Tackling Diversity through First-Year Composition

Abstract

Since the early 1970s, the field of Rhetoric and Composition has recognized that the diverse classrooms require more dynamic approaches instead of those that are solely concentrating on assessing students against Standard English language acquisition. First-year composition classrooms are not linguistically homogeneous; on-going disciplinary discussions have sought to re-imagine what it means to teach students to write when English is not standard for everyone. The most recent of these re-imaginings calls for a curriculum driven by the “translingual approach” to teaching Composition.