Challenges to implementing Translingual Writing in EFL contexts

English is the target language to learn as a subject in EFL classrooms. It is taught by following norms, rules, conventions and forms. So a few common challenges of implementing Translingual writing in EFL contexts are as follows.
1. If teachers allow students to have "multiple norms" to write, but only "Standard norms" can be accepted by high-stake exams, what can a teacher do? If both the standard norms and other norms are both taught and allowed, but students perceive only the standard norms are effective in taking tests, students are prone to use monolingual strategies to learn English. Thus, translingual approach may fail.
2. When a teacher "really" allowing students to have "multiple norms" to negotiate meanings, most students become more "relaxed" to use "Chinglish" to write. Since writing in their instinct ways is so natural that teachers do not need to teach much, what should a translingual teacher do in teaching "translingual writing"? Would it goes back to monolingual classrooms when any "teaching" takes place?

My response: As long as learners are given "options" and are fully informed with multiple norms, they can choose whatever ways to write, including monolingual strategies.

3.

Change into Translingualism Makes Change in the World

When teaching standard norms of English academic writing, teachers need to use these norms to measure students' learning. Thus, monolingualism can creep over and impose the standard norms upon teachers and learners. Therefore, when teaching standard norms of academic writing, teachers also need to remind learners about their L1 roles, language attitudes, and the ideologies underlying the target language. That is, an English teacher is not just teaching English but also teaching language attitude and language strategies about when to choose how to communicate with whom. Only when learners are fully informed by standard norms, deviation forms as well as different consequences of using them, and are well prepared to know how to position themselves as a language user for particular communication purposes, can learners gain language agency.

Not only the classrooms need to be changed but also the mainstream community, especially journals for scholarly publications. If the mainstream doesn't change, all the classroom changes are lies and irresponsible practices because students who believe in translingualism will have hard time to get jobs or publish in journals. When both the classrooms and the core of mainstream can both change, the world's attitude toward monolingualism can be shaped.

I believe that a part of L2 writing research will not be affected by translingualism, which is the cognitive related research. However, most of the research relating to social turns will be influenced by translingualism in all aspects including teaching pedagogies, teaching/learning attitudes, assessments, language policies, and research approaches. 

My translingual writing curriculum design

	Essay 1 Literacy Autobiography	Essay 2 Reaction essay	Essay 3 Bilingual education in Taiwan
Teaching foci Instruction	Rhetorical strategies: sensory descriptions, descriptive details. Vivid wordings, similes, metaphors, sentence varieties, conversations, repetitions, episodic examples. Forms/organization Chronological organization showing important English learning landmarks.	Rhetorical strategies: Reporting verbs to show writer’s stance, transitions, tagging the author, learning what thesis statement and topic sentence are in order to summarize a reading. Paraphrasing strategies by changing key words and sentence structures, Forms/organization *Teaching the forms of thesis statement and topic sentence; *Teaching the CARS four moves of an introduction.	Rhetorical strategies:
Teaching materials	Reading materials: Canagarajah	Reading materials: Students are allowed to pick whatever reading they like to respond.	Yourube films: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bdYKSc8s0DY https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=H_FC5VrTm9w Online articles: https://flipedu.parenting.com.tw/ article/5171 https://tw.appledaily.com/new/ realtime/20181011/1445281/
In-class Activities	*Group discussion about the rhetorical strategies used by Canagarajah; *Rhetorical practices in voice; *Peer review *Displaying Good writings	*Group discussion about and practices in rhetorical strategies of writing thesis statements and topic sentences *peer review	Discussing five questions: 1. Can bilingual education enhance Taiwan's international competitiveness? 2. Would bilingual education marginalize indigenous languages? 3. What kind of bilingual programs can work in Taiwan? 4. Can bilingual education increase social stratification? 5. Would bilingual education affect Taiwanese students' language identity and attitude?
Thinking practice	Recalling one’s past memories and making retrospection and reflection upon their language learning experience	*Critical thinking on a reading article, a movie, or an issue. *The writer is required to choose his/her position and explain why.	*Critical thinking on the upcoming language policy in Taiwan. *Designing survey questions to investigate the issues that they are interested in. Students need to learn how to break down an issue into questions that are researchable. *Team writing demands interpersonal skills, metacognitive strategies, and pragmatic negotiations
Requirement	*At least 1000 words	*At least 2000 words *Adopting at least 3 references to support their arguments	*At least 3000 words *Adopting at least 3 references to support their arguments *Collaborative writing *Survey

