Supporting Students’ Own Languages in the Writing Classroom: Adaptable Writing Assignments for Enacting Linguistic Justice in Local Contexts

Assignment Goals and Learning Outcomes

While each author designed their respective assignment with particular learning outcomes in mind, they are all designed to forward linguistic justice by providing students with opportunities to foster CLA, interrogate standard language ideologies, and celebrate their diverse language practices. Below, we articulate the primary goals of our assignments and how we work to meet those goals.

Fostering Critical Reflection

Some of our assignments prompt students to engage in critical self-reflection by encouraging them to examine their own languaging practices and challenge their preexisting assumptions about language. For Keli’s Language and Literacy Narrative, students reflect on their diverse linguistic backgrounds by narrating a meaningful literacy experience shaped by their language history. Similarly, Sophia utilizes reflective freewriting to help students consider the value of linguistic diversity and examine their own language choices. By asking students to examine the identities, life experiences, and linguistic histories that inform their writerly voice, we aim to help students develop a sensitivity towards the complex relationships between racial, linguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, regional, and other backgrounds. In doing so, students who embody dominant racial and linguistic norms might better understand their raciolinguistic privilege, and linguistically minoritized students might better recognize the legitimacy of the linguistic resources they bring to academic communities.

In addition to reflecting on their own linguistic histories, our assignments ask students to further reflect on their attitudes toward others’ languaging practices. Class discussions leading up to Kelsey’s Linguistic Observation and Analysis prompt students to reflect on the communities they are a part of, the languages they use, the experiences they have in gaining authority in or being excluded from specific linguistic communities, and the linguistic resources they bring to new contexts. Sasha’s Community Influencer Profile assignment encourages students to think about how language allows people to impact others. In asking students to consider the diverse linguistic practices circulating in the communities around them, we intend for them to develop a more critical perspective on the ideologies that shape their perceptions of their own and others’ languaging practices.

Deconstructing Language Ideologies

Our assignments also encourage students to deconstruct the standard language ideologies they may have internalized. Keli’s Language and Literacy Narrative assignment, which was developed in the context of shaping peer writing tutors’ approaches to tutoring and implemented in a classroom composed mainly of racially and linguistically privileged students, is intended to help students with raciolinguistic privilege reflect on how writing—even writing that is considered normative—is shaped by the writer’s linguistic histories. This reflection allows peer writing tutors to develop a stronger understanding of and empathy for students whose ways of languaging are often minoritized in academic spaces. Similarly, Sophia’s reflective activity encourages students to dismantle assumptions of linguistic homogeneity to avoid reifying standard language ideologies when revising their own writing or giving feedback to their peers.

Kelsey’s Linguistic Observation and Analysis assignment encourages students to interrogate standard language ideologies by examining the relationship between language and power in different communities and exploring how a variety of languages have authority across contexts. The assignment's goal is for students to observe their communities, leading them to notice the ways they employ language in different contexts and the material effects of linguistic injustice for those excluded from particular communities. By thinking critically about the legitimacy of “standard” English and considering how language, community, and power intersect, students might begin deconstructing the standard language ideologies many of them have internalized.

Offering Space for Authentic Languaging Practices

Importantly, each of our assignments provides space for students to celebrate the entirety of their linguistic repertoires. By supporting students in embracing the richness of their languaging practices, we hope they will see those languaging practices as assets in academic spaces. Sophia’s reflective freewriting activity encourages students to use their entire communicative repertoire, including languages, dialects, registers, and visual semiotics. The research that students perform for Kelsey’s assignment provides them with an opportunity to identify and legitimize the language practices of communities to which they already belong. Sasha’s Community Influencer Profile achieves a similar goal, emphasizing the importance of using quotes from their research in their original format to maintain the research participant’s authentic voice. Finally, the assignment guidelines for Keli’s assignment encourage students to use their own ways of languaging in their work. Through offering these opportunities for students to employ their full range of linguistic practices—and by providing encouraging formative feedback and utilizing more inclusive forms of assessment, such as grading contracts that measure students’ labor, effort, and engagement rather than their ability to adhere to conventional forms of languaging—we create the space for students to use language authentically and celebrate their full linguistic identities in their work.

Building Rhetorical Flexibility

Lastly, our assignments are intended to not only increase students’ critical awareness of their linguistic repertoires, but also, in some cases, to imagine how they might utilize their developing CLA in future contexts and communities. One aim of Kelsey’s Linguistic Observation and Analysis project is to move students towards competently and confidently navigating new (especially academic) discourse communities through CLA. Through encouraging students to use their entire linguistic repertoires in a low-stakes activity, Sophia’s assignment is also intended to reverse the effect of standard language ideologies that may have silenced students’ ways of languaging in other contexts. By supporting students in building their rhetorical flexibility through legitimizing their full range of linguistic resources, we hope they can more fully embrace language diversity in their own and others’ writing in the future.