Eligible students can submit a paper to the Plurilingual Prize category in addition to their relevant year category. The same paper can be submitted to both categories, or different papers can be submitted. 

 

The Plurilingual Prize reflects one of the contest’s foundational goals of recognizing and celebrating the excellence of multilingual and/or plurilingual writing done at SFU.

Watch a video explaining the Plurilingual Prize and including a reading from a prize winner: 

What is the Plurilingual Prize?

The prizes in this category will be awarded to papers that showcase the writer's skills across languages and writing strategies. In particular, this prize focuses on the writer's plurilingual approach to writing and their incorporation of multiple languages and/or multiple forms of English into their writing. 

Note: papers written for SFU courses can be revised to bring in multiple languages and other plurilingual writing strategies. 

The Plurilingual Prize Writing Prompt

For the Plurilingual Prize only students can submit either

1. a paper originally written for an SFU course, or

2. a paper written specifically for the writing contest.

Papers written for the contest should address this prompt:

Write a 500 to 2,500 word paper that engages plurilingual writing strategies to tell your readers about the way you use language(s) in your learning. Your reflections can include your language use both inside and outside of the classroom and in ways that are visible to others (example, in your Canvas responses) and invisible to others (example, in your personal notetaking, use of translation programs, etc.). How do these visible and invisible aspects of your language use come together to support your learning in an English dominated environment?

For the purposes of the writing contest, plurilingual writing strategies include:

• Papers that use multiple languages in the writing
• Papers that use multiple styles/dialects/forms of English in the writing
• Papers that engage approaches to writing outside of the standardized academic conventions
• Papers that engage with the relationship between language, knowledge, and culture in their content
• And any combinations of the above

Who can enter this category? 

The Plurilingual Prize is open to all eligible undergraduate students* at SFU. 

The Plurilingual Prize is intended to recognize excellent engagement with plurilingualism in writing: the focus of this category is on the writing and rhetorical strategies used in the paper, not on the identity of the author. Multilingual writers are not required to submit for the Plurilingual Prize - students who self-identify as English language learners, EAL, ESL, etc. are welcome to submit to any category of the contest for which they are eligible. 

We hope that students will submit papers in this category that use more than one language, the writing must still be comprehensible in English for our judges. It is also possible to submit papers to this category that are solely or primarily written in English, but that engage with forms of written English outside of the dominate academic English paradigm. Resources and examples are provided below. 

* To be eligible, students must be working on their first undergraduate degree. 

Criteria for Adjudication 

The overall goal of these guidelines is to ensure that the contest remain celebratory of students' writing, including writing that is submitted to the contest but isn't selected for a prize.  

Higher order concerns 

• The paper is the students’ own work. Any use of GenAI tools in the research or writing of the paper is clearly indicated in a transparency statement.  

• The paper is written in a language, style, and organizational structure that is understandable by an educated, interdisciplinary audience. 

• The paper’s central thesis, focus, hypothesis, or observation is interesting, accessible to an interdisciplinary reader, and richly developed. 

• The key arguments of the paper are clearly supported by appropriate evidence.  

• A deep and nuanced understanding of the subject matter is evident throughout the paper. 

• The writing style engages the reader. 

• Depending on the subject matter at hand, the author makes appropriate use of unbiased and inclusive writing strategies. Relevant resources to support this criterion include: 

• Dr. Gregory Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style  

• inclusive and antiracist writing guides  

• APA bias-free language guide  

• Radical Copyeditor’s style guide for writing about transgender people  

Lower order concerns 

• Transitions between paragraphs and arguments are effective  

• Vocabulary is well-chosen and there is variety in sentence structures. 

• Citations are largely done correctly  

• Paper shows evidence of thoughtful revision/editing. 

Judges must give equitable consideration to all writers. The contest welcomes papers written "with an accent" and papers that challenge the traditional hegemonic norms of academic writing.  

Resources and Examples

Read last year's Plurilingual Prize winning papers here. 

Read The Lyre Magazine's special issue "Found in Translation," which features several examples of plurilingual writing. 

Lori Salem from Temple University and Leslie Allison from Rowan University Writing Centre have put together this chart that describes the choices that writers make when code-meshing (i.e., working with more than one language or language style in their writing). The chart also describes the degree of potential challenge for the reader that can arise from these choices. 

Lori and Leslie also compiled a number of samples of different published texts that use code-meshing in different ways. 

Students interested in entering this category, may also find it useful to read this chapter:

Marshall, S. (2021). Plurilingualism and the Tangled Web of Lingualisms. The Routledge Handbook of Plurilingual Language Education, 46-64.

Learn more

You are welcome to reach out to us with any questions. Email slc-writing-contest@sfu.ca