Lyn Westergard and Chloe de los Reyes
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
This activity uses food reviews as an entry point for teaching grammatical awareness, specifically adjective strings and intensifiers, within a multilingual undergraduate writing course. Grounded in critical language awareness, the activity positions grammar as a rhetorical resource rather than a set of prescriptive rules. Students explore how writers use grammatical choices to craft tone, articulate perspective, and orient their message to specific audiences. The assignment is informed by scholarship on linguistic justice, which challenges the assumption that so-called “standard” academic English is neutral or inherently superior (Baker-Bell, 2020; Flores & Rosa, 2015). Rather than treating multilingual language practices as deficits, linguistic justice frameworks call educators to interrogate how language hierarchies are socially constructed and tied to race, class, and power. From this perspective, grammar instruction becomes an opportunity not only to analyze form, but also to examine how particular grammatical features are often granted legitimacy while others are not. Drawing on translanguaging theory (García & Wei, 2014), this activity invites students to see their full linguistic repertoires as meaningful resources for communication. Multilingual writers often navigate multiple linguistic systems and discourse communities, strategically shifting registers, styles, and features in response to context. By analyzing contrasting food reviews, students examine how adjective strings, intensifiers, and multimodal elements such as emojis function rhetorically. They then interrogate how judgments about “professional” or “academic” grammar are shaped by broader social norms rather than by inherent linguistic value.