Teaching translingual writing to EFL students- challenges

         When teaching translingual writing in EFL contexts for academic purposes, the first and most challenge is about teaching academic rules and conventions. Given that translingual writing foregrounds writers' agency engaging in meaning negotiation and resistance to unequal power imposed by dominant language. However, considering the politics of academic writing and publications, translingual writing with code-meshing should be rhetorically justified by taking academic conventions and readers' expectations into account (Canagarajah, 2013).
          Given that my students are novice EFL writers who have never learned English academic writing conventions, I have to teach writing rules, forms, conventions and therefore provide norms to scaffold their learning. Following Horner, Lu et al (2011), I provided explicit and descriptive instruction in English academic rules and conventions, and also compared and contrasted them with Chinese writing. I also inductively guided students to outline a reading sample in order to help students elicit the frame and form of academic writing. Drawing parallels to inductive instruction, I deductively highlighted the notions of topic sentence, thesis statement, and supporting points. Although I addressed differences between English and Chinese writings, which is suggested to be beneficial to development of critical awareness of translingual practices (Gevers, 2018), students' attention without doubt was on English writing norms and conventions. To a certain extent, monolingual pedagogy focusing on forms and rules is integrated into my translingual classroom. I am wondering, what is the line that I should not cross when conducting monolingual instruction in teaching translingual writing? How can I, on the one hand, asking students to practice their writing by following the rules, but, on the other hand, reminding them that it's just a convention of academic communities, and it should be critically negotiated.
          Not surprisingly, when receiving students' writing, I noticed that few of them paid attention to strategies of resistance to the dominant discourse. Instead, they took my idea of "negotiation" as an excuse for their low quality work that might be competed at the last minute, and I also noticed that what were followed are the conventions and rules.
          Following and learning rules and conventions are much easier than negotiating rules and conventions. And following and learning rules and conventions have long been taken as what good students do. They love learning conventions and rules because they can soon gain a sense of achievement as a writer who can write in English. If this is their learning context and expectation from the society, how can translingual approach fit in the context?
They don't have desire to negotiate meaning to argue against unequal power relations or speak to justify their peripheral identity. They believe that they are the "learners" who do not have equal language competence as the native speakers, and who need to learn English by being scaffolded by giving rules and standard models.

REFERENCES
Canagarajah, S. (2013). Translingual practice: Global englishes and cosmopolitan relations. New York: Routledge.
Horner, B., Lu, M. Z., Royster, J. J. & Trimbur, J. (2011). Language difference in writing: Toward a translingual approach. College English, 73(3), 303-321.

Code switching & Code meshing

Figure 1. Language proficiency and lexical access

          One particular translanguaging phenomenon of multilingual speakers is code switching and code meshing. It is believed that multilingual speakers have all of their language codes integrated in one repertoire, and when communicating, all the linguistic codes are activated together. Thus, code mixing/translanguaging is considered as naturally inevitable practices. On the other hand, since both languages are potentially active and competing to control output, Applied linguists of bilingualism indicated that language switching takes time because (1) it involves a change in language schema for a given task (schema level inhibition), (2) any change of language involves overcoming the inhibition of the active lemmas with non-target tags (tag inhibition) (Green, 1998, p. 73); (3) cost of switching is asymmetric, and switching into dominant codes costs more than the reverse direction; and (4) the bility to engage in fluent code switching is a hallmark of high proficiency in two languages (Miccio et al. 2009), given that successful and fluent code switching requires a high degree of knowledge of and sensitivity to the grammatical constraints of both languages (kroll et al, 2015).
          If our brain is prone to take the most economic course when
communicating, and if code switching and code meshing cost cognitive capacity, they may not always be the economic selection of multilingual speakers. I hypothesize that some codes may involve more switch cost (e.g. language specific codes, numeral codes, & functional lexical lemmas)  but some may be triggered more spontaneously (e.g. shared content lexical lemmas) (See Figure 2); different language proficiency may result in different cost of language switch (See figure 1); explicit training of code switch may reduce switch cost; contexts that allow more flexible code mixing can reduce unpredictable switching and lead to less lexical suppression (for the more suppressed codes take longer to switch into); and code-switching/meshing from L2 to L1 when composing L2 writing can be ineffective, especially for high proficiency students who have direct access to L2 codes but need to intentionally use L1 during L2 production.

The Modified Hierarchical Model. A. Pavlenko (2009), Conceptual representation in the bilingual lexicon and second language vocabulary learning. In A. Pavlenko (ed.), The bilingual mental lexicon: Interdisciplinary approaches , p. 147. Multilingual Matters, Buffalo, NY. 

          I also would like to propose a broader definition of code-meshing that it refers to meshing two or more codes as a whole at not only the level of lexicon, but phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. For example, Chinglish, under this definition, can be seen as a kind of code-mashing of Chinese and English, which has Chinese syntax and semantics as the base or matrix and bring in English lexemes as the "guest" (e.g.  " I loved a girl at my first sight" ). Given this definition, all the multilingual speakers' language productions are translingual and code-mashed.

