Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition : Global Interrogations, Local Interventions [1 ed.] 9780809333394, 9780809333387

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REWORKING ENGLISH IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION

REWORKING ENGLISH IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION Global Interrogations, Local Interventions Edited by Bruce Horner and Karen Kopelson

Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale

Copyright © 2014 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University Chapter 2 copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Hall; chapter 5 copyright © 2014 by LuMing Mao; chapter 6 copyright © 2014 by Rachel Constance Jackson; chapter 8 copyright © 2014 by Nancy Bou Ayash; chapter 10 copyright © 2014 by Joan Mullin, Carol Peterson Haviland, and Amy Zenger All rights reserved Epigraph in chapter 6 excerpted from “My People,” written by Woody Guthrie, © copyright Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc.; all rights reserved; used by permission Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 14

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reworking English in rhetoric and composition : global interrogations, local interventions / edited by Bruce Horner and Karen Kopelson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-3338-7 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-8093-3338-4 (paperback) ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-3339-4 (ebook) 1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 2. English language— Composition and exercises—Study and teaching. 3. Report writing— Study and teaching. 4. Language and languages—Study and teaching. 5. Rhetoric—Social aspects. 6. Language and culture. 7. English language—Globalization. I. Horner, Bruce, 1957– editor of compilation. II. Kopelson, Karen, [date] editor of compilation. PE1404.R468 2014 808'.0420711—dc23 2013042437 Printed on recycled paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

To all those students, teachers, writers, and speakers we have known for their past and ongoing accomplishments in reworking English

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition— Global Interrogations, Local Interventions 1 Bruce Horner I. Reworking Language

1. The Being of Language 13 Marilyn M. Cooper 2. Multilinguality Is the Mainstream 31 Jonathan Hall 3. English Only through Disavowal: Linguistic Violence in Politics and Pedagogy 49 Brice Nordquist 4. Critical Literacy and Writing in English: Teaching English in a CrossCultural Context   64 Weiguo Qu II. Locations and Migrations: Global/Local Interrogations 5. From the Spread of English to the Formation of an Indigenous Rhetoric 77 LuMing Mao 6. The People Who Live Here: Localizing Transrhetorical Texts in Gl/ Oklahoma Classrooms 90 Rachel C. Jackson vii

viii

Contents

7. Working English through Code-Meshing: Implications for Denigrated Language Varieties and Their Users 103 Vivette Milson-Whyte 8. U.S. Translingualism through a Cross-National and CrossLinguistic Lens 116 Nancy Bou Ayash III. Pedagogical/Institutional Interventions 9. Toward “Transcultural Literacy” at a Liberal Arts College 131 Patricia Bizzell 10. Import/Export Work? Using Cross-Cultural Theories to Rethink Englishes, Identities, and Genres in Writing Centers 150 Joan Mullin, Carol Peterson Haviland, and Amy Zenger 11. The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project: Youth Culture, Literacy, and Critical Pedagogy “in Place” 166 David A. Jolliffe 12. Rethinking Markedness: Grammaticality Judgments of Korean ESL Students’ Writing 179 Junghyun Hwag and Joel Hardman 13. Relocalized Listening: Responding to All Student Texts from a Translingual Starting Point 191 Vanessa Kraemer Sohan

Afterword: On the Politics of Not Paying Attention (and the Resistance of Resistance)   207 Karen Kopelson



Appendix: Survey   221



Works Cited   227

Contributors   247 Index   251

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MANY OF THE ideas and insights presented in this volume emerged out of work accomplished at the University of Louisville English department’s 2010 Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, “Working English in Rhetoric and Composition: Global/Local Contexts, Commitments, Consequences.” We are grateful to Min-Zhan Lu, the conference director, for designing and organizing that conference, and to Thomas Watson, whose bequest made the conference possible. We are grateful to JAC for permission to reprint portions of LuMing Mao’s essay “The Economics of Writing Writ Large: The Rhetoric of Cultural Nationalism,” which appeared in JAC 32.3–4 (2012): 513–39, and to the estate of Woody Guthrie for permission to reprint the poem “My People” by Woody Guthrie. We thank the University of Louisville’s Committee on Academic Publications for providing funding in support of this project, and for their support and encouragement we thank the University of Louisville English department’s outgoing chair, Susan Griffin; its incoming chair, Glynis Ridley; and other colleagues at the university. Thanks go to Karl Kageff of Southern Illinois University Press for his early interest in the project and for his support and guidance throughout, to Barb Martin and Wayne Larsen at the press for helping us see the book through to completion, and to Julie Bush for her scrupulous copyediting. Thanks go to our reviewers, Catherine Prendergast and Kate Mangelsdorf, who provided valuable suggestions on earlier versions of this collection, and to Nancy Bou Ayash and Kathryn Perry for their helpful research and editorial assistance. Thanks go most of all to our contributors, without whose efforts this book would not exist. Finally, we thank our families and friends for their patience and support as we worked on this book.

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REWORKING ENGLISH IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION

INTRODUCTION

Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition— Global Interrogations, Local Interventions Bruce Horner

THIS COLLECTION RESPONDS to the field of rhetoric and composition’s growing recognition that “English” can no longer be taken for granted as the assumed linguistic and institutional home territory of its courses, programs, and scholarship, within whose conceptual horizons its work naturally takes place. This recognition takes three interlocking forms, the first two of which are commonly understood to work in tandem. In the first of these forms of recognition, the linguistic diversity and heterogeneity of students enrolling in composition courses is increasingly undeniable, making multilinguality, rather than monolinguality, the “mainstream,” as Jonathan Hall elaborates in his chapter for this collection, if not yet the cultural norm. Not only are there more students with different language backgrounds populating composition courses; more and more of these students’ linguistic repertoires defy monolinguist ideology’s insistence on one language, one identity, one nation (Harklau, Losey, and Siegal; Horner, “From English-Only”; Horner and Lu; Leung, Harris, and Rampton; Matsuda, “Myth”). These circumstances raise the questions of which language(s) students are to write in, when, and why, questions unimaginable within the framework of the English-only ideology dominating composition for most of its history (Horner and Trimbur). Second, rhetoric and composition is increasingly recognizing that the demarcation of a single, stable, monolithic, internally uniform set of forms known as “English” is inadequate to practices with English locally and globally. As research on World Englishes and uses of English as a lingua franca have demonstrated, and as the variety of the “Englishes” deployed by students (and their teachers) confirms, “English” is plural and the boundaries 1

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Bruce Horner

distinguishing one English from another and (these) English(es) from other languages are fluid.1 Hence, “English” is seen as in need of pluralization—to “Englishes”—and even the entities making up this plurality are themselves seen as intermingling with one another as well as with other languages likewise seen as plural and fluid. To the question of which language students are to write in, these circumstances add the questions of which English (or other language) students are to write “in,” how, and why. It is possible, if increasingly difficult, to accommodate recognition of both the diversity of writers’ linguistic repertoires and the plural and fluid character of English (and other languages) within a purely spatial conceptualization of language as “territory.” That conceptualization holds that when all is said and done, “English” is still a place populated by natives and nonnatives alike whose borders are, admittedly, subject to disputation and whose internal characteristics are admittedly diverse—provinces within what nonetheless continues to be understood as a relatively stable set of forms, however inclusive and fluctuating. Different subterritories, each assigned a version of English or as a stage for so-called English-language learners making the journey to mastery of Standard English, have been mapped out to determine what English is appropriate for whom. In other words, under somewhat closer inspection, the territory known as English can be seen as a mosaic contributing nonetheless to the larger picture and territory of English in general. In this way the diversity of forms that count as English, and the diversity of the population using it, can be acknowledged without necessarily challenging the general stability, centrality, and (cultural) normativity of English. But more and more teacherscholars of rhetoric and composition are recognizing that the conceptual and pedagogical value of preserving a conception of English as stable and secure is not worth the contradictions that it costs. For example, efforts to identify some “core” English, or an originary English from which the many diverse forms are supposed to have developed, have proven to be futile (Pennycook, Language; Saraceni). Further, the ostensible appropriateness of specific forms of English to specific spheres, and the boundaries distinguishing these forms and spheres from one another, fail to hold up under scrutiny. What we are left with, instead, are ideological beliefs about appropriateness that serve to maintain status quo power relations among users of these various forms of English, despite evidence of the actual range of practices with English to be found in various spheres, and the historically demonstrable fluidity of practices claimed as stable (see, for example, Lea and Street; Thaiss and Zawacki). Rather than attempt to



