Translingual Practices in the First-year International Students’ English Academic Writing

Abstract

The translingual orientation in literacy suggests that multilingual students bring with them the awareness of intercultural communication and the competence of translanguaging between different discourse communities, which prepares them to learn the new forms of writing in their second language. Nevertheless, multilingual students’ pursuit of the “nativeness” in English writing seems counter to the ideology of translingualism. This research explores how writing teachers address those students’ needs to adapt to standardized academic English writing while simultaneously developing their ability to negotiate language differences and to write across contexts with all the linguistic resources available. The findings demonstrated that multilingual students intuitively adopted translingual strategies in English writing but became more critical about their language repertoires if they are appropriately introduced to the concept of translingualism. Accordingly, pedagogical implications for ways university writing teachers can help multilingual students improve academic literacy through a translingual approach are essential.