T

/span>The fetish about the English language worldwide testifies to its significance as a language of politics, economics and education.

The different labels attached to English provide evidence of its spread to countries where it is often considered a second, foreign or even alien language. We have such anachronistic labels for English: English as an international language, English as a lingua franca, and world English.

While these labels have long enjoyed proliferation in literature and have remained unchallenged, their validity has now been called into question, giving rise to a contesting label: trans-lingual English.   

Sri Lankan sociologist Suresh Canagarajah has put forward this label in an attempt to raise the reader'€™s consciousness of the danger of the monolingual ideology, surreptitiously imposed through the creation of the labels above.

Alleging the labels occlude the possibility of diversification and hybridity, Canagarajah redefines the English language as a form of trans-lingual practice, shifting the commonly-held monolingual orientation to the language to a liberating orientation.

Whereas the former is suspected to denigrate and suppress individual language repertoires, agency and identity, the latter legitimizes personal knowledge and acknowledges multiple sources of this knowledge as an asset of meaning-making in trans-lingual practice.

The core premise of trans-lingual practice is the negotiation strategies trans-linguals use in attaining success in a global contact zone. Radically different from monolingual orientation, which glorifies the superiority of cognition only, these strategies make use of the rich ecological and semiotic resources and social interactions of trans-linguals.

In the context of language pedagogy, where monolingual ideologies permeate at ease through the language curriculum, teaching materials, methods of teaching and assessment and trans-lingual orientation sees a pedagogical domain as a site of intricate trans-lingual practices. This orientation paves the way for challenging the status quo and opens up the possibility of '€œdeviating'€ from established standards and norms, with the diversity in the global contact zone being the ultimate objective.

Realizing the power of monolingual ideologies to be translated into pedagogical activities, Canagarajah seems to arm the trans-lingual label by devising a sort of template that can be brought to contact zone communication. This template includes acknowledgement of one'€™s position, negotiations, focus on practice rather than form, the co-construction of rules, responsiveness to the joint accomplishment of goals and the reconfiguration of norms and repertoire expansion.

Probably, the most controversial and highly sensitive issue Canagarajah explores in the book deals with how possible academic writing genres can be pluralized in light of trans-lingual practice. For one thing, academic writing has been universally acknowledged as standard written English (SWE). For another, it is axiomatic that deviations from SWE'€™s established norms will lead to stigmatization and embarrassment.

 Yet, rather than speculating over the possibility of diversifying the norms of SWE, Canagarajah builds his arguments from the ground up, drawing from real and vivid instances of non-native English speakers who wrote and had their writing published in top-tier international journals. Through these examples, he provokes the readers to maintain their authorial voice and agency in academic writing through what he calls a '€œcode-meshing'€ strategy.     

The argument of pluralizing SWE seems unpalatable, given the firm grip of Western ideologies as the gate-keepers of knowledge construction and production worldwide. However, Canagarajah contends that SWE is not a monolithic, value-free act of communication, arguing instead that even written discourse is by its very nature a conglomeration of diverse voices.

Amid the West'€™s persistent hegemony in English language education, the presence of this book throws light on the resistant strategies one can employ to be a potent global citizen. The real examples used as illustrations in strengthening the author'€™s arguments are encouraging and can serve as the impetus for challenging cultural and linguistic determinism.

 However, despite the author'€™s claim that trans-lingual practice is not a difficult or esoteric notion, it takes an arduous effort to understand it, let alone practice it in the pedagogical domain.

Without a strong background in sociolinguistics and studies on post-modernism, the reader has to grapple with the contents of the book, especially those related to important conceptual frameworks that the author employs in illuminating his analysis.