ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author offers an array of specific strategies she uses in her first-year composition (FYC) classes at City College of New York, CUNY, designed specifically to engage the linguistic diversity of her students and to contest monolingualist ideologies, two approaches, she argues, that go hand in hand and are informed by translingual writing studies (e.g. Cangarajah, 2013; Hor et al., 2011). The author provides a description of the carefully designed classroom ecology (Inoue, 2015) she has developed, including excerpts of the language of the syllabus, course policies, and learning objectives. Also detailed are classroom activities designed to elicit discussions about the politics of language difference as well as descriptions of how the author interacts with students around their writing which focus particularly on teaching writing in context and supporting students in their negotiation of language choices in various rhetorical situations. The chapter concludes with advice for writing instructors who want to try this approach in their own classrooms.
