Pedagogical Directions on Language Difference

Delpit's article brought up a teaching problem that I've been thinking about a lot this semester as I approach assessing student writing: the way that I "correct." As background, I've always been in favor of the red pen sort of approach, adding in editing marks on students' papers, correcting spelling and punctuation, crossing out awkward wording and writing in my my own suggestions. My theories as to why I do this (in order of least problematic to most problematic) are: a) because I like to edit and have done a lot of editing work; b) because it was done to/for me as a student; or c) because it feels like I've accomplished something when I grade this way. For me, this feels like I've made my "argument" in response to their writing.

As I mentioned, I know this is problematic. But I think Delpit gets at the heart of why it is when she writes that this correction can actually mar the teacher/student relationship and can impede student's reading and writing, rather than making it more fluent. I notice this more in my online teaching, where the performance of my students in Standard English is much less proficient than at ISU and where all my feedback is necessarily in writing, on the page. When I correct them, they don't just make a change in their habits. Instead, they seem to get defensive about their language. Often, they e-mail me to express frustration at how much they're getting wrong, saying that writing is not their thing or that they've always struggled in English classes. What I've realized is that what is more beneficial (but yes, takes longer) is to summarize tendencies that I notice in their writing and to use those to create lectures for the entire class about why we use certain types of punctuation or what possibilities lie in spellings words different ways. Referring these students to these optional lectures then allows them, hopefully, to feel like they're investigating language on their own and making choices about what mode to employ. At least, I'm hoping that it's more of a choice. This is just one workaround to solve the "correction" problem that I've found, but I'm sure that there are better out there. I find it particularly challenging in an online class, where the curriculum is fairly rigid and it's more difficult to have one-on-one conversations with students.

Ways with Words: Heath's Limitations

I found the second half of Heath's book to be more satisfying in how it discussed applying these ethnographic techniques to the classroom in both teacher and student activity. It seemed to me that it was in those last two chapters where the actual "project" of this work was situated; in other words, how do we go from observation of language patterns to productive use of that knowledge?

I want to focus most of my attention on the article "The Madness(es) of Reading and Writing Ethnography," which we also read for today. What I responded to here most was that, rather than stridently defending her own work, Heath acknowledges her own opacity to the "stylistic features" and "literary tropes" that are present in her work (258). She later addresses the ways in which her identity intruded on her research in ways that she did not thoroughly acknowledges in the text. She calls her competing goals at the time of the writing (e.g. as a mother, a teacher, a researcher, a community member) her "schizophrenic existence" (259). I think Heath is right to point out the fact that these conflicts exist and should be examined, but that this is merely one account by one researcher. So although last time in class we marveled at how extensive the study is and how difficult to reproduce, it's still, by its very nature, only a fraction of what was actually occurring at that time, in those communities.

To that end, the other interesting argument of the article is the way in which she reminds the reader that we are reading this with the benefit of theoretical knowledge that she did not have when writing it. She says "we impose our ideals of equity and access on the past" (262). It is not that she did not consider issues of gender, but her methods were a product of their time. It reminds us that we all write within the boundaries of our moment, that social and historical context that we cannot escape, no matter how enlightened, thorough, or scholarly we may be.

Heath and the Enormous Ethnography

Heath acknowledges in her prologue to Ways with Words that the study it contains is unlikely to be repeatable and in fact was conducted under what we might consider to be ideal conditions, given that "no deadlines, plans, or demands from an outside funding agency set limits on the time or direction of the cooperative arrangements between teachers and anthropologist" (7). This lack of constraint ended up producing an incredibly detailed ethnography with what seems to be a reasonable ambition (i.e. to track and compare how language development occurs among two different populations) but an enormous scale.

