In 2006, Suresh Canagarajah famously argued for “pluralizing academic writing” through pedagogies that attend more closely to students’ “multilingual competence” (586). Since then, numerous scholars have explored the advantages of “translanguaging” (Canagarajah 2011; Hornberger and Link 2012), especially in the context of their literacy learning. Rather than bracketing off certain forms of language knowledge as other or lesser-than, a translanguaging pedagogy works both to make students’ multilingual realities visible, and to affirm students’ multilingual repertoires as an essential benefit to their work as academic writers (Vogel and Garcia 2017).

Yet these literacy theories are rarely applied to those whom our academic cultures have deemed linguistically proficient, leaving many of our students’ multilingual realities invisible, and the possible benefits of their translanguaging unrecognized, if not untapped. This roundtable discussion will explore the relationship between multilingualism and writing pedagogies as they exist outside the context of instruction explicitly devoted to second language learning; instead, this session turns to writing classrooms and support in which monolingual ideologies remain largely unquestioned, even while students’ often private multilingual identities put the lie to these elisions. In keeping with the MLA’s interest in fostering collaborations across k-16 instruction, these three 15-minute presentations will investigate students’ invisible multilingualisms across a range of writing instructional sites: a living-learning program at a diverse R1 university; a university writing center staffed by undergraduate and graduate students; and a secondary classroom at an independent day school in Indonesia, serving 48+ nationalities. After highlighting the individual experiences of student writers, tutors, and faculty, speakers will then lead participants in a discussion about other sites of invisible multilingualism and writing instruction, exploring pedagogies that might more inclusively leverage students’ diverse reservoirs of linguistic knowledge.

Our first speaker considers writing pedagogies and multilingualism in the particular context of a university living-learning community. The learning benefits of such communities have long been documented: when students take classes with peers they also share living spaces with, they are able to access, collaborate with, and learn from each other in newly organic ways (AAC&U 2010). As a consequence of living together, moreover, aspects of students’ identities that are often less visible in a typical classroom are more openly shared and known. Based on interviews with both students and instructors, this talk considers the extent to which multilingualism yet remains an unvoiced aspect of students’ writing identity, even while this residential context means this identity may be well known to peers. However, this specific site of learning also suggests new ways that instructors and students can leverage such literacy knowledge to deepen and advance collaborative learning in a first-year writing classroom.

The second speaker considers similar issues from the perspective of multilingual writing center consultants and their sometimes conflicted position as mediators of students’ English-only classrooms and coursework. For although U.S. writing center theory and practice have long promoted inclusive practices for supporting English Language Learners (Nakamaru 2010; Rafoth 2014; Bruce and Rafoth 2016, Nape 2019), the literature has paid far less attention to the multilingual status of many writing tutors themselves, and the frequent “sociolinguistic negotiations” (Ronesi 2009) they undertake in their work supporting peer writers in English. Drawing on preliminary findings from a mixed method study, this paper will explore the varied ways multilingual undergraduate and graduate tutors understand such “negotiations” to impact both their sense of self and their work with other students. Ultimately, this paper asks how writing centers might better confront problematic language ideologies of the culture-at-large by better supporting tutors’ explorations of their own complex sociolinguistic identities.

The third speaker considers these issues through the lens of the international day school--a site of explicit multiculturalism that has yet been criticized for devaluing multilingualism and reinforcing “linguistic imperialism” (Phillipson 1992). For students, the maintenance of English as the common language of communication and instruction can create tensions between necessary adaptations and suppressions of one’s own multiple languages and literacies. This talk will examine the many ways multilingual identities can be made public and kept private in the international writing classroom. Building from multilingual high school students’ first-person accounts, this paper will investigate moments when the functions of English show themselves not necessarily as “contradictory trends” but rather as processes that “involves the construction and re-negotiation of the fundamentals of individual identity” (Grimshaw 2007; Sutherland et.al 2003). This paper thus points to ways that utilizing students’ unique multilingual capabilities and identities can help bring private multilingual identities into the classroom's public space.