From Error to Agency: Translingual Rhetorical Practice in First-Year Composition Feedback

Abstract

This qualitative research paper examines how rhetoric and composition scholarship frames language difference in first-year composition and how that framing changes the work of teacher feedback. The narrow focus is translingual rhetorical practice: the idea that student writers do not simply bring “errors” into academic writing but actively negotiate language, audience, genre, identity, and power. Using qualitative thematic analysis of a purposive corpus of major rhetoric and composition texts on language difference, multilingual writing, genre, agency, and writing assessment, the study asks how scholars represent student linguistic difference, what assumptions about agency guide feedback, and what pedagogical model follows from a translingual perspective. The findings show four recurring patterns. First, dominant composition practices often treat difference as deficiency even when programs publicly value diversity. Second, translingual scholarship shifts attention from correctness to rhetorical negotiation, making difference a resource for meaning-making. Third, feedback is not a neutral teaching tool; it is a genre that can either reproduce standard language ideology or invite students to make conscious rhetorical choices. Fourth, assessment is the pressure point where progressive language theory often fails to become classroom practice. The paper argues for a rhetorical uptake model of feedback built around noticing, contextualizing, negotiating, and reflecting. Such a model does not abandon academic writing conventions. Instead, it teaches conventions as historically situated choices while protecting students’ right to linguistic agency. The conclusion suggests that translingual feedback can make first-year composition more equitable, rhetorically rigorous, and intellectually honest.