Introduction

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accommodate these deviant facts within an ideological framework of monolingualism, teacherscholars are opting for a different framework altogether, one that takes as the norm not a linguistically homogeneous situation but, rather, linguistic difference—an emerging perspective variously identified as “plurilingual,” “translingual,” “transcultural”—and that heralds ideals of créolité, interculturalité, diversalité (in contrast to, for example, multiculturalism and diversité).2 This third sense in which “English” can no longer be taken for granted as the assumed linguistic and institutional territory of most of the courses and programs identified with rhetoric and composition redefines language from being located purely in space—as “territory”—to being located also temporally in specific utterances and, more generally, in practice.3 This response recognizes the necessary role played by writers and other “users” of language in reworking, and rewriting, English (and other languages) with every utterance. Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration, Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of regionalist discourse, Judith Butler’s conception of the politics of the performative, and Raymond Williams’s articulation of traditions and conventions as always negotiated and negotiable social “agreements,” this response sees the plurality and variability of English(es) and its/their users’ linguistic repertoires not as deviations from an originary and central “core” of English and its (“native”) speakers but, rather, as the norm of language(s) and language use (see Saraceni)—not phenomena to be accommodated within a framework ascribing deviant status to them but, instead, the facts forming the ground on which our conceptual frameworks for language and language use need to be built.4 English, the chapters in this collection argue both individually and collectively, needs to be reworked. The four chapters that make up the first part of this collection contend directly for this radically alternative framework by which to understand language. In “The Being of Language,” Marilyn M. Cooper argues forcefully against the treatment of languages as preexisting, static entities, even in arguments for language rights, insofar as such a conceptualization is at odds with the actual facts of linguistic phenomena and the actual bases of discrimination against some languages and on behalf of others, such as Standard English. Rather than blame particular varieties of language for such perduring problems as racial and ethnic discrimination and environmental degradation, Cooper notes that it is not language per se that is responsible for these but the particular uses to which people put language to produce and perpetuate

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such problems, just as it is people who can engage in alternative practices with language to solve such problems. From a different angle, Jonathan Hall, in “Multilinguality Is the Mainstream,” considers more broadly what U.S. higher education might look like if it assumed multilinguality rather than monolinguality as not only the statistical but the cultural norm. Drawing on the concept of plurilingualism advanced by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and on evidence of multilinguality as the actual statistical norm among U.S. postsecondary students, Hall suggests specific steps we might take in educating ourselves and our future colleagues to address the multilingualism already present in our classrooms, advising that we can build on, rather than attempt to replace, our students’ language repertoires. In “English Only through Disavowal: Linguistic Violence in Politics and Pedagogy,” Brice Nordquist offers a cautionary analysis of the ways language difference is invoked to maintain, rather than to dismantle, monolingualist conceptualizations of language. Drawing on the process Joseph Roach has identified of invoking difference to preserve the notion of a core to culture, called “surrogate doubling,” Nordquist uses debate on making English the official language and style handbooks from Strunk and White onward to demonstrate the ways by which the illusion of a putative, and putatively stable, core Standard English is maintained through strategies of continually invoking differences from that standard for purging or relegation to the periphery. Finally, in “Critical Literacy and Writing in English: Teaching English in a Cross-Cultural Context,” Weiguo Qu further unpacks problematic notions of language—in this case, the treatment of “English” as always and everywhere operating as an instrument of imperialism, excluding the specific reworkings of English in specific, necessarily different locations. This treatment of English, Qu observes, leads ironically to the occlusion of difference within cultures deemed “other” to “English” in order to maintain a view of “English” as always in the position of the powerful. Thus, “homogeneity, which is so detested in the cross-cultural context, is handily imposed on both the powerless and the powerful in an intracultural context in order to dramatize the confrontation between cultures.” Against this monolithic view of English and its power, Qu highlights the historically variable nature and status of what has passed for “English,” the highly selective “final form” definition of “Chinese” culture that is invoked in arguments against English as imperialist, and, in contrast, the specific ways that the very foreignness of English for his current Chinese students enables, in fact, a “de-automatization” of



Introduction

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perception and thinking, eliminating writers’ sense of authoritative certainty and enabling the detection of “differences and other possibilities” of constructing a discourse. The chapters making up part 2 of the collection, “Locations and Migrations: Global/Local Interrogations,” take up the challenges to dominant, monolithic conceptions of language and culture posed in part 1. In alignment with Cooper’s account of language and culture as a complex ecology, Hall’s proposals for working toward a multilingual norm, Nordquist’s analysis of rhetoric’s invoking and purging difference to secure a sense of a cultural and linguistic core, and Qu’s argument for the need to approach the meaning of English and its teaching as always local, each of these chapters explores the complex and shifting significance of specific rhetorics, images, languages, language policies, and teaching in terms of their geohistoric locations— contemporary People’s Republic of China, Oklahoma, Jamaica, Singapore, Lebanon, and Arkansas—understood in dynamic relation with globalizing forces past, present, and prospective. The first two chapters in this section highlight the complex navigation and reworkings of competing languages and rhetorics in the work of cultural identity in globalization. LuMing Mao’s chapter examines the birth of “China English” and the rise of a rhetoric of cultural nationalism as twin manifestations of responses to and interventions in capitalist globalization. Both the disconnection of English from its ostensible place of origin and the Chinese Communist Party’s “rebranding” of Confucianism as an “indigenous” Chinese rhetoric illustrate reworkings of language and discourse—English, Chinese and Chinese script, and the discourses of Western individualism, Chinese Marxism, and Confucianism—to which notions of any of these as authentically “local” or “foreign” are blind. These reworkings, Mao observes, can serve as “boundary-crossing discursive acts” spurring us “to reevaluate our own assumptions regarding . . . self and other, local and global, and dominance and resistance . . . [and open] up new spaces for constructive work.” Rachel C. Jackson, in “The People Who Live Here: Localizing Transrhetorical Texts in Gl/Oklahoma Classrooms,” argues that such revaluations can best work pedagogically through attention to “the particular local material realities of globalization,” for, paradoxically, globalization “occurs most intensely at the local level where individuals experience it in their lives.” Drawing on both the history of Oklahoma and dominant cultural rewritings of that history—including the Broadway musical Oklahoma!—Jackson demonstrates the ways that “Oklahoma has always been far

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more diverse cultural grounds than the dominant narrative . . . suggest‍[s].” However, she observes, its complex history is ordinarily occluded, as “global models [of rhetoric] displace local models and thus obscure the immediate material concerns that globalization creates, a displacement of the local that Jackson links to the historic displacement of native peoples in the history of Oklahoma’s settlement. Jackson’s argument suggests that the reworking of language and rhetoric can serve not simply as production of the new but as a strategy of recuperation and reclamation. The chapters by Vivette Milson-Whyte and Nancy Bou Ayash highlight the necessity of addressing language policies and politics in terms of local/ global specificities. In “Working English through Code-Meshing: Implications for Denigrated Language Varieties and Their Users,” Milson-Whyte cautions against recent arguments that criticize the insistence that students code-shift (that is, use only a single code, such as “Standard English,” deemed “appropriate” for a specific context) and advocate instead that they “mesh” codes ordinarily associated with different contexts (for example, “BEV” [Black English Vernacular] and “WEV” [White English Vernacular]). As she observes, while insistence on code-shifting in the United States does contribute to denigration of language practices of subordinated groups, in Jamaica, code-shifting “is one of the rhetorical strategies commonly practiced by multilinguals . . . [that] can challenge monolingual ideologies represented in standard English-only initiatives,” a strategy demonstrating multilinguals’ agency rather than renunciation of agency. Moreover, neither code-shifting nor code-meshing are options for many Jamaicans, who are predominantly speakers of Jamaican Creole lacking familiarity with Standard Jamaican English and an appreciation of the grammar of Jamaican Creole. Thus Milson-Whyte argues that for the present Jamaican situation, what is needed instead is a policy of legitimating Jamaican Creole as a distinct “code,” a necessary step toward the undermining of English-only ideology. Nancy Bou Ayash, in “U.S. Translingualism through a Cross-National and Cross-Linguistic Lens,” likewise highlights the necessity of attending to local histories and conditions in advancing a translingual approach to writing and cautions against indiscriminate export of language policies and writing pedagogies from one location to another. Analyzing the contradictory responses to global economic forces in the quite different histories and language policies of Singapore and Lebanon, Bou Ayash cautions against the United States adopting policies like Singapore’s that bank on the commodification of English as an ostensible global lingua franca and cross-ethnic link language,



