The term translingual highlights the reality that people always shuttle across languages, communicate in hybrid languages and, thus, enjoy multilingual competence. In the context of migration, transnational economic and cultural relations, digital communication, and globalism, increasing contact is taking place between languages and communities. In these contact zones new genres of writing and new textual conventions are emerging that go beyond traditional dichotomies that treat languages as separated from each other, and texts and writers as determined by one language or the other.

Vershawn A. Young. "Keep Code Meshing" Literacy As Translingual Practice: Between Communities and Classrooms. Ed. Suresh Canagarajah. Routledge, 2013. 278-286.

 Motivated by a scholarly interest in race and whiteness studies, and by an ethical commitment to anti-racism work, contributors address a series of related questions: How does institutionalized racism in American education shape the culture of literacy and language education in the writing center? How does racism operate in the discourses of writing center scholarship/lore, and how may writing centers be unwittingly complicit in racist practices? How can they meaningfully operationalize anti-racist work? How do they persevere through the difficulty and messiness of negotiating race and racism in their daily practice?

Vershawn A. Young. "Should Writers Use They Own English?"Writing Centers and the New Racism. Ed. Karen Rowan and Laura Greenfield. Utah State University Press, 2012. 61-74.

A collected volume of original essays, Code-Meshing as World English presents code meshing—blending dialects and languages with standard English—as the better pedagogical alternative to code switching—shifting between dialects or languages in different settings—in teaching literacy to diverse learners.

Vershawn A. Young, Aja Martinez, and Julie Anne Naviaux. "Introduction" Code Meshing as World English: Policy, Pedagogy, Performance. Ed. Vershawn Ashanti Young & Aja Y. Martinez. National Council of Teachers of English, 2011. 1-12.

This paper argues against critic Stanley Fish's assertion that students should not use dialect in academic writing.

Vershawn A. Young. "Should Writers Use They Own English"Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 12/13 (2010): 110-117.

“Your Average Nigga” contends that just as exaggerating the differences between black and white language leaves some black speakers, especially those from the ghetto, at an impasse, so exaggerating and reifying the differences between the races leaves blacks in the impossible position of either having to try to be white or forever struggling to prove they’re black enough. In this essay I recount how I negotiated my own black ghettoto- middle class identity conflict as I facilitated classroom interactions with a black male student from the ghetto.

Vershawn A. Young. "Your Average Nigga" College Composition and Communication 55.4 (2004): 693-715.

Although linguists have traditionally viewed code-switching as the simultaneous use of two language varieties in a single context, scholars and teachers of English have appropriated the term to argue for teaching minority students to monitor their languages and dialects according to context. For advocates of code-switching, teaching students to distinguish between “home language” and “school language” offers a solution to the tug-of-war between standard and nonstandard Englishes. This paper argues that this kind of code-switching may actually facilitate the illiteracy and academic failure that educators seek to eliminate and can promote resistance to Standard English rather than encouraging its use.