I thought it was an effective rhetorical choice to begin with the acknowledged limitations of the study (e.g. the lack of quantifiable data it produced). Yet she defends her research by saying that more quantitative results wouldn't necessarily have acknowledged the social and cultural contexts of the study. She also refers to the book as an unfinished story -- placing the importance on the narrative nature of the book, again moving it away from expectations of empiricism. This narrative tendency is demonstrated even in the first sentence. Rather than beginning with her claim, the theoretical framework for the study, a description of her method or her participants, Heath begins by setting the scene: "A quiet early morning fog shrouds rolling hills blanketed by pine-green stands of timber, patched with fields of red clay" (19). She is orienting the reader to the fact that this is a story of a place and its people. It's something different than we might expect when we think of a "study."

I take that interest in narrative to be part of the reason why she spends so much space orienting the reader to the material conditions of the participants' lives as well (particularly in  Chapter Two, where we learn everything from the layout of the towns and the decor of the homes to how money is typically spent). Yet I couldn't help but wonder if, for the sake of a coherent "story," there isn't a problem with some of the essentializing that Heath does. The gender and racial identities of these participants is often generalized (i.e. "the men do this" or "Trackton children do this"). It goes back to my post last week, where I asked about when we can/can't generalize as researchers. It occurred to me that a study like this almost requires generalization, because without it, how do you represent this (presumably) massive amount of data? Given that we're only halfway through the book, I'm reserving judgment about her conclusions, but I think it's an interesting quandry: Is there such a thing as too much data?

Critical Ethnography and Generalizability

I thought Hammersley's article was useful in the way that it unpacked what seems to be a very loaded term. He outlined the older, anthropological use of the term and contrasted it with modern interpretation, including:
-the ethnography may include qualitative and quantitative data (3)
-ethnography doesn't necessarily involve "living with" your subjects (4)
-ethnography is now more likely to take place over months than years, assisted by more advanced data collection technology like audio and video recorders (5)

He also brought up some of the risks inherent in ethnographic research, such as overgeneralizing results to assume they characterize "typical" activity (5). Later, he notes that critics of ethnography have charged it with "only documenting the surface of events in particular local settings, rather than seeking to understand the deeper social forces that shape the whole society, and that operate within those settings" (7). I was interested in the conflict between these two positions and how and when, whether in ethnography or other research methodologies, we can move from the specific to the general and vice versa.

This conflict is present in Canagarajah's article as well, in that he first acknowledges the risk of the teacher/researcher position and details why his particular subject position (including his status as a native Tamil, bilingual English/Tamil speaker, and progressive professor) might bear on his findings. After examining this a bit, he then moves to assert the relevance of his data by stating, "Although the uniqueness of each teacher/researcher-student interaction should not be slighted in favor of the generalizability of this study, we have to note that almost all Sri Lankan ESOL teachers are Westernized, middle-class, bilingual, native Lankans like me" (620-621). Thus even though he is cautious about generalizing, he wants the reader to know that this data might be common across the experience of many Sri Lankan teachers.

In approach the subject of critical ethnography, the questions then become: Can one design a study that is both "micro" in its execution (i.e. involving specific and close analysis), yet allow the researcher to make larger claims? Should "larger claims," as I've said clumsily here, ever be a researcher's goal? Does it do a disservice to your subjects to attempt to make larger claims or to shy away from them? In what ways is the subject able to assist in, contest, or question your focus and its "size"?

Education and "The Market"

As a lot of the other blogs are ably tackling the questions of literacy and ideology in this week's readings, I thought I would use mine to discuss something that came up in Gee's breakdown of the recent history of education. In particular, I wanted to talk about Gee's discussion of the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980's and the "market-driven approach" to education that resulted (27). He discussed how the purpose of education became churning out knowledge workers, technical workers, and service workers in order to satisfy a capitalistic economic system. He correlates this drive with the resultant emphasis on standardized testing and curricula and the stratification of school systems, with schools in privileged communities getting access to resources and an "elite" education and an emphasis in poorer communities on learning "the basics" (30).