Introduction

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or policies like Lebanon’s that appear to be banking on commodification of a “translingualism” geared toward cross-language commerce. Demonstrating the contradictory forces and effects of such policies, and their imbrication in quite specific local conditions and histories, Bou Ayash argues for the need both to build our pedagogies and policies in relation to local conditions and histories and to beware the vulnerability of these to commodification in response to global economic pressures. The collection’s final part presents more specific explorations of possible pedagogical and institutional interventions aimed at reworking English. In “Toward ‘Transcultural Literacy’ at a Liberal Arts College,” Patricia Bizzell describes her own efforts to take a translingual approach encouraging intercultural competence in teaching individual courses in composition and expository writing. Responding to arguments in earlier sections of the collection as well as to broader arguments on language politics in composition teaching, Bizzell suggests a strategy of directly addressing language issues in one’s teaching of writing as a way to advance students’ translingual dispositions toward language, while cautioning that these need to be supported by cross-curricular, institutional policies on language as well. Joan Mullin, Carol Peterson Haviland, and Amy Zenger argue in their chapter for redefining writing center work to provide such support. Drawing on examples from writing center tutor/ client interactions in Lebanon, the United Kingdom, Southern California, and Texas, they suggest that writing centers can provide a more central forum institutionally to engage in interactive, rather than one-directional, learning, drawing and building on the full range of language repertoires of both writing center tutors and writing center clients to make writing centers the primary locus of work on and with English and other languages. David A. Jolliffe describes a different, if complementary, approach in his account of the Arkansas Delta Oral History Project (ADOHP) involving collaboration between a university and high schools across the state of Arkansas. Against programs directed either at teaching a set of “general” skills exportable across domains and locations or at uncritical rehearsals of practices circumscribed by location, the ADOHP assumes neither that inhabitants of the Arkansas delta are already in possession of knowledge about its “local” culture nor that delta culture exists as a stable entity discrete from the global. Instead, the project draws on the agency of writers—delta high school students and students from the University of Arkansas—to investigate and change that culture through oral and written history projects. What is

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produced, then, is not precisely a set of general language and literacy skills but instead work with and on language and culture understood as practice at the tension point between the local and the global. We can better grasp what such work on language and culture involves through microanalyses of writers’ and readers’ constructions of language, culture, and literacy: what for individual writers and readers constitutes grammaticality, “English,” or “intelligibility” in writing. As Junghyun Hwag and Joel Hardman reveal in their chapter’s study of reactions to “marked” and “unmarked” sentences, actual and perceived intelligibility in writing do not, in fact, match up. Instead, ascriptions of both grammaticality (or not) and intelligibility (or not) have to do with readers’ perceptions of the writer’s ethnicity—for example, nonnative English speaker (or not). In other words, “‘markedness’ is created in the mind of readers.” Hwag and Hardman’s study also suggests importantly that (1) nonnative writers of English can and do exercise agency in writing, rejecting ascriptions of unintelligibility and ungrammaticality to their writing and deliberately “marking” their writing to achieve “voice,” and (2) emphasis needs to be placed not only on helping L2 writers accommodate questionable demands of L1 readers but also on revising the attitudes of L1 readers toward seemingly marked writing to enable them to see how such writing makes contributions to knowledge. Vanessa Kraemer Sohan’s chapter furthers Hwag and Hardman’s call for attending to the needs of English monolingual students as well as of other students. Noting that much of the scholarly literature addressing language difference has focused on students other than English monolinguals, Kraemer Sohan claims that, in fact, calls for translingualism, plurilingualism, and the like are relevant to addressing how to respond to all texts, including not just those “marked” as somehow linguistically different but also those we are disposed to think of as mainstream (monolingual). Using an English monolingual student’s written response to Gloria Anzaldúa’s multilingual “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Kraemer Sohan argues for understanding responses like that student’s as engaged in “relocalized listening,” by which writers are understood to always give new life to both conventional and unconventional discourse and their sense of self in responding to the difficulty posed by what seem unfamiliar writings and positionalities. Finally, in her afterword, “On the Politics of Not Paying Attention (and the Resistance of Resistance),” my coeditor and colleague Karen Kopelson responds to the arguments of the collection from the perspective of an admitted



Introduction

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“outsider” to many of the conversations from which they emerge. Addressing both those advocating for adopting more “translingual” approaches to writing and those (with whom she identifies her past self) comfortably inattentive to those calls, she cautions, as someone located in the still current English monolingual mainstream, that “identification across lines of difference is hardly automatic, even for those of us occupying other positions of ‘difference’ from other standards and norms.” Moreover, those calls for such identification can prompt not resonance but perceived threat to the comfort one experiences and so “remain unheard.” Or, in other words, as the terms “comfort/discomfort” imply, to be effective, calls for changes in our approach to language “must work at the level of affect, located/lived experience, and habituated attachments and response.” And she suggests that directly confronting the issues most disturbing to those most comfortably located in the still dominant English monolingual mainstream—error and the tendency to fetishize lexical, syntactic, and notational “difference” from “the standard”—is a strategy by which that mainstream might be more readily, and rightly, persuaded to start paying attention to the more substantive reworkings of English for which the collection’s chapters call. As I’ve suggested, this collection is one manifestation of a growing recognition among teacherscholars of rhetoric and composition that English needs to be reworked, spurred by increasingly undeniable contradictions between the tenets of the dominant ideology of English-only monolingualism and the linguistic facts on the ground. This collection had its immediate historical origin in the 2010 Thomas R. Watson Conference, “Working English in Rhetoric and Composition,” organized by Min-Zhan Lu, director of the 2010 Watson conference, and in the special issue cluster on the same theme published in 2009 in JAC in conjunction with the conference.5 That special issue, the 2010 Watson conference, and an increasing number of other conferences and publications point to the field’s growing sense that English—at least as traditionally defined—is and must be always reworked by writers and readers and by teachers and students in the day-to-day practices of reading, writing, rereading, and rewriting.6 In keeping with that growing sense, the contributors to this collection cannot claim to have the last word on “reworking English”—the very idea is antithetical to the concept. But their explorations of specific reworkings of language policy, practice, theory, and pedagogy help show us ways by which such reworking might best be undertaken—and continued—by all of us as we engage the necessary, inevitable, perpetual, and rewarding task of reworking English.

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Notes 1. See Brutt-Griffler; Calvet; Canagarajah, “Place”; House, “Misunderstanding”; Meierkord; and Pennycook, “English.” The same, of course, is true of other demarcations of distinct, monolithically conceived languages, such as French. See, for example, Qu’s critique of treatments of “Chinese.” 2. See Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant; Blanchet and Coste; Canagarajah, Translingual; Candelier et al.; Horner et al., “Language Difference”; Guerra; Gilyard; Khubchandani; Lu, “Metaphors”; Moore and Gajo; Zamel; and Zarate, Lévy, and Kramsch. 3. On the “practice turn” in the human sciences, see Schatzki. 4. For a fuller articulation of this theoretical perspective, see Lu and Horner, “Translingual Literacy, Language Difference.” 5. The 2010 Watson conference brought together leading scholars and teachers in rhetoric and composition for two and a half days of presentations and sometimes heated, often insightful discussions of issues of language policy, politics, and pedagogy in rhetoric and composition in response to the special issue cluster on the same theme (Horner et al., Working English). Both the conference and the special issue cluster were made possible by the generous endowment from Dr. Thomas R. Watson, a Louisville physician, banker, and entrepreneur. 6. For example, the themes of the 2011 Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition and the 2010 Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition were, respectively, “Rhetoric and Writing across Language Boundaries” and “Working English in Rhetoric and Composition.” The July 2006 issue of College English was devoted to cross-language relations in composition, and a 2006 special issue of WPA was devoted to the topic “Bridging the Disciplinary Divide: Integrating a Second-Language Perspective into Writing Programs” (Matsuda, Fruit, and Lamm). Other recent books and articles challenging monolingualist ideology in English studies include Canagarajah, Literacy and “Place”; Ellis, Fox, and Street; Fraiberg; Guerra; Hall, “WAC/WID”; Horner et al., “Language Difference”; Horner and Lu; Horner, Lu, and Matsuda; Horner and Trimbur; Jay Jordan; Kells, Balester, and Villanueva; Kramsch, “Privilege”; Leung and Street; Martinez and Young; Matsuda et al.; Nero; Severino, Guerra, and Butler; Smitherman and Villanueva; Tardy, “Enacting”; Trimbur, “Dartmouth”; Valdès; and Young, “‘Nah.’”

I.

REWORKING LANGUAGE

1.

