This literature review synthesizes scholarship on standard language ideologies in college writing programs and the theories and pedagogies being proposed to disrupt such ideologies. Findings include a tension between belief and action, or that professors' awareness of language diversity does not translate into changes in pedagogy. This is due to…

The invention of composition as a required course in the United States, a booming textbook industry, and an increased focus on nationalism perpetuated the standardizing of English language practices and curriculums in secondary and postsecondary schools in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Composition textbooks circulated both standard…

Scholars in writing studies have positioned numerous critiques of the tacit myth of Standard English (*SE) and its use as an unquestioned communicative norm. While these critiques reflect the overlap of the field's translingualism and anti-racist writing assessment movements, they also reveal an empirical need surrounding the writing instructors…

Critical language awareness offers one approach to communal "justicing," an iterative and collective process that can address inequities in the disciplinary infrastructure of Writing Studies. We demonstrate justicing in the field's pasts, policies, and publications; offer a model of communal revision; and invite readers to become agents…

Translanguaging, an emergent theoretical orientation to language, has become a widely discussed topic in writing studies with the rise of translingual movement in composition. Challenging the ideologies of standardization and monolingualism, translanguaging forwards towards a pedagogy of difference and facilitates transcending the…

This article affords insights into the interdependence between writing and critical translation to inform implementations of antiracist and translingual writing pedagogies. Promoting linguistic and social justice for multilingual writers, it presents a writing assignment design that focuses on critical translation across asymmetrical power…

Correct grammar is important for precise, accurate, academic prose, but the traditional skills-based approach to teaching grammar is not effective if the goal is good writing. The sentence-combining approach shows promise. However, sentence modeling is more likely to produce strong writing and enhance reading comprehension. Through sentence…

Writing centers provide a crucial site for multilingual writers to experience generative and productive conversation about their writing projects and for their language and cultural experiences to be appreciated as sources for meaning-making. For this to be possible, tutors must understand the phenomenon and problems of standard language ideology…

While we in composition studies may have grown more sensitive to and welcoming of cultural and linguistic differences in the classroom, we remain far from united in pursuits to combat explicitly in our pedagogies the politics of standardized English. To move toward linguistic justice, we call for unified intention and action across our field to…

We examine how culturally sustaining pedagogy that fosters linguistic and cultural pluralism might be taken up in writing instruction. Using data collected through semistructured interviews with nine urban elementary and middle school writing teachers, we document teachers' conceptualizations and enactments of culturally sustaining writing…

The number of English language learners (ELLs) mainstreamed into regular classrooms continues to increase. Curricular writing standards required by the Common Core State Standards require students to write essays analytically in response to text(s). Many English Language Arts (ELA) teachers may worry about effectively delivering essay writing…

The purpose of this dissertation is to outline a pedagogy that promotes language difference in college composition classrooms. Scholarship on language difference has strived for decades to transform teaching practices in mainstream, developmental, and second-language writing instruction. Despite compelling arguments in support of linguistic…

The purpose of this qualitative action research study was to explore how critical pedagogy can foster writing competency and critical consciousness among adult basic writing students in a community college writing classroom. To this end, critical pedagogy and related critical discourses were used to theoretically frame this study. These theories…

Linguists have long accepted the inevitability of linguistic variation as scientific fact. However, the general public continues to associate regional variation with low intelligence and to promote a non-regional, "accentless" English as the ideal. The result of this ideology, which ignores the natural diversity of all languages, is that…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…