Sociocultural and Power-Relational Dimensions of Multilingual Writing

Amir Kalan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) at McGill University, Canada. He is the author of Who’s Afraid of Multilingual Education? (Multilingual Matters, 2016). He is interested in critical literacy, multiliteracies, second language writing, intercultural rhetoric, multilingual text generation, and multimodal and digital writing.

• Acknowledgments1. Introduction2. Conceptual and Empirical Background3. Making Sense of Histories and Literate Legacies4. Literacy and Writing Discourses5. Writing as a Power Differential6. Written Texts as Organic Outgrowth of Complex Linguistic and Cultural Repertoires7. Social and Institutional Lived Experiences8. Mechanics and Practicalities     9. Implications, Recommendations, and Potential Further DirectionsReferences

Amir Kalan’s participatory ethnographic research with three adult multilingual English writers reveals how monolingual language ideologies, formalist pedagogies, and industrialized assessment practices have kept Anglo-Americentric educational institutions oblivious to the richness and complexity of immigrants’ cultural and discursive experience. Kalan’s exemplary case studies show how this experience might be tapped as an intellectual catalyst, with writing re-figured as an emergent activity of hermeneutic design, semiotic dexterity, and rhetorical consciousness of language-power relations.