For me, this called to mind how this market-driven approach manifests itself everywhere, even in practices within ISU and our department in specific. I've often heard that the way to justify particular elements of our curriculum is to tie them in some way to our students "professionalization" or to imply that the skills they are learning in our English classes will help them be more effective workers in other disciplines. While I don't think there's anything wrong with tying our educational practices to our students' future careers (as it would be nice for them to leave school and get jobs to ensure their survival), I always bristle a little at the notion that our job is to discipline students to participate more effectively in the capitalist system. I think the particular problem is that instead of talking about how to empower our students to challenge the status quo, how to make our students better critical thinkers, better problem-solvers in their interpersonal relationships, or even kinder, more altruistic human beings, there is an implicit institutional mandate to focus on how to make them better workers. It's not the kind of thinking that would be present in our university mission statement, but I hear it discussed all the time, even as a graduate student and I have to assume it is discussed even more often by faculty and the administration.

Applying a Translingual Approach

After this week's reading, it occurred to me that although changing attitudes toward language instruction in a composition classroom is a battle that has to be waged on multiple fronts (i.e. against those opposed in university administration, in other departments, within our department, within our writing program, our students, ourselves), the move toward a translingual classroom is a logical reflection of our increasingly translingual society. It's a small example, but I was thinking about how my nephew, son of monolingual English L1 parents, already knows several words in Spanish due to limited exposure to Dora the Explorer. Though he's not quite school age, he may find himself in classes later on that will either encourage him to capitalize on that kernel of knowledge or not. The language he's learned and more obviously, the language learned by those growing up in multilingual environments where code switching is the norm, should not be disregarded. Horner et al. see a pedagogical approach that can integrate this knowledge as useful for all students. They state, "This approach insists on viewing language differences and fluidities as resources to be preserved, developed, and utilized. Rather than respond to language differences only in terms of rights, it sees them as resources" (304). It makes perfect sense that I should want, as a teacher, to utilize every possible advantage that I can to get students to write interesting, dynamic work. So if employing a translingual approach will broaden my students' ability to communicate, why not try it?

My next thought was that enacting this kind of language policy on the classroom level might involve reconceptualizing some of our extant notions about what constitutes formal writing and what doesn't. Specifically, I was struck by how the chart on page 647 in the Tardy article demonstrates a decrease in the percentage of teachers willing to include practices that integrate other languages relative to the "seriousness" or finality of the assignment. So it seems to me that when we label an assignment as "final paper", "formal writing", or "graded work" it carries with it a hierarchy that demands, at least according to most teachers, a use of Standard English. I wonder if inverting that very structure might be what gets students to write more creative, expressive work. For instance, if students are encouraged to use the Standard (whatever that means to us or them) while drafting, but are then encouraged to make the writing match their own voice in revision, maybe the resultant work will be more engaging or will at least suit the individual writing it. I suppose I’m feeling that maybe it’s not just the language that we allow or encourage our students to use that matters, but the way that we frame the writing that we require them to do.

From Contrastive to Intercultural Rhetoric

I think one of the things that I took away from this week's reading is the value of dialogue in developing our theories. It's admirable that Connor was willing to adapt and rethink "contrastive rhetoric" (including an all-important name change) in response to specific criticism while simultaneously defending its value. She acknowledges that the original definitions of culture being exploited by contrastive rhetoric could be considered essentialist and that intercultural rhetoric needs to account for the dynamic, changing nature of culture (Beyond Texts, 292). In the same article, Connor proposes that the application of new research methodologies will allow for more specific, targeted study of how culture influences writing.

