Modern Languages Commons^™

Undergirding Writing Centers' Responses To The Neoliberal Academy, Randall W. Monty

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Writing centers are at once a part of and a response to the neoliberal academy, a phenomenon that Ryan King-White describes as a place where, “students have come to be regarded as customers, academic researchers are thought of as entrepreneurs competing for external grant funding, and the university itself more closely resembles a business model than an institute of higher learning” (223). Using that as a starting point, this essay functions part historiography, part diagnosis, and part synthesis, with three main goals: (1) redefine “neoliberalism” as a framework of critique for contemporary higher education within the United States, (2) diagnose …

Derecho Comparado Para Abogados Anglo- E Hispanoparlantes: Culturas Jurídicas, Términos Jurídicos Y Prácticas Jurídicas [S. I. Strong, Katia Fach Gómez & Laura Carballo Piñeiro. Comparative Law For Spanish-English Speaking Lawyers: Legal Cultures, Legal Terms And Legal Practices], Gabriel Gonzalez Nunez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Con más de 700 páginas, este libro es extenso y tiene un título que coincide con su extensión: Comparative Law fo Spanish-English Speaking Lawyers: Legal Cultures, Legal Terms and Legal Practices / Derecho comparado para abogados anglo- e hispanoparlantes: culturas jurídicas, términos jurídicos y prácticas jurídicas. Tanto el título como el subtítulo contienen gran cantidad de información. Con solo echar un vistazo a la portada, se le informa al lector del tema general del libro (el derecho comparado), la audiencia (abogados anglo e hispanoparlantes), el énfasis (culturas jurídicas, términos jurídicos y prácticas jurídicas) y su carácter único (está escrito en …

El Francés Como Desafío Plurilingüistico En El Contexto Educativo De México, Khalid Aada

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Las políticas lingüísticas en México– tanto a nivel regional como nacional – carecen de claridad suficiente, y el francés ocupa un lugar insignificante o incluso inexistente debido a que cada Estado de la República adopta sus propias iniciativas de política lingüística, y donde la decisión sobre el aprendizaje del idioma extranjero se deja a cargo de cada institución, que tiende a tomar decisiones basadas sobre las demandas de su entorno y no sobre los principios del plurilingüismo y el pluriculturalismo (Silva, 2011)

Evaluación De Programas De Lengua: Perspectivas Profesionales E Investigadoras, Julio Ciller, Ramsés Ortín

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

The purpose of this article is to advocate for the use of ongoing evaluative processes at the programmatic level in order to ensure language program quality and worth. After a thorough review of the field of language program evaluation, we argue that the benefits of evaluation cannot but strengthen the relationship between an academic program and stakeholders’ needs (students, teachers, community). We propose the use of the CEA standards as a guide for any evaluative effort in foreign language programs while designing context-specific tools to address the needs of each program. Finally, we aim to promote the development and dissemination …

Transfer Of Variable Grammars In Third Language Acquisition, Ramsés Ortín, Carmen Fernandez-Florez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Research on linguistic variation suggests that usage patterns are deeply embedded in native and non-native speakers’ knowledge of grammar. This study explores the transfer of these variable sociolinguistic patterns at the initial stages of third language acquisition. We elicited narratives in Portuguese from two mirror-image groups of sequential Spanish-English bilingual early learners of Portuguese. Their production of variable subject pronoun expression was analysed. When comparing the two groups with regards to the linguistic factors that constrain subject pronoun expression, evidence of transfer from Spanish and not from English is consistent for both groups. We conclude that variable linguistic information is …

Traducir En Pro De La Educación Del Pueblo: La Labor Traductora De La Sociedad De Amigos De La Educación Popular, Gabriel Gonzalez Nunez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Este trabajo pone en relieve una labor desempeñada por la Sociedad de Amigos de la Educación Popular (SAEP) que, si bien no es desconocida, tampoco ha recibido suficiente atención por parte de historiadores y académicos. Se trata de los esfuerzos traductores desplegados por los integrantes de la SAEP en su celo por introducir en el Estado Oriental del Uruguay nuevas e innovadoras ideas en cuanto a la educación y su función social. El trabajo contextualiza esta labor dentro del papel histórico de la traducción en el continente americano, para luego dar paso la descripción de los esfuerzos traductores llevados a …

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 …

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 …

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; …

“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 …

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.

