Suresh Canagarajah is a Sri Lankan-American applied linguist and writing scholar at Penn State University whose work on translingual practice challenges monolingual assumptions in writing instruction and assessment.
Core ideas
- All communication is translingual: Canagarajah argues that speakers and writers always draw on multiple linguistic resources — languages, dialects, registers, codes — and negotiate meaning across differences. Monolingualism is an ideology, not a natural condition [@canagarajah2013].
- Translingual practice vs. multilingualism: “multilingual” still assumes separate, bounded languages that speakers switch between. “Translingual” recognizes that languages are not discrete systems — speakers mesh, blend, and draw on resources fluidly. Code-meshing (blending languages within a text) is the norm in many communicative contexts, not a deviation.
- Language diversity as resource: writing instruction that enforces conformity to a single standard treats linguistic diversity as a problem to be corrected. Canagarajah proposes treating it as a resource — writers who navigate multiple languages bring rhetorical repertoires that monolingual writers lack.
Notable works
- Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations (2013)
- A Geopolitics of Academic Writing (2002)
- Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching (1999)
Related
- translingual writing — the term entry for the approach Canagarajah theorizes
- discourse community — Canagarajah’s work shows how discourse communities can be translingual
- language and power — translingual theory makes explicit how language standards encode power relations
- Asao Inoue — complementary work on how writing assessment enforces monolingual standards