Week 11: Executive Summary

“Toward a Writing Pedagogy of Shuttling between Languages: Learning from Multilingual Writers” by A. Suresh Canagarajah

            Canagarajah is calling for writing teachers to take new approaches in multilingual writing with three models: the inference mode, the correlationist model, and the negotiation model.  With the inference model, “if [the teacher] sees a particular tone, style, organization, or discourse, many teachers instinctively turn to the first language (L1) or ‘native’ culture (C1) of the writer for an explanation” (589).  With the correlationist model, “[the teachers] study the texts in L1 descriptively before they draw on this information to explain the writer’s peculiararities in L2” (589-590).  The negotiation model, “is different from the first two in many respects: rather than studying multilingual writing as static, locating the writer within a language, we would study movement of the writer between languages; rather than studying the product for descriptions of writing competence, we would study the process of composing in multiple languages; rather than studying the writer’s stability in specific forms of linguistic or cultural competence, we would analyze his or her versatility; rather than treating language or culture as the main variable, we would focus more on the changing contexts of communication; rather than treating writers as passive, we would treat them as agentive” (590-591).