ABSTRACT
This chapter documents several critical shifts in first-time instructors’ thinking about students’ linguistic repertoires and differences during an orientation in a university multilingual composition program. Conversations about multilingual students’ competence as communicators led instructor participants to pivot away from deficit orientations to students’ abilities only in English and toward a plurilingual understanding of students’ vast communicative resources. These shifts involved rethinking students’ prior language knowledge and experiences as resources for the teaching of academic inquiry in English, reexamining the analytical habits of mind that characterize our first-year writing course in relation to plurilingualism, and imagining what it might look like to facilitate plurilingual spaces in the writing classroom. In describing these shifts, the author argues for a pivotal praxis, a theory-grounded set of instructional and administrative practices for understanding students’—and instructors’—knowledge of multiple languages as an interconnected, plurilingual repertoire upon which writers draw to make agentive decisions.