Teaching Implications:
1. Since L2 may affect L1, EFL students when writing in L2 dominant contexts may experience reduced access to their L1. I have students complained that code-switching during L2 writing sometimes was not effective. However, most students reported that using L1 to plan before writing is effective. This finding suggests that before the target L2 task schema is activated, L1 can be of great help in idea generation, logic reasoning, and detail elaborations. However, once the L2 task schema is activated, and L1 is inhibited during L2 writing, L1 code-switching may be less effective or even lead to more errors. Therefore, (1) Pre-writing contexts (L1 dominant): teachers can create an L1 contexts triggering L1 writing schema to help students take good use of their L1 resources. (2) Writing contexts (L1 and L2): Do not require students to use certain language when writing. Instead, allowing students to use whatever languages during their processes of drafting. This can allow students to spontaneously use the more strongly activated codes through competing. (3) Post-writing (L2 only): When making final revision/editing, students can then encouraged to use the target language only.
2. EFL writers should not only learn to regulate and control cross-language competition but also learn to shuttle between all the language resources in their repertoires in order to creatively negotiate or mash languages for writing agendas.
3. EFL students with different English proficiency levels can be benefited from L1 differently. Low proficiency writers may be benefited from L1 in lexical search, idea generation, logical reasoning, translating, and monitoring. However, high proficiency writers may prefer to use L1 in idea generation and monitoring. Other usages of L1 during L2 writing may lead to interference for high proficiency writers unless L1 can compensate their situational writing needs.

Week 6 Peer review and reflection paper

          On Week 6, I had my students to do peer review of the draft they composed. Collaborating with professor Canagarajah, I came up with a peer review sheet in which 10 questions were asked. The purposes of the questions, one the one hand, is to elicit information about students' writing processes in relation to their traslingual and rhetorical strategies; on the other hand, the questions can serve as a guideline helping the writers and the reviewers to keep track of their own or the reviewed writings. The ten questions were formulated based on Canagarajah's five formulation questions and four translingual strategies (see my blog article -Week 4).
          Moreover, I designed 5 reflection questions in order to understand students' rhetorical decision, negotiation between L1 and L2, construction of identity, and challenges they encountered.
          I explained the purposes and concerns of peer review since all of my students have never done peer review before. I explained each question of the peer review and the reflection to make sure that they could grasp it. Besides, I demonstrated how I made rhetorical negotiation to compose my idea. I guess my demonstration was quite good for it provided a substantial example accounting for rhetorical negotiation and voice construction.
          I left about 1.5 hours for students to do peer review in class. It is hoped that they could discuss with the writer when reviewing the draft and collaboratively constructed texts from both the writer and reader's perspectives.
          Ten students have turned in their drafts. I was quite anxious about their outcome. And, sigh... I was quite disappointed after reading them. Most of the drafts are too short to carry in-depth reflection and to demonstrate their translingual literacy.  I just wrote an email to my students to encourage them to revise their drafts by next Wednesday, which is the deadline of the final draft.
          Let's see how the final results will turn out to be.

Week 4 writing of autobiography- content & strategies

         On week 4,  I used Canagarajah's autobiography as writing sample to explain content organization and strategies when writing autobiography on one's language learning experience.
          Adopted from Canagarajah (2019), five guide questions were provided for helping students' idea formulation:
1) What are the challenges you faced when learning a new language? 
2) What challenges do writers face for their identity when they develop as multilinguals? 
3)  What strategies do they adopt to negotiate these challenges?  
4) What are the motivations that explain their approaches?  
5) What lessons do writers learn from this experience?

              I also introduced the translingual strategies suggested by Canagarajah (2013)-- 

        1) envoicing: semantic resources used to voice identity

       2) recontextualization: textual strategies that appropriate negotiation of the texts and help 

            readers better understand them.

       3)  interactional: Outputs adopted by writers to facilitate the co-construction of meaning

       4) entextualization: textual strategies that facilitate voice and meaning.

                   Honestly, it was not easy to help these freshmen understand these abstract and complex concepts, such as "identity", "voice", negotiation", "interaction" etc. So, when lecturing, I shifted languages between Mandarin and English in order to make my points clear to them. I also used the writing samples to demonstrate how the formulation questions can lead the story going and how the writers incorporated the four translingual strategies into their texts.
              Concepts of "identity" and "voice" are very foreign to the students because their English writing practices were designed and taught mainly to satisfy the demands of entrance examinations. They rarely had chances to explore how to position themselves in different genres for different purposes. This is also my first time to teach these concepts which used to be the topics only for research purposes. I didn't like my teaching performance. I should have spent more time on discussing "identity" and "voice" and left some time for students to practice how to construct their identity through audience concerns and rhetorically creating a specific voice corresponding to the identity.