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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.

A Contrastive Analysis Of Dar ‘Give’ In English And Brazilian Portuguese: Semantic-Syntactic Relationships And Implications For L2 Instruction, Katherine Christoffersen

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

In recent years, research on multiword lexical units has influenced second language acquisition research, but little work has been done on light verbs, especially comparing the use of light verbs in English and Brazilian Portuguese. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the syntactic and semantic aspects of dar and ‘give’ through the semantic continuum, event type, denominal verbs and incorporation. This study finds that distinct and varied semantic uses of light verbs present a unique challenge to second language learners in terms of both their understanding and their production. Furthermore, this study analyzes the semantic-syntactic interrelationships and suggests implications …

On Attitudes Toward Spanish Varieties: A Bilingual Perspective, Julio F. C. Ciller, Carmen F. Florez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

This study explores the attitudes of 25 English-Spanish bilingual speakers from Tucson (Arizona) towards their own variety and compares them with their attitudes toward monolingual varieties of Mexican (from Hermosillo) and Peninsular Spanish (from Murcia and Madrid). Our analysis points to a clear influence of the standard language ideology (MILROY, 2001) on shaping these attitudes, escalated by a tendency among bilinguals in diglossic societies to feel insecure about their own variety as a minority language, or towards a feeling of linguistic self-hatred.

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Este estudo explora as atitudes de 25 falantes bilíngues de espanhol e inglês de Tucson (Arizona) com …

Audio Description Washes Brighter? A Study In Brand Names And Advertising, Jose M. Davila-Montes, Pilar Orero

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Dealing with objects in audio description, and particularly with those objects that have a clear designer imprint or branding, is a complex matter when a brand name is part of the scene in a film. Deciding whether to describe or not, and how, becomes more than a technical matter that depends on text–image synchronization: it is a complex decision-making process comparable to other forms of audiovisual translation that needs to be approached as a paradigmatic example of intersemiotic translation. Dávila-Montes and Orero address the audio description of branded objects in movies, and their intersemiotic translation from images to spoken words, …

On Translation Policy, Gabriel Gonzalez Nunez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

The term translation policy has become problematic for the field of Translation Studies because it has meant so many things to so many authors that it threatens to lose some of its efficacy (see Meylaerts 2011a, 163–166). In light of this, the concept of translation policy should be developed so that it will be broad enough to account for diverse phenomena in different places with multiple agents, while retaining specific parameters that make the concept methodologically useful. This article will consider insights from Translation Studies and from other fields, especially from the field of Language Policy, in order to …

Translation Policy In A Linguistically Diverse World, Gabriel Gonzalez Nunez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

In Europe, policy approaches toward old minority languages (i.e., ‘regional’ minority languages) and new minority languages (i.e., ‘immigrant’ languages) are different. This is seen in language policy throughout much of the continent. And yet this distinction between speakers who belong to old minorities and those who belong to new minorities can be questioned, or at least the existence of distinct policy approaches for both groups when dealing with their languages. This paper will argue that if the ultimate goal of social policies – such as language and translations policies – is to bring about a more inclusive state, it may …

Dominant Discourses And Language Socialization In The Literacy Practices Of A Spanish-Speaking Church, Katherine Christoffersen

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Over the years, research has investigated language in communities, schools and homes, community programs and to a lesser degree research investigates language use in religious communities. In particular, there is a lack of research on religious language and literacy practices in Hispanic communities, especially those in the United States, although incipient work has revealed the importance of religious literacy among women Mexican immigrants (Farr, 2000) and for the socialization of children into a Mexican identity (Baquedano-López, 1997). Given the hostile local sociopolitical environment of Spanish in the state of Arizona in the Southwestern United States, the church is one of …

Carving Characters In The Mind. A Theoretical Approach To The Reception Of Characters In Audio Described Films, Nazaret Fresno

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

From early childhood on we are exposed to characters in books, cartoons, films, theatre plays, and video games. Through these media we enter fascinating fictional worlds that seduce our imagination with every page or scene. As the events unfold, we become captivated by the story and its protagonists, whose deeper feelings are outlined in a succession of words and/ or images that the audience needs to endow with meaning. In their search for comprehension, readers and spectators “picture” the situations described in their minds by creating multimodal representations (mental models) about the events taking place, the place and time in …