Elena: You had a very interesting presentation at the Symposium on Second Language Writing in Vancouver—both in format and content. During this presentation, which you organized as a dialog, you discussed two dominant trends that, from your perspective, seem to be affecting the field of second language writing: translingualism and written corrective feedback. Could you briefly tell our readers how the idea to create such a dialogue was born?

Christine Tardy, professor of English, University of Arizona

Christine: I think it arose out of numerous conversations that we’d had over the past few years, just musing about the field, the Journal of Second Language Writing (JSLW), and various conferences. Research on written corrective feedback (WCF) has played a pretty prominent role in publications for a while, and translingualism had started to play a role in the relationship between second language writing (SLW) and composition studies. We were interested in how these two areas of work were so different yet both impacting the field (albeit in distinct ways). We wanted to share these ideas as a dialogue, rather than an article, because we thought a dialogue had more potential for showing the complexities. Traditional scholarly articles and conference presentations tend to represent ideas in a unified and conclusive manner. We hoped a dialogue could better capture the struggles and uncertainties in our conversations and also represent the ideas as a conversation, an exchange of ideas that build off each other.

Elena: In your presentation, you both mentioned that you worry about the future of the field of SLW. What are particularly your worries?

Christine: Speaking for myself, I think my worries are more tied to the U.S. context and the role that SLW can play in the teaching of writing in higher education, which of course is just one part of the larger field. I worry that the attention to translingualism in composition studies may displace the role of SLW teachers and scholarship in composition studies. I think there is room for both, but I fear that SLW—which is rooted in scholarship that is less familiar to many people in composition studies—may take (or is taking) a backseat to translingualism. SLW is certainly less represented in journals like College Composition and Communication and College English or conferences like the Conference on College Composition and Communication, compared with translingualism. Our 2015 open letter (Atkinson et al., 2015) was written because of this concern. We had seen and heard about numerous academic jobs asking for specialists in translingualism to direct second language writing courses in writing programs. Just to clarify, I agree with the values that underlie translingualism, and I see the role it can play in teaching writing, but translingualism has little to say about language development, which is a very important component of supporting second language writers in the classroom. I think the scholarship on multilingualism and biliteracy has been more productive in bridging attention to linguistic resources and language development (e.g., Gentil, 2018; Rinnert & Kobayashi, 2017).

Dwight Atkinson, professor of English, University of Arizona

Dwight: I am less positive about translingualism than Chris is. As expressed in the coauthored JSLW paper our symposium presentation was based on and which will hopefully appear soon, I see translingualism—and much of what passes for knowledge-making in composition studies these days—as a rather typical creation of neo-Marxist-origin "critical theory" perspectives, which are problematic in various ways: 1) They are produced purely from the top-down by academic theoreticians rather than bottom-up from students themselves; 2) They assume reductive dichotomies, especially oppressed versus oppressor, with the SLW teacher usually assigned the role of oppressor as standard language teacher; and 3) Because they are so top-down theory-based, critical theory-based approaches have little to say about the actual teaching of writing.

More generally, I worry that our rather new, rather small, and rather fragile little SLW field is in danger of being colonized by older, larger, and more powerful fields, from two main directions: 1) composition studies, which seems to want to replace SLW with translingualism, as represented by some of that field's most influential voices (e.g., Canagarajah, 2013b, 2015); and 2) cognitivist second language acquisition, which has substantially influenced the WCF movement and may be actively trying to move into new areas of research because it has lost dominance in its own right.

Christine: I think we agree that translingualism represents a kind of threat to the field. As Dwight says, we are not a big, powerful field with a long history, and in general we work at the periphery of other fields.

Elena: What do you see as the biggest problem with each of these two trends?

Christine: I am not sure if I would characterize this as a “problem” so much as a “danger,” but with WCF, I worry that its traditional focus on discrete language error is just a poor representation of writing, which is a much more complex construct. To be fair, I do not think that the scholars working in this area equate language error with “writing”; the danger is more about overrepresentation of this area of work in comparison with other areas, which may inadvertently magnify the importance of error treatment in writing. Writing entails so much that we need to always be considering how various dimensions of writing are part of a bigger picture. I suspect that we have already seen the peak of WCF scholarship though, in terms of quantity, so I’m not sure how much of a danger this really is, looking forward.

As for translingualism, my concerns are more about how it impacts our relationship with the related field of composition studies. It seems like it has created a wedge between our fields rather than helping to bridge our conversations and areas of expertise. I certainly support a more multilingual perspective within second language writing, and I think that translingualism and translanguaging have helped bring more attention to multilingualism within composition studies. However, teachers also need knowledge and tools for supporting student writers in developing their linguistic repertoires.

Dwight: I already described some of my problems with translingualism and to a lesser extent WCF, in terms of how they could impact SLW's professional survival, but let me try to problematize them both briefly from a different perspective, which is how they conceptualize writing. From what I can tell, translingualism conceptualizes writing as a kind of open-ended performance. It's how we blend and embrace all forms of language and multimodal phenomena in performing ourselves—in expressing our identities and our voices in multimodal meaning-making. It's not a big believer in linguistic form, per se—for example, "Grammar is incidental to meaning-making" (Canagarajah, 2013a, p. 147). I find this hard to accept and not very coherent—language is a symbol system, and the only way it really works as language per se is as a symbol system wherein conventional signs are assigned conventional meanings. Certainly, these finite tools are used to produce infinitely new and different meanings, and writing is fundamentally about making meaning. But to do so we must have forms.

