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?