THE BEING OF LANGUAGE Marilyn M. Cooper IN HIS ESSAY “Definition of Man,” Kenneth Burke claims that animal language is inferior to human language because it lacks a symbolic or referential quality, and thus he distinguishes humans as “symbol-using” animals. He offers an example of a wren whose actions demonstrate how lack of language restricts its thinking. The wren flew around the ceiling of his college philosophy class, unable to find the open windows because of its instinct to fly up to escape. Burke comments that if he and the bird had a common language, all could be made clear with a simple statement: “Fly down just a foot or so, and out one of those windows” (4). But language is not essential to the wren’s escape: birds usually get out of rooms by fluttering down to windowsills in exhaustion, in which position their instinct for flying up facilitates their escape, or by people guiding them to the open windows with brooms or similar implements, or through capture and release—in other words, there are kinetic or behavioral cognitive abilities that work as well as a common language might in this situation. What’s at stake here is whether Burke wants to rescue the wren or just use symbols to talk about it, as his denial of language to the wren suggests. In fact, how does Burke know that the wren wants to get out of his philosophy classroom? Lots of birds live happily in buildings like train stations and shopping malls, protected from inclement weather and provided with good sources of food (insects, potato chips) that are probably also available in Burke’s philosophy classroom. He infers that the wren is trying to escape by observing its behavior. He could be more accurate in his inference if he knew more about the wren’s communicative behavior: house wrens give a “churr-call . . . a short burst of song like a rattle being shaken” (Stokes 179) when in danger. But in any case, if he believed that the wren wanted to (or should) escape, he could simply behave in such a way as to assist the wren out the window. Burke and the wren do 13

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not need a common language to coordinate their behavior, although knowing something about each other’s language—like knowing things about each other’s behavioral patterns—can help. In this chapter, I argue that a more precise understanding of the being of language enables a better understanding of agency and responsibility in linguistic behavior. In other discussions, Burke clearly recognizes that linguistic behavior is not simply about manipulating symbols but rather involves using language to get things done. But what does it mean to use language? In what sense does “language” exist? How do beings “use” it? And who or what is responsible when language is used to do bad things? Language does not exist as an entity. Language is not a code, not a means of expression, not a resource. It is not an organism either. It does not have agency or rights; it does not determine behavior or create identities or discriminate against others based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, country of origin, or species. People (and other living beings) do all these things. What we call language consists of practices—patterns of behavior— that arise out of interactions (people’s interactions, in the case of human language) among beings, animate and inanimate, and that respond to naturalcultural1 needs and contexts. These practices can be thought of as durable dispositions (as in Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of habitus) or, to emphasize their dynamism, as evanescent communicative behaviors that exist only in people’s acts of writing, reading, speaking. I am not alone in making this argument. As Wittgenstein said, language is use (sec. 20); as Heidegger said, it is the house of Being (193). Bakhtin said that “it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!”; rather, the word “exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions” (294). Donald Davidson has argued that “there is no such thing as a language” in the sense of “a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases” (107). His concern is to explain how understanding is possible, and he avers that understanding cannot depend on “rules or conventions known to speaker and interpreter in advance.” Instead, he says, “what two people need, if they are to understand one another through speech, is the ability to converge on passing theories from utterance to utterance” (106), passing theories simply being theories of “how to interpret particular utterances on particular occasions” (102). Passing theories assume the evanescence of patterns of behavior that emerge in linguistic interaction, and as Davidson observes, they mesh linguistic behavior with other forms of social behavior: “we have abandoned



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not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally” (107). Echoing these arguments, the French linguist Louis-Jean Calvet offers what he calls a “rather provocative” but “fundamental” hypothesis: “languages are not alive, are not part of a family, and are neither instruments nor organisms external to those who use them; languages exist only in and through their speakers, and they are reinvented, renewed and transformed in every interaction, each time that we speak” (7). The assumption that language exists apart from its use leads us to believe, as Burke suggests, that all could be made clear if only we had a common language, that the only real difference that divides us is what language forms we use. As his example also illustrates, one of the causes of the overemphasis on the forms of language is human exceptionalism, the attempts of linguists and other language scholars to find features that distinguish human language from the communicative behaviors of other beings.2 When language is defined solely by its form rather than considered as patterns of behavior inextricable from its functions and purposes and the contexts in which it is used, it is cut off from its source in the naturalcultural endeavors of living beings. And thus the real agents in the interaction of living beings with each other and their material worlds are elided along with their responsibility for the results of their actions. That language exists as practices that emerge from interaction rather than as an entity with agency in itself also explains what often seems like a paradox: language doesn’t tell us what to do, but neither will it do what we tell it to do. Linguists as well as our experiences as writing teachers affirm that language practices resist top-down control: all the usage books and writing teachers in the country have failed to stop people (including a lot of academics and even compositionists) from frequently saying and writing “between you and I,” a usage that Bryan Garner calls “appallingly common” (102). Concomitantly, as Alice points out to Humpty Dumpty, neither can an individual make words mean just what he or she wants them to. At the same time, the fact that human language changes only as people speak or write it suggests that it is not language that directs the course of change or impedes change (even in writing): it’s people who redesign language every time they speak or write, as the New London Group and Jacques Derrida and Calvet, among others, have argued. Even copyeditors, who police published writing, are careful to make decisions based on the changing practices they observe in (reputable) current publications (or they should be). Copyeditors consider

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which practices are most prevalent and compare practices in related constructions, deciding which are most useful or whether a new practice that seems to be emerging might work better. Similar decisions by writers and speakers are not entirely or always conscious, which adds another complication. It is people who direct the changes in human language patterns, but they do it through their interactions, not primarily through conscious choices. As patterns of behavior, language practices emerge from complex systems such as societies, cultures, or ecologies, in which beings, material forces, and things respond to one another in recurrent interactions. Anything that affects who participates, how many interactions there are, and the nature of the interactions will cause changes in the practices. Calvet explains how such “chance” occurrences as the domestication of the horse around 4,000 bce by the Kurgan people living in the Volga basin led not only to changed language practices but also to “numerous dramatic social and cultural changes” (50–51) as the Kurgans migrated into western Europe in search of more pastures and game, bringing along their intertwined language practices and naturalcultural systems. He notes that such changes are characteristic of complex systems in which interactions amplify variations in unforeseeable ways: “the behaviour of such systems cannot be predicted, but it can be explained a posteriori” (52). A significant implication of complexity theory for living language work is that even though individuals cannot make language do what they want it to, how each of us acts in language always has some effect on language practices and on the whole complex system of endeavors that includes both “natural” and “cultural” entities. Because we are agents in our speaking and writing, just as we are agents in our other actions, we can change language practices that contribute to conditions we find harmful, such as social and economic inequality and environmental destruction. Though the outcome of the changes is never fully in our control, I argue that focusing on what work the language practices we engage in do and considering whether that work is something we want to be responsible for is more likely to lead to outcomes we can live with than would focusing on language as a discrete code or even as a symbolic resource. LuMing Mao relates an illustrative incident of a language practice whose effects most of us would find distressing: Manuel Castillo, a long-distance truck driver and a permanent resident of California, was fined $500 by a trooper in Alabama for “speaking with an accent” (“Why” 189). Mao points to the Standard English ideology as the basis of the problem, asking, “Is it possible anyway for one single variety of English to represent our myriad



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ways of knowing and speaking?” (190). Everyone speaks with an accent, and the accents of English are not particularly discrete: multiple language features cross over the multiple varieties of English, and whether a person is perceived to be speaking with an accent varies with the perceiver’s perspective. Rosina Lippi-Green calls Standard English a myth that exists only as “a useful abstraction” (53)—but useful to whom? Lippi-Green would characterize the trooper’s action as a failure “to accept [his] responsibility in the act of communication” in that as a presumed speaker of a dominant language, the trooper felt “perfectly empowered . . . to demand that a person with an accent carry the majority of responsibility in the communicative act” (70). As she points out, perception of an accent is also not necessarily linked with the phonemes produced by the speaker. She describes a study in which undergraduate students were asked to listen to a recording of a short lecture made by a native speaker of English from central Ohio while being shown either a slide of a Caucasian woman or of an Asian woman. Afterward the students were asked if they understood the speaker, and they took a comprehension test. Though listening to the same recording in both trials, not only did the students say they had more trouble understanding the speaker when they watched the slide of the Asian teacher, but also they remembered significantly less of the content of the lecture when they thought they were listening to her. Calvet would characterize the myth of Standard English as a representation of a language; he defines representations of language as people’s ideas and beliefs about how one correctly uses a language practice, what practices are legitimate, and what practices identify them as members of a group (139). Many people believe Standard English exists somewhere (in books on “correct” speaking or writing, or in English teachers’ heads, or in their own uses or the uses of people they admire), and they may choose to use this belief to authorize their behavior, as did the Alabama trooper, or not. That it is only a myth or a representation doesn’t matter, as the study of expectations of speakers cited by Lippi-Green and studies of attitudes toward languages cited by Calvet demonstrate. Expectations of speakers and attitudes toward languages have their origins in how people feel in their interactions with others: how highly others regard them (status), how well they fit into a particular community (identity), and how “normal” they are (in the sense of to what extent their language practices match those that are perceived to be most frequent) (Calvet 135, 121). There’s nothing wrong with these feelings—who doesn’t want to feel well-regarded and secure in their relations with others?—and Calvet argues that it is such security or

