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?