Speaking to the pedagogical implications of intercultural rhetoric research, I thought Li made an interesting point when he stated, "many of the flaws in our research stem less from the misconceived notion of culture, a notion that is both pervasive and elusive and probably all too broad as an analytical category, than from the misguided view of culture as an omniscient explanation and the assumption that there is one cultural prototype that students from the same cultural background would all pay homage to” (17-18). I think this applies to some of the discussions we’ve been having about how we regard non-standard English in student writing. The trouble occurs when we assume too much or are too eager to attribute differences in student writing to any one aspect of their identity.  These conclusions do not take into account a writer’s agency, as Kubota and Lehner point out in their article. Particularly at the college level, when students have presumably been writing in some form for many years of schooling, we can’t assume that students are entirely unaware of the standard. But is their deviation from that standard a product of culture alone? What about the interplay of questions that Kubota and Lehner suggest they might be considering: “How can I add English writing to my existing literacies?, Do I want to add English writing to these?, What do I intend to achieve with such an addition?” (21) I think a responsible teacher would also ask herself similar questions when evaluating student work: Are they writing according to how I expect them to write or according to their own definition of good writing, which may or may not have come from academic or standard English? Is the way they’re writing a reaction to some aspect of the assignment itself? Does their use of language follow the conventions of the genre I’ve assigned?, etc. “Critical” here, becomes the key word, particularly in how we assess our students’ needs and teach toward those needs.

Week 4: Codemeshing, Creativity, and Learning-by-Doing

For me, what stood out most about our readings for this week were the diverse ways in which English is negotiated and adapted by novice speakers (to use Canagarajah's preferred term). All four of the articles we read depict a growing English-speaking population that is flexible and creative in their use of English, that is aware of and relies on context to enable specific interactions in English, and that is not flouting Standard English, but instead "work[ing] from within the existing rules to transform the game" (Canagarajah, "World Englishes" 599).

While I would previously have assumed that novice English speakers would be at a disadvantage when it came to deriving an understanding of the conventions of a given genre by looking at samples, both Canagarajah and You offer examples of the innovative strategies these speakers use to negotiate unfamiliar speaking/writing situations. You's work with the online message boards of Chinese writers of English shows that novice speakers will not only learn conventions of English through these conversations, but will create new conventions unique to the codemeshing of Chinese, English, and Internet language. This is one of several instances in which novice speakers are adapting English to suit the rhetorical situation and to meet very particular needs, primarily social and professional. (I'm also recalling last week's reading by Ibrahim that showed us a similar socially-driven use of hip-hop English by novice speakers).

At the same time, what struck me about Canagarajah's article on academic writing is the assertion that no one innately knows how to do this specific kind of writing. Rather, he reminds us that "it is not formal study of rules, but actually practicing the relevant discourse of the community one wishes to join that leads to one's insider professional status" ("Peripheral Participation" 197). Everyone has to learn this research article genre by practicing it. The difference is that advanced English speakers have access to resources that enable that learning (e.g. a community of peers interested in publishing, technologies that enable certain kinds of research, a variety of texts both popular and obscure). In spite of this, novice speakers are still committed to learning-by-doing. So the question becomes: How can we facilitate this learning-by-doing in our pedagogy, in a way that allows student work to use language creatively, to incorporate their voices and language varieties in a way that doesn't compromise the academic context of the assignment? I like Canagarajah's suggestion of creating codemeshed academic texts, but I wonder how this works in practice: How does it get presented to students? What this would look like in an assignment? How would this be adapted for students who already speak/write in a more standard form?

Week 3: Hip-Hop Language and the Classroom

The statement that resonated most with me from the readings this week follows Ibrahim's discussion of language use as a method of identification and belonging for the African students in his study. He states, on page 365, that "one invests where one sees oneself mirrored." I was immediately troubled by the statement. The question for me became: If I am not a mirror of my students, in appearance, cultural or socioeconomic background, language variety, or otherwise (of course, there are dozens of categorizations that separate me from any one of my students), how will they become invested in me and, by extension, the course?