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lack of security with regard to language that “constitutes a primary motor of linguistic change: linguistic practices are affected by the speaker’s relation to his or her language” (140). But as he also points out, the speaker’s relation to his or her language is “not innate, but, of course, acquired, produced by sociolinguistic situations” (143), such as the Alabama trooper regarding the truck driver as an incompetent speaker of English. Calvet offers other examples of how “judgments on languages are judgments on human beings and are produced by social situations” (147): for example, the Songhay people living on the Niger River feel threatened by their neighbors the Tamasheqs and the Bambaras and find their languages “insipid” or “heavy” but judge the language of the Fulas, whom they do not feel threatened by, as “poetic . . . noble, beautiful and rich, but . . . also a language of beggars and chatterboxes” (146). That representations of language are inspired by social needs is attested to in a more positive way by a study of the French accent in La Havre, where residents insist that they speak with a distinctive accent but cannot distinguish recordings of local speakers from recordings of working-class Parisian French speakers. Calvet concludes: “We have here a typical demonstration of the desire for an identity: we exist autonomously, we are inhabitants of La Havre, and the proof lies in our accent” (152). Not only language practices but representations of language practices arise out of social interactions. Official laws and regulations about language practices are also a result of social interactions rather than autonomous choices. The trooper might have justified his action with reference to a federal regulation that still stands: “Every driver shall be able to read and speak the English language sufficiently to understand highway traffic signs and signals and directions given in English and to respond to official inquiries” (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration). But as Harold Schiffman argues in his study of language policies around the world, overt policies set by the state are always trumped by covert policies, those that develop through the interactions of a people’s history, cultural values, and political, economic, social, and physical environments. He notes that “the almost total lack of a coherent explicit [language] policy at the federal level” in the United States (211; emphasis in original) was countered by a strong covert policy that developed in the nineteenth century and that was characterized by “antipathy to any expanded role for ‘foreign’ language in American life, and allied perhaps to xenophobia, racism, and other unsavoury attitudes,” including a wish not to tolerate anything “that it sees as dangerous, untrustworthy, expensive, perhaps even un-American” (247).



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The influences he cites as leading to this covert policy include Western expansion and absorption of non-English speaking groups, increased immigration and the mission of public schools to Americanize immigrants, and the rise of nativism and xenophobia (231–32). He says: The idea gradually grew . . . that American ideas could not be expressed in a language other than English, and various court cases involving the naturalization of foreign-born persons who did not have proficiency in English were decided negatively, because—as those writing the decision put it—they could not know the true meaning of “truth, freedom, justice,” etc. if they did not know English. (232–33)

Calvet also notes that in order to succeed, state interventions to establish a language practice must be accompanied by the implementation of social conditions that allow the emergence of the language practice: for instance, in Indonesia the state declared in 1928 that Malay was the national language, but “this deliberate and interventionist decision was purely symbolic and only came to be implemented after the country gained independence, twenty years later” (189). So, given that the truck driver was recognizably Hispanic, the Alabama trooper probably expected that he would not be able to understand the truck driver and refused to accept his responsibility to try to understand him; the trooper thus participated in, and was responsible for, furthering the covert U.S. language policy based in racism and xenophobia. The English-only ideology is not responsible in itself for this harmful practice. Instead, the responsibility lies with the agents whose racism and nativism lead them to deny equal rights to others, just as Burke’s human exceptionalism led him to deny that he could help the wren. Alastair Pennycook has also argued for the nonexistence of languages: “languages are not . . . entities that exist outside human relations and interactions, but are embedded in ecologies of local practice” (Language 105). He cites Roy Harris’s 1990 argument that “the concept of languages as separate entities within orthodox modern linguistics does not correspond to any clear object of analysis” (82). Instead, language as an autonomous entity was an invention of modernism and played an important role in colonialism and the construction of the nation state (compare Makoni and Pennycook, “Disinventing”). In addition, the enumeration of separate languages and speakers of each language encouraged “a monolingual norm of speakerhood” (Hill, qtd. in Makoni and Pennycook, “Disinventing” 144). Diversity in language, Pennycook says, is not due to the diversity of discrete languages but instead

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to diversity of meanings (he’s relying here on Halliday’s distinction between glossodiversity and semiodiversity) (Language 97). Diversity in meaning arises out of diversity in language practices, which are not coterminous with separate languages. Pennycook defines language practices as “a set of activities dynamically integrated across physical, social, mental and moral worlds” (Language 130), and he argues, “An ecology of local language practices can be useful if we use it to understand, on the one hand, the ways in which language practices are deeply embedded in local, social and cultural practices; and on the other, if it can help us to get away from viewing diversity in terms of segregated, enumerable language entities” (108–9). Pennycook’s central example comes from his work as a volunteer on projects to save coral reefs in the Philippines, in particular through the way names of reef fishes differ in different language practices. The family of what are called butterfly fish in English are good indicators of the health of a coral reef, and the volunteers on the projects, who variously speak English, French, German, or Japanese, commonly use similar but different names for the same fish: what in English is called a mirror butterflyfish or an ovalspot butterflyfish is called Chaetodon à miroir in French, for example. So, in line with the purpose of the study, the volunteers learn to use the scientific name, in this case Chaetodon speculum. In contrast, local Filipinos who fish for food are simply interested in fishes that are good for eating. Because they are engaged in a different language practice, they do not distinguish individual species of butterfly fish: they use the Visayan name alibangbang for all of them. Because language practices are connected to projects, the same practice may also be enacted in what are commonly called different languages. Pennycook cites Claire Kramsch, who observes, “Many Chinese or Koreans now speak an American neo-liberal discourse of consumerism, entrepreneurship and economic competitiveness even as they speak Chinese or Korean” (qtd. in Pennycook, Language 101). Language practices are not stable or the same everywhere, as Pennycook realizes: he argues that viewing languages “in terms of local language practices” draws our attention “to the doing of language in particular localities” (Language 71), which include not just particular social projects but also cultural values and physical features. Practices like consumerism do not just take on local characteristics; instead, he says, they have “always been local”: in other words, they emerge locally, and thus they have “a direct link back to traditional ways” (72). A good example of this is the academic research article, as noted by Suresh Canagarajah in his analysis of three articles written



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by Professor Sivatamby, a senior scholar in Sri Lanka (“Rhetoric”). Though the articles were written in different languages and for different audiences, Canagarajah’s analysis shows that the rhetoric in all three is distinctly localized. He lists features that are “consistent across all three papers”: “there is no explicit niche creation, no literature review, and no advance statement of the findings, the structure of the article, or the evolving argument” (170). Canagarajah explains that there is no literature review because local libraries in Sri Lanka do not have the facilities to enable thorough literature searches and that Sivatamby does not forecast his findings and argument because “in the local community, there is a preference for embedding modes of argumentation that respect the reader’s involvement in deciphering the threads of reasoning in the argument” (164). Canagarajah notes too that Sivatamby’s rhetoric appears to have resulted from “intuitive choices and strategies in his writing repertoire, no doubt developed over time through his multilingual writing experience,” rather than from choices of which he was consciously aware (173). I agree that studying language in terms of local language practices instead of discrete languages and language varieties can help us to better understand the sources of semiodiversity, but I also argue that an ecology of language practices can help us to more accurately place responsibility for linguistic behavior. Pennycook disagrees, cautioning that equating languages with biological species that compete with one another for survival elides “the crucial role of human agency . . . in the development of language as a human artefact” (Language 98) and that language ecology is inevitably linked to a “broader reactionary stance to naturalize the world as it is, to make the cultural natural, to render language biological, to normalize social and sexual relations as hard wired, to make genetics the science of everything, to counter [ironically] an emphasis on difference” (95). But these hazards largely result from popular misunderstandings of ecology and of complex systems in general. Persistent Western worldviews and popular accounts of genetics, evolution, and ecology entangle in creating these misunderstandings, tacit assumptions that nature and culture are discrete realms that do not interact and that biological phenomena are governed by timeless “natural” laws while social and cultural phenomena are ever-changing relativistic constructions. Donna Haraway describes the “Great Divide” between nature and culture as “the institutionalized, long dominant Western fantasy that all that is fully human is fallen from Eden, separated from the mother, in the domain of the artificial, deracinated, alienated, and therefore free” (11). She attributes the

