collaboration, Beatrice Mendez Newman, Penny Rosas

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Drawing on the work of Denstaedt, Roop, and Best (NCTE), the authors devise and coteach an interdisciplinary unit based on proslavery and abolitionist primary documents to guide students in doing history and doing writing.