Crossing Communicative Boundaries: The Translingual Practices of Engineering Students on the U.S.-Mexico Border

• In Event: Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: Postsecondary Experiences in the Context of Multiple Languages and Literacies

Abstract

This paper, and the larger study of which it is part, examines the multilingual and multimodal communicative practices of undergraduate engineering students in the highly fluid linguistic and cultural context of the US-Mexico border. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and observations over a two-year period, we show how the communicative practices of Latino/a and transfronterizo/a (border-crossing) engineering students were highly-situated, multimodal, and translingual, rather than uniform, static, and “skills”-based. These practices complicated, resisted, and sometimes reinscribed ideological binaries such as English/Spanish, home/school, official/unofficial, and academic/popular. Findings from this study challenge the institutional emphasis, often tacit, on monolingual, decontextualized communication skills development, both in engineering and beyond, within higher education in the US.

Authors

• Erika L. Mein, The University of Texas - El Paso

• Alberto Esquinca, The University of Texas - El Paso

• Mayra Lizeth Ortiz-Galarza, The University of Texas - El Paso

• Rocio E Gallardo, The University of Texas - El Paso