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term Great Divide to Bruno Latour, who also refers to it as the Modern Constitution, a Western self-deception that humans are the sole agents purified of and therefore able to freely work on, or translate, a passive natural reality. Latour argues that the divide has always been an illusion that is simply now more evident; he cites newspaper descriptions of crises such as the Antarctic ozone hole and the AIDS virus: “The same article mixes together chemical reactions and political reactions. A single thread links the most esoteric sciences and the most sordid politics” (We 1). Pennycook’s definition of the ecology of language practices explicitly refers to the same mixing of cultural and natural realms—“physical, social, mental and moral worlds”—as does his discussion of the threats to coral reefs: “warming seas, pollution, tourism and different levels of economic development” (Language 107). But when he discusses the hazards of taking the ecology metaphor too literally, he reverts to the Modern Constitution while at the same time asserting “a need for a more complex relationship here among language and culture, language and reality, and culture and reality” (96). But ecology and more explicitly complexity theory already provide this complex understanding because they understand systems as open to each other. Systems of language practices are like ecologies in that both are systems that function dynamically internally and with other systems. Like an organism, a language practice is structured by its internal interactions and external interactions with other language practices and with other systems in its naturalcultural environment. In complex systems, agency is distributed among a vast array of beings, things, and forces. Human agency does play a crucial role in the development of language practices—but so do, for example, changes in climate and politics that result in migration of peoples. In the same way, genes play a crucial role in biological evolution and in the development of individual organisms—but so do cytoplasm and internal and external environmental factors that switch genes on and off.3 The fact that agency is distributed in complex systems does not relieve any particular agent of responsibility; it just means that no one agent can predict or completely control the effects of their actions. As Jane Bennett memorably wrote, “Agency is the . . . capacity to make a difference in the world without knowing quite what you are doing” (155). Despite his dismissal of the “sciences of complexity,”4 Latour’s theory of action, derived from that of Alfred North Whitehead, explains most clearly the alternative that complexity theory offers to realism and constructivism as explanations of the relation between language and reality. Referring to



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Pasteur’s discovery of lactic acid, Latour notes how the Great Divide would have forced Pasteur to choose between admitting that lactic acid was created in the lab and was thus nothing but a fantasy or claiming that lactic acid was real because he did not create it. Latour paraphrases what instead Pasteur did say: “The ferment of lactic acid is real because he carefully set the stage on which the ferment revealed itself on its own” (Modern Cult 17). Language practices similarly emerge from interactions among people and their naturalcultural environments. They neither create the world nor adapt to it (compare Pennycook, Language 92). Filipino fishers eat some fish and not others, and good-tasting alibangbang are as real as the researchers’ Chaetodon speculum. Language is neither “an agentive categorization of the world” by humans nor “an objective reflection of a material world” (98). The fish, water pollution, the arrival of McDonald’s in the Philippines—any or all of these and many other factors may alter these language practices. None of the participants can control or master the process, nor can the practices that result be simply predicted from an analysis of the participants and their interactions. Latour explains: As powerful as one might imagine a creator, he will never be capable of better controlling his creations than the puppeteer her puppets, a writer her notebooks, a cigarette its smoker, a speaker her language. He can make them do something but he cannot make them: to launch a cascade of irreversible events, yes, to be master of his tools, no. (Modern Cult 65)

Speakers’ words may incite a revolution—or end in their imprisonment. Because the rhetorical situation is complex, involving physical, social, mental, and moral worlds, the outcomes are unpredictable, but speakers’ acts still have real effects that are attributable in part to them, and thus they have some responsibility for the outcome. Nor does the fact that they were influenced by their individual history and embodiment relieve them of this responsibility.5 As quoted above, Pennycook is especially concerned with accounts that equate languages with biological species that compete with one another for survival. I believe that the analogy between languages and species can be useful—but only if we recognize that languages are no more adaptable than are species, that neither species nor languages compete with each other for survival, and that diversity, whether biological or linguistic, is a matter of struggle, but neither endangered species nor endangered languages need to be saved to preserve biological or linguistic diversity. Species has been a

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problematic concept in evolutionary biology ever since Darwin. In current understandings, species are very much like languages in being more of a fuzzy set than a discrete entity. Like linguists attempting to enumerate the number of languages in the world, scientists are continually “lumping” and “splitting” species as they study genetics, physiology, and behavior of organisms and reconceive the category of species itself. Pennycook, referencing Douglas Kibbee’s well-known refutation of the “language equals species’ equivalency,” asserts, “Species . . . cannot, by definition, interbreed, whereas languages, perhaps by definition, do” (Language 95). In a 2005 discussion of the modern concept of species, Kevin de Queiroz argues that interbreeding, along with other factors like sharing an ecological niche or specific mate recognition, are not necessary but contingent properties that species “may or may not acquire during the course of their existence” (6605). The only necessary property that qualifies a group of organisms as a species is that it be “a separately evolving metapopulation lineage” (6604); or, in other words, “Species [are] equated with groups of interconnected populations that form an extended reproductive community and an unevenly distributed but unitary gene pool or field for gene recombination” (6601). Calvet follows this definition in his treatment of languages as species; he says they “are not considered here as organisms but as populations, i.e. sets of variants . . . just as the genetics of populations studies the aptitude for the reproduction and mutation of individuals of the same species cohabiting in the same geographical zone, I will be studying the transmission and change of ‘languages’ in their ecological niches” (57).6 In claiming that languages, unlike species, can interbreed, Pennycook (and Kibbee) confuses species and organisms (the rejection of interbreeding as a characteristic of species is partly dependent on the fact that not all organisms reproduce through interbreeding) and at the same time underestimates the adaptive capacity of species and overestimates the adaptability of language. Pennycook says, “If a dog lives in the same house as a bird it does not grow wings, nor does the bird sprout paws. If two languages are in contact, they create a new language” (Language 95). It may be true that interacting human languages create new languages, but no new languages have emerged from the contact between human languages and those of dolphins, whales, or parrots, for example, because the lineages of these languages differ too much. Similarly, dogs and birds arose from different lineages; more closely related species, such as dogs and coyotes and different species of fishes and birds, interbreed when given the opportunity to do so.7



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Stephen Jay Gould agrees with this definition of species as populations that share gene pools (706) and furthermore argues that “in many cases of species selection, the success of one species over another cannot be explained by competition between their sympatric populations, but depends upon a species-level trait of the species’ full range” (707–8), commenting that “Darwin himself clearly favored an expansive concept of interaction with environments in natural selection” over the idea that “the interactors must be able to duke it out directly” (706). Calvet explains that it is not competition between species that drives natural selection but limiting factors that arise from the relations between organisms or language practices and their naturalcultural environments. He describes how having either too few or too many speakers will threaten the existence of a language, which may fall out of use (because of too few speakers) or disintegrate (because of multitudes of speakers spread out over a vast area), as Latin disintegrated into French, Spanish, and other Romance languages or as Arabic disintegrated into modern Arabic, Egyptian, Tunisian, and Moroccan (25). Other factors, such as representations of language as official or national languages, also affect the survival of languages in particular environments. Salikoko S. Mufwene also sees languages as species, but with a difference: “Language is more of the parasitic, symbiotic kind of species than the animal kind . . . because a language does not exist without its speakers, just like parasites do not exist without hosts” (151–52). Thus he argues that “the agents of language evolution are individual speakers . . . who, while interacting with each other, cause their varying [linguistic] features to compete with one another” (149–50). He attempts to define the competition as a negotiation of sorts: “This state of affairs highlights the reality of competition in a living language, the continuous negotiations that take place as individuals communicate with one another” (147). But he also comments on how languages “adapt to the responses of their new hosts while affecting, or eliminating, other linguistic species that they come in contact with” (162) and argues that “approaching language as a species makes it possible . . . to pay particular attention to the linguistic behavior of individual speakers, on whom selection operates” (166). Characterizing language as a parasitic species leads Mufwene into a tangle here. If he is talking about language evolution, it is language that selection operates on, as it does in Calvet’s use of the analogy, not its users, and it is limiting factors that affect its survival, not the competition between languages or between their features. Individual speakers can be considered agents of language evolution but only insofar as they are negotiating language

