Multilingual Writing in Digital World

This chapter examines teachers' practices and strategies while using digital tools for writing. The chapter argues that when teachers use digital writing, they need to change their teaching strategies in order to ease their students' writing tasks. It also highlights the purposes of integrating digital tools for the writing classes and the challenges they face while adapting digital writing. The data are collected from teachers who work at schools, colleges, and universities, through a survey generated by Google forms. The findings show that integrating suitable digital tools requires mastering the use of technologies by supporting teachers' digital literacy skills before integrating them into classes to overcome any emerging challenges. This is to reinforce students to improve their writing levels. The chapter suggests more extended studies to examine students' attitudes and experiences with using digital tools and the impact of coronavirus pandemic on education.

Multilingual Writing Support

This chapter will provide a research-based protocol for one-to-one writing conferencing that helps tutors and teachers to navigate the tension between standardizing multilingual students' language practices and honoring their rhetorically rich linguistic backgrounds through a series of activities in a ten-week writing center pedagogy course. This series of activities was specifically developed in an effort to respond to writing tutors who are always seeking strategies that effectively apply theoretical principles in practice. While this work focuses specifically on one-to-one writing tutoring, the topic of multilingual writing support is applicable to any English language learning context. By the end of this chapter, readers will have gained a practical strategy centered on using declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge to help preservice tutors and teachers develop metalinguistic awareness and foster critical consciousness through one-to-one conferencing.

Locating the Transrhetorical in Multilingual Writing

Students' lived lives and experiences are tools that they can use to learn and own their writing as they grow and become fluent writers. Theorists have described different ways that students draw from their first languages and culture to write in another language. This chapter showcases how two African students bring their culture of orality into the classroom and use it as a tool to understand, develop, and conquer their writing. The chapter gives examples of the students' narratives as they navigate their writing. As they write, they constantly dig into their culture through tools of translation in order to perform, inform, and transform their writing in English, a language that is different both linguistically and culturally from their own.

Expressive Multilingual Writing

The purpose of this chapter reveals the healing power of writing at times of stress, turmoil, and crisis from multilingual perspectives. Writing relieves emotional chaos, stress, and even physical pain as evidenced by research. Multilingual writing is a process-based, complicated act that requires a series of intellectual stages to be developed as a skill. In parallel to this rationale, multilingual learners can generate creative spaces for their well-being and growth by using writing as a skill to express their emotions for easing feelings related to stress, turmoil, and crisis. This chapter encourages and models emotional or expressive writing as an innovative method to use in educational and health settings to allow creating novel experiences into language learning phases.

Das (verhinderte) Potential der Mehrsprachigkeit

This paper introduces the results of a series of writing workshops about “Mehrsprachig Schreiben” [Multilingual Writing], which took place at the University of Vienna between 2015 and 2017. The article poses the question, how individual, multilingual potentials can be used productively and creatively for the development and enhancements of academic literacies in the tertiary education sector. First it focuses on the linguistic landscapes at Austrian Universities such as the handling of multilingualism in this context, as well as it concerns the framing conditions and challenges of academic writing per se, before it shows the terms of the writing workshops and the methodical and didactical approach in connection with the concept of a multilingual process orientated writing didactic. On the basis of an exercise example (“Meine Sprachen und ich” [My languages and I]) it is responding in the end to the concrete challenges of multilingual academic writing at “German speaking” universities.

Verflochtene Sprachen und Kulturen: Gohar Markosjan-Käspers Romane als Beispiele des mehrsprachigen Schreibens

Intertwined Languages and Cultures: Gohar Markosjan-Käsper’s Novels as Examples of Multilingual Writing. The present article analyses the phenomenon of multilingualism in the novels of Gohar Markosjan-Käsper (1949–2015) and discusses her life and work in the socio-political context of the former Soviet Union (in relation to language and cultural politics). Markosjan-Käsper was an Armenian-born writer who spent most of her life in Estonia and wrote her books in Russian. Accordingly, her works originated in a contact zone of different languages and cultures. This article highlights her novels Helena and Penelopa as examples of transcultural writing and analyses the manifestations and functions of multilingualism in these works. The study shows that a number of topics and motifs that are present in German-language transcultural literature also appear in Markosjan-Käsper’s novels (for example cultural comparison, self-discovery in a foreign culture). The multilingualism can be seen in these novels both explicitly and implicitly: in addition to Russian, other languages such as Armenian, Estonian, English, and Latin are used, with numerous indirect references to these languages. Furthermore, various references to world-famous novels such as Ulysses by James Joyce and Master and Margarita by Michail Bulgakov are analysed.

Linguistics Difficulties in Harmonisation of European Union Law: The Example of Directives on Procedural Guaranties in Criminal Matters

Multilingual writing of European directives is faced with a few linguistic difficulties, like choosing an appropriate legal terms. All linguistic versions shall reflect the same content event though the legal system of each Member State is different and some legal concept do not have an equivalent in other legal systems. In this way, legal writing of European Directive is a very complex subject both from legal and linguistic perspective. The aim of this article is to discuss different linguistics difficulties that could appear during the harmonisation of criminal proceedings in European Union, where multilingualism is a key value and to analyse the possible solutions, when dealing with those difficulties. It seems that even if multilingualism is a big challenge to European Union, it could have a positive influence on the quality of European legislation.

Sociocultural and Power-Relational Dimensions of Multilingual Writing

This book examines the writing practices of three adult multilingual writers through the prism of their writing in English as an additional language. It illustrates some of the social, cultural and political contexts of the writers’ literacy activities and argues for a writing pedagogy that reflects the complexity of writing as a social practice.