Ibrahim uses this concept of mirroring as part of a larger call to action, asking teachers to "First, identify the different sites in which our students invest their identities and desires, and, second, develop materials that engage our students’ raced, classed gendered, sexualized, and abled identities” (366). This allowed me to then read his "where one sees oneself mirrored" as a request that students see themselves represented in my pedagogy, my assignments, and the day-to-day teaching of the class. This is somewhat of a relief, in that it takes some of the burden off of me to be a hip-hop scholar or a fluent speaker of AAE or any other variety of English I might encounter in the classroom. At the same time, there has to be room in my pedagogy to allow for students to teach me what they know, what their practices are, what they see in the world that feels relevant to them, and what they could be opened up to based on their backgrounds and experiences.

This is where I see the "critical awareness" discussed in Alim to be so important. Asking students to do ethnographies and other projects in which they have to pay attention to their language, something to which they may not be accustomed regardless of how "standard" their English is, seems like it could be a revelatory experience for both them and me. It might also help navigate some of the difficult territory that I envisioned getting into when we spoke about the Matsuda and Matsuda article and the notion of "teaching the non-dominant forms." If I’m not “teaching” it, but I’m learning it based on their research (as Ibrahim says, according to a Freireian model), I don’t see how it could be oppressive to students who reject non-standard English or to those who speak a non-standard variety. 

With this in mind, it seems to me that part of cultivating that awareness has to include asking students about the influences on their language that exist beyond the family, their peers, and the classroom. It has to move into a discussion of popular culture and the movies, music, websites, etc. that affect their ideas about what should and shouldn’t be said and what constitutes cool/weird/uncool, modern/outdated language.  If we deny popular culture in language learning, we’re denying the tremendous effect it has on our students’ lives, identities, and relationships. As Pennycook (quoting Grossberg) states in Chapter 5: “Popular culture is implicated in the ‘multilayered, fragmented collection of meanings, values, and ideas that we both inherit and construct and which largely define our taken-for-granted interpretations of the world’” (81). If students are already doing this “tak[ing]-for-granted,” asking them to be more observant and critical about the language they're hearing and speaking seems appropriate. 

Week 2

A common thread that ran throughout the texts we read was the push-and-pull between the homogenization of language and culture that the spread of English can bring and the potential for varieties of English to make the language more useful and to become forces for resistance. I could not help but think about the imposition of language as it happens through globalization and colonization and to compare that to my own teacherly ideology. I think a lot of well-intentioned, but perhaps under-informed teachers (and by this, I really mean myself) recognize the conflict in imposing expectations about student language use. Does it serve students better to teach them what they may be expected to know or to try to appreciate and incorporate what they already do know? To clarify, I often feel like I am white-washing (what would a better term be? Standard English-washing?) students’ unique expression when I “correct” their grammar, move them away from the vernacular, or assume what they meant to write/say is different from what they actually wrote/said. Of course, this feels oppressive and I want to work against it. I found the Matsuda article useful in this regard, in that it advocated teaching dominant and non-dominant varieties, while also promoting an understanding of the importance of context, audience, situation, and credibility.

At the same time, I keep returning to Pennycook’s discussion of hip hop English as (he quotes Ibrahim) a “counterhegemonic undertaking” (11). How, then, could our classrooms become sites for such an undertaking? I’m considering this question in my current position as a composition instructor, but I haven’t felt as confused about it when I’ve taught creative writing in the past. In the space of a writing workshop, hybrid, non-standard, vernacular, informal, “incorrect” language is as common as language that adheres to Standard English. That’s not said to valorize creative writing, as I think the standards of “legibility” and “comprehensibility” that Matsuda describes are met no better in an introductory creative writing course than they are in an English composition course. Rather, I think it says a lot about my skewed theories and underlying generalizations. Why are my standards for academic/professional language still one way, while those for creative pursuits are another? Along those lines, am I fully able to “differentiate between ‘errors’ and creative innovations” (Bolton 458)? These are questions I have to consider as I consider teaching both in my specialization and outside of it.

Trying this out

Hi everyone,
This is my first time blogging for a class (and blogging in general). Just hoping this posts correctly!
-Erin