ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author considers the challenge that Canagarajah identifies and why it remains a challenge—and how instructors might teach grammar with a translingual approach. The goal is a pedagogy that enables a shift in instructor orientation from a focus on prescriptive grammar to a productive, generative grammatical literacy that reorients instruction at the sentence level to focus on grammatical patterns and usage in their linguistic context, rather than always comparing them with those of so-called standardized English. The author aims to consider what a translingual approach to grammar teaching might look like, in full recognition of the linguistic ideologies that make such a project challenging. She sets out what her mean by grammatical literacy, in the context of the pedagogy of naming that she laid out earlier. In order to do that, college-level grammar instructors might start with reframing their thinking about “patterns of error” towards a framework of “patterns of usage.”
