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Contesting the monolingualist assumptions in composition, this article identifies textual and pedagogical spaces for World Englishes in academic writing. It presents code meshing as a strategy for merging local varieties with Standard Written English in a move toward gradually pluralizing academic writing and developing multilingual competence for transnational relationships.
"The task, as we see it, is to develop an internationalist perspective capable of understanding the study and teaching of written English in relation to other languages and to the dynamics of globalization. At a point when many North Americans hold it self-evident that English is already or about to be the global lingua franca, we need to ask some serious questions about the underlying sense of inevitability in this belief-and about whose English and whose interests it serves"
-Horner and Trimbur 624.
In their award-winning essay "English Only and U.S. College Composition," Bruce Horner and John Trimbur trace the pedagogical and cultural developments that have led to the conception of English writing in the United States as a unidirectional and monolingual acquisition of literate competence. While these assumptions have been motivated by the modernist ideology of "one language/one nation," the authors envision that postmodern globalization may require us to develop in our students a multilingual and polyliterate orientation to writing. They outline the shifts in curriculum, policy, and research that will promote such a broadened pedagogical orientation in the future. However, as a teacher of writing for ESL and multilingual students, I am left with the question: what can I do to promote this pedagogical vision in my classroom now? I am concerned about the implications of this policy change for the texts produced by students in my current writing courses. Though the policy changes Horner and Trimbur advocate are admittedly "long term ideals" (623), teachers don't have to wait till these policies trickle down to classrooms. They have some relative autonomy to develop textual practices that challenge dominant conventions and norms before policies are programmatically implemented from the macro-level by institutions (see Canagarajah, Resisting Linguistic Imperialism). The classroom is a powerful site of policy negotiation. The pedagogies practiced and texts produced in the classroom can reconstruct policies ground up. In fact, the classroom is already a policy site; every time teachers insist on...