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practices in their interactions with each other and their environments, and these negotiations are not competitions between linguistic features but rather navigations by speakers of language practices. An example of how speakers negotiate—in the sense of navigating— diverse varieties of language is found in Canagarajah’s discussion of a telephone conversation in English between a Danish cheese exporter and an Egyptian importer (“Multilingual Strategies”).8 The importer complains that the cheese he has received is “blowing.” The exporter initially does not understand “blowing,” but he encourages the importer to continue and then offers a possible translation: “blowing uh what uh, what is this too big or what?” The importer responds with different translations—“No the cheese is bad . . . it is like fermenting”—which inspires the exporter to offer his own translation, which they then converge on: “Ah it’s gone off” (21). Canagarajah argues that the importer and the exporter “are focused on the functions they are here to achieve—i.e., the business transaction—not on grammaticality judgments” (21). In other words, they are engaged in a language practice, in Pennycook’s terms, and it is from such engagements in the practices of living that linguistic diversity inevitably and continuously emerges. Pennycook is also troubled by the equation of language diversity and biological diversity, arguing that while biological diversity is always good and natural, “the ‘rich tapestry’ of diverse human language practices is something we need to struggle over, since they include anything from magical moments of language creativity to hateful moments of deepest bigotry” (Language 97). Once again, Pennycook’s argument is hindered by a confusion. The biological diversity that is necessary to sustainability refers to the diversity within the populations that are classed as a species, and while in general lots of diversity make the survival of populations more likely, not all the traits of species are good in the sense of being beneficial to either the particular organism or the population as a whole. We struggle to eliminate mutations and environmental hazards that lead to harmful effects in people and in other species we care for, just as we struggle to eliminate social practices such as bigotry that infect language practices. But diversity of species is not necessary to the sustainability of an ecology, nor is diversity of languages necessary to the sustainability of a culture. The populations of organisms and language practices are continually changing due to their own dynamics and those of the ecologies and cultures in which they exist, a process that continually creates diversity of all kinds, good and bad. Neither particular species nor particular languages need to be saved to preserve diversity, nor



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does diversity itself need to be preserved as it is continually created by those dynamics. But again, this does not mean, as Pennycook asserts, that we “should not intercede in ecologies but let them run their natural course” (96); indeed, we are continually interceding willy-nilly and thus we always have some responsibility for the state of our naturecultures. Mufwene need not postulate that language exists as a parasitic species in order to describe language evolution, as he says, as a macroecological process, one in which complex structures and behaviors emerge from interaction (157). The cases he offers are equally consistent with an approach that sees language patterns as emerging from interactions of speakers in ecologies that include physical, political, social, and moral worlds. For example, he contrasts the status of indigenized varieties of English spoken by Native Americans to Irish and Scots Englishes. The latter Englishes “thrive because they are spoken in their homelands, in which the speakers are the majority and use it to communicate among themselves. Although Native Americans are in their homelands, the socioeconomic ecology has changed” (165): in particular, as he points out earlier in discussing the loss of Native American languages, the population of Native Americans was decimated by wars, diseases, and relocations, and their new “homelands” on the reservations “lacked the socioeconomic vitality necessary to sustain their communities” (156). He argues that “no human intervention will stop the endangerment of the Native languages unless it recreates socioeconomic ecologies that grant them selective advantage or make them equally competitive with the European languages” (156).9 But changes in socioeconomic ecologies do not grant advantages to languages or language varieties or help them compete; such changes are changes in the interactions of the people and the other beings and forces that produce the ecologies. When interactions change, language practices, which respond to both natural and social worlds, change. Here’s an example. Four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in Oregon and California completed in the 1960s led to the collapse of the traditional Indian fisheries, reducing the amount of salmon in the Klamath tribes’ diet from 450 pounds per year per person in precontact times to 5 pounds. As they turned to “store-bought and government commodity foods—cheap starches, fats and sugar” (Hartel 16), type 2 diabetes rates rose to 21 percent, compared to 7 percent in the general population. At the same time, the dams created warm reservoirs, low-flow waters, and agricultural runoff that facilitated the growth of cyanobacteria that poisoned the waters, causing harm to livestock, wildlife, and humans. The Klamath Settlement Group, which

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contained representatives of tribes, irrigators, ranchers, fishing associations, government agencies, and conservation groups, began meeting to address these problems. In the meetings, “lasting friendships across disparate groups” arose: “They sat in motel meeting rooms learning of births of grandchildren, divorces, graduations, river ceremonies, festivals, the deaths of parents and friends” (Hartel 21). The settlement group offered a proposal to restore the watershed that included not renewing the dam licenses, which expired in 2006. PacifiCorp, the owner of the dams, refused to sign on to the agreement, and Warren Buffett, whose company is affiliated with PacifiCorp, met tribal and environmental protesters with a condescending lecture on utility company politics. The tribes and a citizens’ group then sued PacifiCorp for fostering the growth of cyanobacteria and won, which led PacifiCorp to agree to remove the dams because they were too expensive to fix. With the return of the salmon, the Indian fisheries—along with the language practices associated with it—are returning, the result of changing interactions among groups of people, salmon, cyanobacteria and affected animals, the legal system, and economics. Tribal fishing practices will have changed, of course, and so will the language practices that emerge from it, as the participants have changed through their history of interactions. Neither ecologies nor cultures nor any complex system is ever recreated or restored; they simply change for the better or for the worse, depending on whose perspective is privileged.10 Mao suggests that we need to go beyond “critiquing Standard English and developing critical language awareness” (“Why” 192), that we need to understand varieties of languages as critical resources and teach students cross-language strategies that enable them “to express their own needs and wants and to write themselves back into the American imaginary” (193–94).11 Understanding varieties of languages as resources and learning cross-language strategies will certainly improve how students who speak and write “nonstandard” languages relate to their language, making them feel more secure in their interactions with others. Perhaps these practices will encourage more tolerance for diverse writing in academia as well. But what can we do to change linguistic misbehaviors like that engaged in by the trooper in Alabama (and by other troopers around the country who in 2006 issued 25,230 tickets for speaking with an accent), Burke’s dismissal of the wren, or Warren Buffett’s lecturing tribal members on the politics of energy? First, we need to remember that language is not just a matter of using symbols, as Burke sometimes seems to suggest, and that languages are not a resource, as Pennycook implies when he says that “language practices are activities we do



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with the semiotic resources of language” (Language 106). Canagarajah says, “We write in order to perform important social acts” (“Rhetoric” 176). What the troopers have done is deny effective communication to those who “speak with an accent,” just as Burke denied the ability to communicate to the wren and Buffett refused to recognize complaints that the dam was destroying people’s ways of life; they refused to recognize the other as a partner in a communicative act. Their actions were not a consequence of acquiescing to a code of Standard English or of needing to enforce a law or of searching for a common language, but a consequence of real material conditions such as economic insecurity, loss of cultural identity, and longstanding American traditions of xenophobia, racism, speciesism, and profiteering, all of which have developed through their experiences and relationships and of which they are probably not consciously aware. What has to change in order for their actions to change are their experiences, the economic conditions, the American traditions to which they are exposed—exposure to traditions of tolerance and code-meshing, perhaps. Any argument about language varieties as resources for meaning would have much less effect on their actions than, for example, being assigned a partner whom they like and respect who speaks with an accent different from theirs or meeting to discuss local problems in motel rooms and sharing life experiences. And, of course, it would also help if they recognized that they have some responsibility to try to listen and respond in their interactions with others. Second, we need to recognize that language practices are emergent. What Canagarajah says of the conversational practices of multilinguals is true of everyone: “They instantaneously construct the norms and conventions that will operate. . . . [They] don’t depend on language as a preconstructed system that comes ready-made with forms and meanings. For them meanings and grammars are always emergent” (“Multilingual Strategies” 18). We need to recognize that writers are continually constructing norms and conventions as they write, as Professor Sivatamby does in his academic articles. These “intuitive strategies” do not “come from a vacuum in the brain” (Canagarajah, “Rhetoric” 173), but neither are they conscious reworkings of or resistances to preexisting practices. Rather they are creations that emerge as writers negotiate their performative intentions within real world rhetorical situations. My argument is simply that if we want to do something about what John Trimbur calls “the uneven and unequal distribution of linguistic resources in the globe-hopping, point-to-point circulation of English” (“English” 122), we need to stop talking about and teaching Standard English

