Community and Language Awareness
"A Lesson For Fostering Critical Language Awareness in First-Year Composition" (Sophia Minnillo)
Despite scholarship underscoring the importance of interrogating hegemonic language practices in the First Year Composition (FYC) classroom (e.g., Shapiro, 2022), instructors have been reluctant to promote Critical Language Awareness (CLA) in their classes. When instructors, through their status as literacy brokers (Lillis & Curry, 2006), convey that “standard” English is the only acceptable language variety for use in the university, students are more likely to perpetuate standard language ideologies that support linguistic injustice and often contribute to their own marginalization (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Alternatively, FYC classes can support the whole student when instructors value and encourage language diversity.
This presentation will describe how I employ CLA pedagogy during a lesson in a FYC course. The lesson contributes to students achieving two learning outcomes: (1) demonstrating CLA and (2) practicing metacognition. Before class, students read excerpts from two texts that foreground translingual practice (Anzaldúa, 1987; Sánchez-Martín, 2021). This prompts class discussion about linguistic discrimination and language difference, which is furthered through watching a multilingualism-focused TED Talk (Leung, 2018). Students then collaboratively define key terms and apply these terms to describe their languaging practices. Later in the lesson, students analyze a model text and brainstorm how they can use techniques from the examples in their own translingual practice. Finally, they engage in translanguaging and present their compositions to a partner, explaining the rhetorical choices they made while translanguaging.
I will conclude the presentation by highlighting excerpts from students’ translingual compositions that demonstrate how the lesson contributed to their CLA and metacognition development. I will also offer strategies to engage students who are more reluctant about translanguaging and propose ideas for implementing the lesson in courses with different areas of focus.
"Discourse Community Manual and Infographic Assignment" (Andrew Yim)
In this proposed talk, the presenter will talk about an activity that teachers can run where students are tasked to research one discourse community (e.g. college club, job, volunteer organization) that they have never joined or recently became a member of. They need to identify the 5 elements of the organization including 1. goals 2. membership process 3. utilization of specialized language 4. purpose of the tools and technologies used for communication 5. determining if any of the tools and technologies are effective genres (textual responses to a recurring situation that is recognized by all group members). To collect data, they will first interview one member who has been in the organization for at least a month. Furthermore, they will examine publicly accessible documents and websites alongside directly observing how members in the community interact with each other. Using this data, they will write a 600–800-word essay along with a 150–200-word infographic. In their essay, they will discuss why they chose their community and how they collected their data and analyzed it. For their infographic, they will visually outline what are the 5 elements of their community. Students must decide where and with whom they will share these documents; they can help non-members learn more about the organization and aid members in evaluating if their organization is effectively meeting the criteria of a discourse community.