11 Students’ Right to Their Own Writing Voice: How Three “Literacy Brokers” Can Support “Agentive Participation”

In the 1970s, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) issued a statement titled “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” which has widely been abbreviated to “SRTOL.” Here is the statement as it was originally adopted in 1974:

We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language–the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language. (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1974, “To Readers of CCC”)

This statement affirms some radical ideas about language diversity in education that still resonate today. These ideas were born in the crucible of protest and activism by African American scholars, with Geneva Smitherman at the forefront. These scholars fought for the full recognition of non-mainstream dialects of English, particularly Black English Vernacular (BEV). Linguists have long asserted that Black English Vernacular was a valid form of English, in every way cognitively and expressively equal to mainstream Englishes. Writing scholars asked: why shouldn’t students claim the right to bring their whole selves, language resources and all, to the classroom? While “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” was rooted in the fight for widespread recognition of Black students’ linguistic equality, this statement also supported recognition of the linguistic equality of multilingual students. As Smitherman (1995) puts it so eloquently, “Black students’ right to their own language has made possible all students’ right to their own language” (p. 25). This essay builds on SRTOL to argue that multilingual students not only have the right to their own language, but also have the right to write in their own academic voice. In order to do this, multilingual writers and international students can use three literacy brokers to help them access academic writing: writing centres, office hours, and generative AI.

Professors who are not specifically trained in inclusive writing feedback may make multilingual international students feel they are “bad writers.” Many multilingual students, whether their first language is something other than English, or whether they speak a type of World English, may feel that they are not meeting the expectations for writing in North American Academic English. Such students may be empowered by the fact that SRTOL places the responsibility for supporting multilingual students on teachers by asking them to “uphold the right of students to their own language.”

Linguists and writing scholars have offered several insights about Academic English that help to support multilingual writers finding and writing in their own voice:

• First, they have noted that “Standard” English is a myth. Multilingual students, who shuttle between languages and dialects, know that language is not stable, fixed, or perfect. Language is organic. It evolves, grows, and changes over time, for different purposes and cultural contexts (Firth & Wagner, 2007).
• Second, everyone has to learn how to write in Academic English (Matsuda, 2006). As Heng Hartse and Morphett (2024) put it, “Academic and professional writing is a second language for everyone: no one is born knowing how to properly cite sources or craft airtight business proposals” (“Needed at All Universities” section). Students whose home language is close to Standard English have an advantage, but even they need to adapt to new expectations.
• Finally, for the reasons above, there is no such thing as linguistic homogeneity in a university classroom (Matsuda, 2006). Classrooms are full of students from a wealth of demographics, and now — more than ever — with the easy flow of immigration and travel and exchange around the world, classrooms are cosmopolitan.

Given these points, many writing scholars believe that when multilingual writers are invited to draw on their linguistic and cultural backgrounds, their writing creates new critical pathways for Academic English (Canagarajah, 2013). In other words, multilingual writers have a unique writing voice that is important to and necessary for academic discourse today.

While linguists and scholars have challenged Standard English, there are professors and employers who still want writing to conform to certain norms. The conflict over students’ use of diverse Englishes is ongoing. Expectations regarding students conforming to the dominant variety of English are therefore not the same across all disciplines and classes at universities. The good news is there are resources on campus to help multilingual writers learn how to write Academic English in a way that preserves their thoughts and writing voices while still helping them effectively meet different expectations.

Most campuses offer resources for writing clearly and accessibly in Academic English, while still potentially preserving the writer’s unique writing voice. This essay calls these resources “literacy brokers,” borrowing a term from Mya Poe (2013). Poe (2013) uses this term to describe the networks of collaborators and mentors who give multilingual writers access to “resources in order to gain proficiency with disciplinary discourse” (p. 177). Literacy brokers can support the writing journey by making academic writing norms and expectations more transparent to multilingual writers, thereby empowering them and boosting their writing confidence.

The three literacy brokers discussed here –writing centres, office hours, and generative AI – while very useful, come with their conflicts and biases. Situated as they are in North American institutional systems, which are shaped by a predominantly Western-European worldview, these literacy brokers can sometimes feel tricky for multilingual students to access. Ilona Leki (1995) documents no less than fifteen coping strategies that multilingual students employ while completing a standard writing task in their academic program. The layers of coping strategies required by multilingual students to navigate the systems, power dynamics, and cultural norms of writing centres, office hours, or generative AI can be an obstacle to sustained use. To that end, the section below gives a brief overview of each literacy broker with an eye to making it less mysterious and hopefully a little easier to use.

Literacy Broker 1: The Writing Centre

In her essay on writing centres, Genie Giaimo (2024) reflects: “Writing can be a lonely, stressful process. Writing centers mitigate such issues. They also propagate community—and joy” (section 6, para. 3). Studies have shown that students who regularly use the writing centre, especially diverse student writers, feel more confident about their writing and perform better on their writing tasks (Salazar, 2021). This is great news for multilingual writers. Giaimo (2024) also says, “[T]here are few places … where a group of trained and kind experts will engage with not only your writing but also your ideas” (section 1, para. 5). In these appointments, writing consultants employ a range of techniques to help students improve their writing strategies and confidence. In other words, while multilingual students may come to the writing centre to have their grammar or citations “fixed,” ideally, they leave the writing appointment with one or two more tools for the writing task. As Stephen North (1984) once wrote of writing centre staff, “Our job is to produce better writers, not better writing” (p. 438). In this way, the goal of writing centres is to empower students as writers.

