D’une langue à l’autre: pour une didactique plurilingue et translangagière de l’écrit

Writing instruction tends to be compartmentalized along clearly demarcated language lines: English or French, first language or additional language. Such monolingual arrangements are at odds with the needs and practices of writers in multilingual situations where one must write in one language using sources in another language and vice versa. For example, it is not uncommon for science students in Québec and France to first write their theses in French using English research articles and then to publish in English while popularizing their results back into French. Another increasingly common practice is to submit a bilingual thesis with English publications inserted into a French framework. Such practices require not only writing and reading abilities in two languages (biliteracy) or more (pluriliteracy), but also the added ability to move effortlessly between languages and modes (translanguaging skills or transliteracy). Drawing on case studies on bilingual writers and other research on writing transfer, multilingual education, and translation, this paper aims to (1) illustrate the challenges of biliteracy and transliteracy development and (2) propose educational strategies for biliteracy and transliteracy at the classroom and curriculum levels