As an educator, I engage my students in developing an awareness of themselves as communicators in the multilingual and multimodal 21st century society. Whether I teach first-year writing, upper-level professional and technical writing, or grammar classes, I ask students to reflect on what is meaningful to them as contributors to the society. I cultivate an inclusive atmosphere that encourages students to become a part of the conversations inside and outside of the classroom. In order to engage students in continuing conversations outside of the classroom, I make use of online technologies in all my classes, whether they are face-to-face, hybrid, or online. For example, as a follow-up to in-class activities, my students create collaborative pages as quick reference guides for class concepts. During their invention stages of writing, students utilize online collaborative tools, such as Popplet.com for concept mapping or NowComment.com for commenting on their readings. My multimodal approach to composition expands the traditional essays and professional documents to assignments in which students create e-portfolios, proposals, videos, posters, and brochures. Through these assignments, students become familiar with formats, styles, languages, and modes of communication in their discourse communities and in different genres.

 

I also encourage students to consider the linguistic diversity in contemporary societies by teaching editing as negotiation, where students negotiate—not only with their teachers, but with readers as well—about writing conventions that shift and are “renegotiated throughout history and in each act of writing”[1]. In order to examine how linguistic diversity affects the production of meaning and texts, I guide my students through analyzing the rhetorical and linguistic elements of multimodal texts (such as multilingual music videos and advertisements that target international audiences). In addition, we investigate how linguistic choices are represented in their disciplines of interest, whether these choices perpetuate the relationships of power, and which alternative choices could be negotiated in their disciplines. Based on these analyses and investigations, students produce visual arguments on a topic relating to linguistic diversity, such as code-switching or translingualism. These assignments allow students to have the power over their writing, not merely by having the freedom to express their ideas, but by having the freedom to choose how they will express those ideas. However, students’ choices have to be guided by their investigations of the aforementioned multimodal texts in order to accomplish the desired rhetorical effects in their academic and nonacademic discourse communities and genres.

 

My teaching is deeply informed and guided by my research that centers on investigating frameworks for developing students’ metalinguistic and critical language awareness. The traditional college composition methods and best practices for addressing language issues are based on mainstream student writers, thus overlooking the increasingly diverse post-secondary writing classrooms. My goal is to develop innovative teaching approaches that foster students’ awareness of language as a powerful instrument that will make them confident communicators in all spheres of their lives. 

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[1] Horner, Bruce. “Rethinking the “Sociality” of Error: Teaching Editing as Negotiation.” Rhetoric Review 11 (1992): 172-199. PDF.