Code-meshing in Higher Education

Michael-Luna, Sarah, and A. Suresh Canagarajah. “Multilingual Academic Literacies:

     Pedagogical Foundations for Code Meshing in Primary and Higher Education.”

     Journal of Applied Linguistics 4.1 (2007): 55-77. EBSCO. Web. 17 Feb 2013.

Michael-Luna and Canagarajah are concerned with pedagogies related to multilingual forms, as they become more relevant in academia. They examine previous pedagogical methods, such as codeswitching, but feel these pedagogies still advocate for students to switch from one morphosyntactic system to another and feel this switch advocates for compartmentalized linguistic knowledge, reinforcing a dominant discourse in academia.

The authors introduce code-meshing, which advocates “multilingualism in academic text production to critically engage with dominant discourses” as an alternative in the writing classroom (56). This allows for students to act as agent and includes interaction between the different languages/dialects. Instead of “switching” between different languages/dialects, the student will mesh together lexical items, rhetorical strategies, and structural units.

In order to understand the benefits of code meshing, the authors used an ethnographic study on a first grade ESL classroom of Spanish speaking students. The study brought about six pedagogical strategies that support code meshing: 1) multilingual texts 2) knowledge from inside and outside the text 3) valuing multilingual code meshing 4) modeling oral code meshing 5) modeling written code meshing 6) strategic scaffolding of text negotiation (58).

The next step for the authors was to bring these strategies back to the higher education classroom. Canagarajah’s concern is that even when students feel free to produce in their home dialects/languages in informal exercises like freewrites or class discussions, there is still a perceived lack of agency for students in formal written assignments and students typically move towards the dominant writing styles in academia. The higher education instructor often allows students to explore voice in low stakes assignments but is “not ready to provide models for negotiating competing discourses effectively in high stakes writing” (70). This leads to students returning to conventional rules of academic discourse, losing voice and agency, or writing essays that don’t follow dominant conventions where the instructor struggles to assess the writing (70).

Canagarajah suggests drawing on oral history or community narratives, using cultural models of writing, and providing students with examples of academic writing that code meshes so students recognize they don’t need to suppress their own knowledge. Their final note is that moving to value multilingual rhetorical strategies and knowledge will serve to bring academic literacies into line with the linguistic pluralism, as well as ‘real world” communications (71).

The strategies of code-meshing present a pedagogical model that many theorists have been working towards in English studies in recent scholarship. My last blog discussed pluralism, which advocated allowing all language use in the classroom equally, but it differs from code-meshing, which teaches students how to incorporate academic discourse with their own dialects and voice. This article focused on the first grade classroom, with a small section on African American students doing low stakes activities in the higher education classroom. It would be beneficial for these authors, or follow on researchers, to perform a study on the HE classroom to determine how well these six code-meshing strategies work with different dialect and language learners in higher education writing assignments.