Title: Translingual Worldmaking: Place-Based Interventions for Linguistic Justice Regarding Emerging Technologies
Name of presenter: Joseph Wilson
Affiliation and academic title: Assistant Professor, Syracuse University, New York, U.S.A.
Email address: Jwilso56@syr.edu
Keywords: translingual; Linguistic Justice; genre; LLMs; pedagogical methods
Abstract:
This workshop considers how writing classrooms function as material sites where translingual orientations to language can strategically intervene in the worldmaking labor of generative AI. I understand AI not as abstract technological disruption but as emplaced, embodied practices shaping the material conditions of everyday writing. Translingualism, emerging from attention to inequalities within and across languages, offers language teachers frameworks for intervening where Large Language Models (LLMs) reproduce linguistic hierarchies. I argue that translingual labor becomes particularly visible when students navigate the material-discursive practices of AI tools that flatten linguistic diversity while privileging standardized Englishes. Rather than treating LLMs as external to pedagogy, I propose that translingual revisions, practices that embrace productive disruption (Portz & Wilson), can help instructors and students attend to whose languages LLMs value as well as the “decision-making” of LLMs regarding how to reproduce, revise, and sediment particular Englishes. Drawing from action research grounded in academic and technical writing classrooms, this workshop proposes an IDGJ framework (Identity, Discourse, Genre, Justification) as a pedagogical method for illuminating language ideologies embedded in LLM outputs. This approach, informed by translingual praxis in classroom writing ecologies, reveals how prompting LLMs can generate insights about linguistic hierarchies while simultaneously demonstrating LLMs’ limitations in replicating the intentional, context-responsive work of translingual revisions. Students learn that LLMs’ apparent neutrality obscures particular language ideologies with material consequences for multilingual writers. The presentation offers hands-on implementation strategies grounded in the hard work of ethical pedagogy rather than reflexive idealism about technology. I describe specific classroom activities where students historicize language by comparing LLM outputs with texts by multilingual writers, making visible which Englishes LLMs center. I conclude by considering how this framework sustains place-based, justice-oriented teaching that reaffirms human agency in language learning while attending to the material realities of writing with and against AI’s standardizing tendencies.