Code Switching and Code Meshing and the NS PhD Student

Until this week, code switching and code meshing were not terms that I used in professional conversation and certainly not in personal conversation. If you had asked me what it meant in my present teaching context, I would have said that I was not completely sure. But, to come back to a comment I made in my first blog, I have come to find that I have more in common with TESOL and WE issues than I had thought when I signed up for this class. And I think that the same is probably true of code meshing as well as the other topics we've covered.

Michael-Luna and Canagarajah's article "Multilingual Academic Literacies: Pedagogical Foundations for Code Meshing in Primary and Higher Education" has helped me to gain a clearer understanding of what it is, how it works, and how I might use it in my own context. In my conversation with Robin during class, I also worked through what some difficulties might be for me and for my students, which is the real focus of my blog entry today.

We talked about how difficult it would be for us if someone asked us to use any code meshing that we used in our blogs in an academic paper. As we talked , we realized that we would be more than a little nervous. Would I trust that the teacher really meant that I could write a paper the way I write a blog entry? Where is the line between acceptable and not-so-acceptable code meshing? What if I cross that boundary? What if I misinterpret the assignment? Now, I understand just how hard it was for the college students in the article to successfully transfer their own way of speaking and writing to an academic paper, especially since they had probably been well-grounded in the requirement to write in "academic English" when they write papers for their college classes.

So, I think the most valuable concept I can take from this article is that I need to be aware of my students' fears about writing if I were to ask them to do such a task. Certainly, I would need to prepare them well and make them feel more comfortable in bringing their own background and language into what has always been a formal context, one in which they often - if not always - had felt uncomfortable.

Now....if I can just manage to get past my own fears and insecurities so that I can do a little code meshing myself!