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Once students understand what their switching, meshing, and blending can do rhetorically, we must help them set goals for their future writing. Some students may feel more overwhelmed than empowered at moments, or potentially ambivalent. It’s our job to help them first see the value of linguistic diversity. Then we can help them decide if, when, and how they want to execute their linguistic freedoms. Those who want to experiment should make conscious decisions based on the demands of the situation. For resistant students, we cannot force them to practice linguistic variety. We can hope, however, that the lessons will help them see and appreciate others’ use of language when they encounter it.
Feedback on writing with language variations can be stressful for a teacher who may feel unprepared. Horner et al. offer thoughtful questions that we can ask our students and increase understanding: “What might this difference do? How might it function expressively, rhetorically, and communicatively? For whom, under what conditions, and how?” Horner et al. follow up by encouraging teachers to “[read] with patience, respect… perceived differences within and across languages, and [convey] an attitude of deliberative inquiry” (304). When students are brave enough to practice these new skills, be sure to give feedback based on meaning-making and clear communication. The University of Connecticut instructs its First Year Writing teachers to give feedback based on “correctness in the context of meaning, rather than as a discrete set of skills or intrinsic knowledge” (Translingual Teaching). Rosa and Flores likewise note that “appropriateness” based pedagogy is often actually a “reproduction of racial normativity” of the past (Flores and Rosa 151). Concerns like this urge instructors to look at why they believe something is or is not correct– is it because of what they have been taught in school to be correct, or is it correct because the intended meaning is being conveyed? When in doubt, instructors’ best move would be to sit down with the student and ask more questions about the author’s decisions. Providing thoughtful feedback rooted in understanding and context is the key to success in translingual writing