Even with all these writing centre benefits in mind, multilingual students from outside Canada may still struggle to navigate the social context of the writing centre as well as the cultural norms associated with accessing and using this service. Since multilingual students can use positional agency to effectively “take action” in a particular academic context once they understand that context (Vaughn, 2018, as cited in Karam et al., 2021, p. 372), some unpacking of the context would be helpful.

Perhaps the most powerful resource writing centres offer is the one-on-one appointment with a writing consultant. Writing consultants can be fellow students who have been especially trained to help with writing; they can also be professional writing staff or writing faculty. While it might feel intimidating to meet with a writing consultant, these staff members genuinely want to help writers succeed. Understanding the social context of the writing centre means understanding that writing consultants do not grade or have any power over the formal assessment of writing. In addition, many writing centres provide confidentiality for the students who meet with them. That means that writing consultants will not talk to the writer’s faculty members or peers without the writer’s consent. In light of all this, multilingual students can make the most of their experience at the writing centre by being as clear as possible about the kind of writing support they need. For example, multilingual students can ask for help with the following writing tasks: understanding the writing assignment requirements, generating writing for a writing assignment, structuring and organizing ideas, writing a thesis statement, structuring paragraphs, understanding grammar and mechanics, learning pronunciations, and formatting citations.

Literacy Broker 2: Office Hours

Multilingual students can meet directly with their faculty to get help with writing assignments through office hours, when professors or teaching assistants open hours in their schedule for students to visit and ask questions about course work, get clarity on course concepts, or generally connect with faculty about learning. Margaret Smith and colleagues (2017) note that focused interactions between students and faculty help build students’ skills and academic belonging, along with their achievements, their confidence, and their aspirations for future paths. Taking the opportunity to use office hours to get clarity on writing assignments for a course is one of the best ways for multilingual students to learn how to do well on a writing assignment.

With that said, as with writing centres, approaching a professor during office hours can be riddled with cultural nuances and power dynamics that are difficult for multilingual students to navigate. To that end, Karam et al. (2021) recommend that students use “agentive participation” to bridge interactions with their teachers (p. 388). By “agentive participation,” they mean that multilingual students actively engage with their teachers and learning environment. Most professors genuinely want to see their students succeed and are happy when students take the opportunity to meet with them during office hours. Multilingual students can exercise “agentive participation” by making connections between what they are studying and their own backgrounds and identities. Sharing to whatever extent they are comfortable about their home cultures and languages in relation to the writing task will help the professor understand how best to support them. The professor will likely learn something about the student’s home culture and language, too, which may improve the inclusivity of the environment. When the professor and student are able to talk about the ways that the student’s home culture and language inform their writing process, it creates opportunities for the student to bring their full writing voice to the assignment, linguistic difference, and all.

Literacy Broker 3: Generative AI

We cannot discuss literacy brokers without naming the most recent writing tool to enter the academic scene. Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has thrown universities into a whirlwind of possibility and panic. This powerful technological tool promises to do the heavy-lifting of academic writing for students, thereby relieving the mountains of pressure on student shoulders, especially multilingual shoulders. But can it really do all that? As the old adage goes, “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” The potential and limitations of generative AI are still a mystery. In the meantime, while there is no doubt that generative AI might be a useful tool for writing and learning, there are two things every multilingual writer should be aware of when considering using generative AI in their writing.

First, while generative AI is very good at creating natural-sounding language, it is not good at thinking (Mahowald et al., 2024). Language and thought are inextricably linked in the writing process for humans. When we write, we shape our thoughts, clarify ideas, and make connections in our brain (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015). However, language and thinking are not equivalent in generative AI. Mahowald et al. (2024) call the assumption that language and thought are equivalent the “good at language > good at thought” fallacy (p. 517). When using generative AI, writers should be careful not to let it “think” for them. Instead, students should keep the thinking for themselves and try to use generative AI to streamline mechanical tasks associated with writing, for example, formatting citations, checking spelling, and correcting grammar.

Second, understanding that generative AI is a product of those who have programmed it is important when considering when and how to use it. This means that “human” biases and prejudices about language can influence the algorithms and coding that guide generative AI. Nearly everything mentioned earlier in this article about the power of linguistic difference in writing is lost on existing versions of generative AI. For example, when students ask generative AI to write for them or revise their original writing, it tends to flatten their writing voices and make them sound like computer-generated prose. SRTOL says that a student’s linguistic background enriches their writing. However, generative AI is not (yet) able to help a student integrate their cultural and linguistic background into their writing in the same way a writing consultant or professor can. So, while it can be tempting to use generative AI to make writing sound “natural,” multilingual students should resist handing over their writing voice to AI. In the end, we can think of generative AI as a literacy broker that supports the writing process, rather than as doing the writing entirely.

Conclusion

The CCCC told students 50 years ago that they had the right to learn and write in their own language. Today, we can build on this statement with the help of literacy brokers to empower multilingual writers to write in their own voice. SRTOL and the consequent research remind us that multilingual writers are not broken writers. They have unique cultural and linguistic resources that enrich academic writing. As the CCCC writers state in SRTOL, the writing of multilingual writers “in whatever dialect, makes sense and is important … [and] we read it and are interested in the ideas and person that the writing reveals” (1974, p. 15).

A Note on This Article

This essay follows the “They Say/I Say” formula outlined by Graff and Birkenstein (2021) in their textbook “They Say/I Say”: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. The essay begins by referencing a pre-existing document from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. This is what Graff and Birkenstein call the “They Say.” The essay uses “They Say” as a starting point to frame the topic and context of the paper. Then the essay pivots to “I Say.” At this point, the essay posits its thesis and key supporting points for the rest of the essay. Students could use the “They Say/I Say” template to organize their next research or position paper.

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