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We trace significant shifts over the last forty years in the assumptions about language, language relations, and language learning made by US composition scholars to understand written error through their use of specific theories and findings of scholarship in linguistics, and we explore the implications of these shifts for the teaching of writing. We identify three sets of assumptions with monolingualism, and a fourth set with a break from monolingualist assumptions and an alignment with those associated with translingualism and plurilingualism. Examples from student writing are used to illustrate the implications of these different assumptions for the teaching of writing.

Min-Zhan Lu is Endowment Professor of the Humanities at Drake University, where she teaches courses in writing, autobiography, fiction, and critical theory. Her work is concerned with the use of cultural dissonance and the politics of representing difference in writing and teaching. The following article is from College English, 49, April 1997.

In this chapter we examine how a “translingual” approach to the teaching of writing would address matters of agency in all writing, including not only writing that appears to deviate from language norms, but also writing that appears simply to reproduce language norms. For a variety of reasons, those arguing for a translingual approach have been concerned primarily with the agency of those producing writing that appears to deviate from language norms.1 For example, the call Horner, Lu, Royster and Trimbur (2011) made recently for taking a translingual approach to writing is framed not in terms of language in writing but “language difference in writing.” And some approaches aligned with the translingual approach have argued that we should not require students to “code-switch”—that is, to use only the code deemed appropriate to a particular situation-but instead to “codemesh”—that is, to mix codes within individual utterances (Canagarajah, 2006; Young, 2009; Young & Martinez, 2011).2

This article examines Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations in light of current discourse theories which posit language as a site of struggle among competing discourses. It finds Shaughnessy's analyses and recommended pedagogies dominated by a view of language as a politically innocent vehicle of meaning. The author argues that this view of language leads Shaughnessy to overlook basic writers' need to confront the dissonance they experience between academic and other discourses , which might undercut her goal of helping students achieve the "freedom of deciding how and when and where to use which language." The author further argues that to pursue Shaughnessy's goal of countering unequal social conditions through education, we need to abandon the limitations of the essentialist view of language informing our pedagogy. The aim of this paper is to critique an essentialist assumption about language that is dominant in the teaching of basic writing. This assumption holds that the essence of meaning precedes and is independent of language, which serves merely as a vehicle to communicate that essence. According to this assumption, differences in discourse conventions have no effect on the essential meaning communicated. Using Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations as an example, I examine the ways in which such an Min-zhan Lu, assistant professor of English at Drake University, teaches writing and literary and cultural criticism. Her work has appeared in College English, The Journal of Education, and Prairie Schooner. She is currently writing a novel on three generations of Chinese women, and coauthoring a book with Bruce Horner on representations of nontraditional students. © Journal of Basic Writing, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1991

This is an attempt to define what being a responsible and responsive user of English might mean in a world ordered by global capital, a world where all forms of intra- and international exchanges in all areas of life are increasingly under pressure to involve English. Turning to recent work in linguistics and education, I pose a set of alternative assumptions that might help us develop more responsible and responsive approaches to the relation between English and its users (both those labeled Native-Speaking, White or Middle Class, and those Othered by these labels), the language needs and purposes of individual users of English, and the relation between the work we do and the work done by users of English across the world. I argue that these assumptions can help us compose English against the grain of all systems and relations of injustice.

In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and the pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in

the populations they work with and the changes that may arise from that work. Both thus face the challenge of negotiating differences and power. The course of these negotiations, we argue, depends on what experience is taken to mean and how it can be used. Signs of this convergence between ethnography and composition pedagogy appear in both the shared ideals and the shared dilemmas reported in recent accounts and critiques of such projects. We have in mind those projects which attend to the politics of their research and teaching methods in pursuit of their commitment to socially emancipatory ends. Many ethnographers and teachers might see themselves as working for socially emancipatory ends (if defining these in different ways), and presumably all would be concerned with methodology. For us, however, critical ethnography and pedagogy approach methodology not strictly in terms of its efficiency in producing or transmitting knowledge to inform subsequent (social) practice but in terms of its effects as social practice. Critical ethnog

Louise Pratt points out that while colleges and universities have increasingly deployed a rhetoric of diversity in response to the insistence of non-mainstream groups for fuller participation, the "import" of "multiculturalism" remains "up for grabs across the ideological spectrum" (39). I begin with Pratt's reminder because I want to call attention to the images of "grabbing" and "import." These depict "multiculturalism" as a construct whose "import"meanings, implications, and consequences-is available only to those willing to expend the energy to "grab" it: to search, envision, grasp, articulate, and enact it. And these images conjure up the act of importing-of bringing in-perspectives and methods formerly excluded by dominant institutions. I want to articulate one "import" of multiculturalism here by exploring the question of how to conceive and practice teaching methods which invite a multicultural approach to style, particularly those styles of student writing which appear to be ridden with "errors." And I situate this question in the context of English Studies, a discipline which, on the one hand, has often proclaimed its concern to profess multiculturalism but, on the other hand, has done little to combat the ghettoization of two of its own cultures, namely composition teaching and student writing. My inquiry is motivated by two concerns which I believe I share with a significant number of composition teachers. The first results from a sense of division between the ways in which many of us approach style in theory and in our teaching practices. I have in mind teachers who are aligned in theory with a view of composition which contests the separation of form and meaning and which also argues against a conception of "academic