Observing Students’ Everyday Literacies Through a Translingual Lens

This presentation aims to answer calls from Matsuda (2014) and Canagarajah and Dovchin (2019) to highlight the everyday literacies of multilingual writers. Blommaert and Horner (2017) describe that by viewing literacy in regards to its space, we can see how practices that move across languages are not in opposition to a monolingual standard. I use screen recordings, recorded conversations, classroom observations, and literacy portraits all demonstrate normal language use across various spaces and time and language. I will describe observational research of multilingual writers and speakers literacy practices to describe how tools, like dictionaries, are not neutral and are imbued with feelings and past histories. If writing teachers of multilingual students choose to leave the tools that students are using for translation as a black box, they are ignoring the holistic process of how multilingual students write papers. This presentation will detail observational data of multilingual writers and speakers in order to suggest practical classroom applications that transcend boundaries between languages and countries. Specifically, this presentation suggests that writing instructors may incorporate translingual lenses into the way they view their multilingual students’ writing processes by asking their students to observe and record the tools and languages in their own writing processes. In addition, this presentation suggests how teachers may use screen recordings to gain further details on their students’ writing processes.