My problem with WCF is almost the opposite: Due to its relentless focus on form, WCF effectively suggests that SLW is simply and fundamentally about form: If you get the right forms in the right order, then you automatically have good writing. I don't believe this is true. SLW, as I stated above, is about making meaning with form, not about correct form equaling or automatically expressing meaning. So, to make a long story short (too short, really, to be fully understood) both of these approaches seem to me to misrepresent, either directly or indirectly, what SLW should be about. In my opinion, SLW should be about expressing new and always personal meaning in largely preexisting, socially shared form, and teaching writing should be about helping students to learn to do this. This claim extends at least to most academic and special purposes writing, but it doesn't extend (at least to the same extent) to what is traditionally called "creative writing," which deals with altering the written conventions themselves. All writing is creative in a sense, but I think the scope for creativity, and the types of creativity encompassed in both forms of writing, are rather different, and that's not a bad thing.

Elena: Who are we as a field now? And how do you see the field in the future?

Christine: I suspect that you would get different answers to these questions from nearly every scholar! My impression from publications and conferences is that SLW is an active field with a lot going on in various parts of the world. I am a little pessimistic about our role in and relationship with composition studies, but at the same time, I think SLW is thriving as a field in multiple contexts around the world.

Dwight: I think we're at a point where we don't really know what we have in common, or if we have anything in common beyond teaching and researching people who fall under some definition of "second language writers." And if a field doesn't spend a good bit of time seriously talking together and getting to know and agree on what makes it distinctive and different from other fields, then it is open to colonization. One need go no farther for evidence of this possibility than Canagarajah's (2013b), "The End of Second Language Writing?" or colloquia or special issues that seek to unite SLW and second language acquisition.

Elena: And finally, what is something that we, SLW professionals, can do in order to help the field stay diversified and avoid the dominance of individual trends?

Christine: What a great question! I do think that journals (especially JSLW) and conferences play a big role in giving voice to diverse perspectives. As SLW professionals, though, it is also our responsibility to read broadly (and critically), to become familiar with different perspectives on and contexts of teaching L2 writing, and to be open to the various approaches that can be taken to studying and teaching L2 writing. As a field, we are teaching a pretty diverse set of learners and in a wide range of institutions and geographical areas, and we come out of a range of academic traditions around the world, so we should expect to have diversity in our scholarship. Sometimes that diversity may lead to disagreements, but that is not a bad thing. Disagreement can be very healthy in an academic field, though of course it can also lead to splintering. I am reminded of Silva’s (2005) paper on paradigms, in which he advocates for a “humble pragmatic rationalism” as a guiding paradigm to inquiry in SLW, and “humble reflecting the limits of one’s knowledge and pragmatic in the sense of a pluralistic and eclectic approach that accommodates different worldviews, assumptions, and methods in an attempt to address and solve specific problems in particular contexts” (pp. 8–9).

Dwight: I agree with Chris. I would add that I think we need to sit together, talk together, and, to some extent, agree together on what SLW actually is, at least if we hope to have a field which can grow strong and healthy and stand on its own two feet in a dangerous world. I may be exaggerating here, as I'm certainly trying to express my feelings strongly to attract further attention to these issues, but I don't think I'm just imagining.

References

Atkinson, D., Crusan, D., Matsuda, P. K., Ortmeier-Hooper, C., Ruecker, T., Simpson, S., & Tardy, C. (2015). Clarifying the relationship between L2 writing and translingual writing: An open letter to writing studies editors. College English, 77, 383–386.

Canagarajah, A. S. (2013a). Negotiating translingual literacy. In Translingual practice (pp. 127–152). New York, NY: Routledge.

Canagarajah, A. S. (2013b). The end of second language writing?Journal of Second Language Writing, 22, 440–441.

Canagarajah, A. S. (2015). Clarifying the relationship between translingual practice and L2 writing: Addressing learner identities. Applied Linguistics Review, 6, 415–440.

Gentil, G. (2018). Multilingualism as a writing resource. In J. Liontas (Series Ed.), D. Belcher, & A. Hirvela (Eds.), The TESOL encyclopedia of English language teaching (Vol. 4: Teaching reading, teaching writing). New York, NY: Wiley.

Rinnert, C., & Kobayashi, H. (2017). Multicompetence and multilingual writing. In R. Manchón & P. K. Matsuda (Eds.), The handbook of second and foreign language writing (pp. 365–366). Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter.

Silva, T. (2005). On the philosophical bases of inquiry in second language writing: Metaphysics, inquiry paradigms, and the intellectual zeitgeist. In P. K. Matsuda & T. Silva (Eds.), Second language writing research: Perspectives on the process of knowledge construction (pp. 3–16). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Elena Shvidko is an assistant professor at Utah State University. Her research interests include multimodal interaction in language teaching/learning, interpersonal aspects of teaching, second language writing, and teacher professional development.