Living English work.

Keeping in mind the Chinese character-combination yuyan, with its multiple meanings of language, parts of language, the processes of language, and the products of those processes, the author depicts English as kept alive by many people and by many different ways of using it in a wide range of personal, social, and historical contexts. She proposes four lines of inquiry “against the grain” of English-only instruction—that living-English users weigh what English can do for them against what it has done to them; that they weigh what English can do against what it cannot do; that they understand English as being in the hands of all its users; and that they focus energy on how to tinker with the very standardized usages they are pressured to “imitate”—and discusses the implications of those lines of inquiry for composition in the United States

Redefining the legacy of Mina Shaughnessy : a critique of the politics of linguistic innocence.

This article examines Mina Shaughnessy\u27s Errors and Expectations in light of current discourse theories which posit language as a site of struggle among competing discourses. It finds Shaughnessy\u27s analyses and recommended pedagogies dominated by a view of language as a politically innocent vehicle of meaning. The author argues that this view of language leads Shaughnessy to overlook basic writers\u27 need to confront the dissonance they experience between academic and other discourses, which might undercut her goal of helping students achieve the freedom of deciding how and when and where to use which language. The author further argues that to pursue Shaughnessy\u27s goal of countering unequal social conditions through education, we need to abandon the limitations of the essentialist view of language informing our pedagogy

Composing in a global-local context : careers, mobility, skills.

When composition students look to their teachers for vocational guidance, both groups should acknowledge that the contexts of such terms as career, mobility, and skills have radically changed. In particular, the economy now links the global with the local, and capitalism has shifted from the fordist model, dominant through much of the twentieth century, to a newer, “fast” model

Introduction : translingual work.

This issue both reflects and builds on the efforts prompted by the 2011 College English essay “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach,” by Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur. Contributions to this symposium contextualize the emergence of a translingual approach, explore the tension and interconnections between a translingual approach and a variety of fields, and explore the viability of a translingual approach in light of existing academic structures

Working rhetoric and composition.

Given the multiple meanings of rhetoric and composition, as well as the vexed history of institutional relationships between these two terms, it is important for scholars to trace how they are “worked”—that is, how they materially function—in a variety of specific circumstances