ABSTRACT
China is a big country, with many differing regions, and the students who come to State University bring with them a variety of language backgrounds—they all speak “Mandarin” or “Putonghua,” but that is often only one element in a complex linguistic profile. Translingual pedagogy, or transing pedagogy in general, then, recognizes that students have the right to their choices and opportunities to explore their own language repertoire in a safe, welcoming, and nurturing environment. If instructors present themselves as the representative of the “standardized language,” there is the risk that students will adopt and write for this representative of the “accepted standard language.” The cynical appeal, sometimes explicit and other times implied, is to the idea of “one nation, one language” at the macro level, with a corollary of “one person, one language” at the micro level. The chapter also presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book.