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and the conventions of academic discourse and other discourses as if they were entities in themselves, or teaching languages and language varieties as discrete codes, or teaching language practices as resources. Instead, we need to draw attention to how language practices and patterns—or as Trimbur says, stylings—emerge as writers interact in the complex systems of naturalcultural endeavor in the real world. We need to draw attention to what writers are doing in their writing: what practices they are helping to create, what the effects of these practices are, and what writers’ responsibilities are for these effects. Notes 1. I am following Donna Haraway’s use of the term “natureculture” to signify the imbrication of what are considered separate realms in modernist thinking. 2. And the similar efforts of many to define a standard language against the usages in social dialects. 3. Cf. Keller: “The gene can no longer be set above and apart from the processes that specify cellular and intercellular organization. That gene is itself part and parcel of a complex, self-regulating dynamical system in which, and for which, the inherited DNA provides the crucial and absolutely indispensible raw material, but no more than that” (71). 4. Cf. Politics 256n27, 270n4. 5. For more on rhetorical agency and responsibility as emergent and enacted, see Cooper. 6. Though Calvet retains the notion of ecological niche that Queiroz lists as a contingent property of species. 7. See the interview with Gregory Acland of Cornell University’s Center for Canine Genetics and Reproduction in “Dog Breeds.” 8. The conversation is quoted from Firth. 9. Actually, both Native American languages and varieties of English do thrive to some extent in Indian communities on reservations and elsewhere, and the “decreasing numbers of their speakers” that Mufwene refers to (156) resulted not only from the decimation of Indian peoples but also from the deportation of a whole generation of Indian children to off-reservation boarding schools in which their language and cultural practices were explicitly forbidden. 10. As I learned from my father, Edwin L. Cooper, a freshwater ecologist. 11. Mao is agreeing with other chapters in the collection Cross-Language Relations in Composition (ed. Horner, Lu, and Matsuda), in which his chapter also appears.

2.

MULTILINGUALITY IS THE MAINSTREAM Jonathan Hall MULTILINGUALITY IS THE mainstream. On a global basis, this is a simple statement of fact. Around the world billions of people—from highly educated to illiterate, encompassing rich and poor, men and women and children of every religion and every nation—are users of two or more languages. Most of the English speakers in the world also speak another language—in fact more people speak English as a second language than as a first language (Graddol, Future and English Next). So we’re not talking about a bare majority here—we’re talking about the norm, the mainstream. It’s only in the United States and in some other countries where English is the local language that multilinguality is regarded as at all odd or problematic. It’s only in the United States, with its “melting pot” tradition, that the expectation for immigrants is that as they learn English they will gradually extinguish their other languages. If statistically speaking multilinguality is the mainstream, where then does this “subtractive expectation” come from?1 Have we in the composition community really come to terms with the ways in which assumptions of monolingualism—or of multilinguality as a merely transient phenomenon—affect the work we do in our classrooms and in our research? To be sure, within composition studies, a robust critical tradition has over the past decade examined the ideological assumption of monolingualism within all aspects of academic work. Bruce Horner and John Trimbur traced the historical development of a normative “monolingual culture.” Suresh Canagarajah turned the discussion to the pedagogical work of World Englishes in the present and future of composition (“Place”). Paul Kei Matsuda exposed “the myth of linguistic homogeneity” in the composition classroom—and the ways in which this assumption can persist even in the face of contrary evidence. Gale Shuck explored some of the consequences of 31

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monolingualist thinking for writing program administrative work (“Combating”). As the work of English as a global language has come under scrutiny, the monolingualist research culture of academia has also come under fire (Donahue, “‘Internationalization’”; Lillis and Curry, “Professional”). Most recently, the “translingual approach,” endorsed by many scholars working in the field, has sought to provide a starting point for the development of a writing pedagogy not based on a foundation of monolingualism (Horner et al., “Language Difference”). All of this work has documented the effects of monolingualism in our teaching, our research, and our administrative practices. The question I’m interested in is: what might a U.S. higher education system that does not begin from an assumption of monolinguality look like? What form might an academia of the future take if the idea that multilinguality is the mainstream were adopted seriously? If multilinguality is reconceived as a resource rather than as a deficit, how will this lead to institutional change in education and research? What might a culture of multilingualism or plurilingualism (Canagarajah, “Multilingual Strategies”) or translingualism look like? In this essay I’ll employ two principal strategies for making invisible monolingualist assumptions more explicit and thus more critique-able. I’ll begin with a fantasy, an imagination of an alternative universe, or at least an alternative education system, based on different assumptions. Returning to our present reality, I will then examine some data from a survey on education and language background, conducted at a public urban university, and explore some consequences for the work of composition regarding the significant linguistic diversity that it reveals.

Fictional Prelude: The Story of “John” at “Carrothers College” Let’s begin with a thought experiment. Consider a scenario in an alternate U.S. educational universe: John’s instructors at Carrothers College were very concerned about his progress. When he arrived on campus as a first-year student, he struggled with the placement essay, which included a simple “code-meshing” component, similar to a basic exercise that most students had practiced dozens of times in high school, which asked them to strategically incorporate elements of their non-English language into their mostly English-language essay.2 John scattered a few words of Spanish here and there throughout his essay,



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but he never really got beyond the level of superficial lexical borrowing. As a result, he was placed in a special section of first-year composition designated “College Writing for Monolingual Learners,” which was officially described as equivalent to “regular” composition, but everyone knew that such sections were taught mainly by inexperienced adjunct faculty, most of whom had no special training in ESL (English as a Sole Language). Despite his instructor’s lack of preparation, John did very well in that composition course, and later in courses on British and American literature, and showed promise as a writer of short stories and poetry. So what was the problem, then? He seemed to be making very little progress toward developing proficiencies in writing, reading, and speaking in a second language, which was one of the key outcomes of the Carrothers general education curriculum. His instructors didn’t like to use the word, which sounded to some ears almost like a racist slur, but among themselves they were sometimes known to whisper their disappointed judgment of John: “doomed to remain monolingual.” Of course, his instructors recognized, John had come to Carrothers with severe disadvantages in his background: not only were both of his parents monolingual English speakers, but he had attended a school in a district where, due to pervasive budget cuts throughout his childhood, there had actually been school years in which the standard two hours a day of immersion in another language had been entirely omitted or at least greatly cut back. For two whole years, fourth and fifth grades, all of his content-area courses had been taught entirely in English! In other years the instruction had been irregular and sometimes inferior, since the better teachers didn’t want to take a job that was so unstable. The result was that John never really got a solid grounding in any language other than English. In high school, in fact, he was put in a special English-only mathematics class in an effort, ultimately successful, to get him up to grade level in that subject. Now at Carrothers, John had chosen courses that did not call for multilingual learning—he steered away from the history department, for example, where almost all of the courses encouraged students to make use of online archives in various languages. Given John’s cultural isolation and educational deficiencies, some of his instructors were inclined to make allowances. In an attempt to fulfill the multilingual requirement, John had enrolled in beginning courses in Spanish, but he never seemed to make much progress and had never attained higher than a C, which the instructor had said was a gift, because while John

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had actually done many of the required tasks, they didn’t seem to help him to actually learn the language. His current biology instructor was of the opinion that his persistent monolinguality was cultural, stating that it was her impression that John lived in a monolingual English-speaking enclave and never used any of the languages he studied outside of the classroom. Due to John’s early linguistic deprivation at home and his continuing lack of multilingual immersion due to a substandard school system, some of his college instructors were of the opinion that he would never be able to master another language and would always be limited to being an English monolingual—perhaps they should regard it as a learning disability? As distressing as that result may be, one instructor offered his belief that it was possible to live a perfectly functional life in one language as long as one was not called upon to exercise many higher-level cognitive functions. Philip Herdina and Ulrike Jessner have observed that “as bilinguals are measured according to monolingual criteria, they appear to be greatly disadvantaged both in linguistic and cognitive terms” (7). Of course what we have in my little scenario is exactly the reverse of what Herdina and Jessner are describing, in which their bilingual speaker is being (mis)judged as cognitively and linguistically inferior because the standard of comparison is a monolingual speaker. In John’s case, we have a monolingual speaker who is being judged against the standard of a multilingual speaker. In an environment where multilingual competence is prized and rewarded, monolinguality appears as a deficit. Notwithstanding John’s stellar performance in his courses based on English reading and writing, his instructors find themselves debating his basic cognitive competence. At Carrothers College, multilingual proficiency is seen as a key underpinning of academic success, and so a student who is unable or unmotivated or badly culturally positioned to achieve it is regarded as at-risk. In our current system, of course, John would be a star student. We regard English reading and writing proficiency as the foundation of our educational values, and John goes well beyond such minimum proficiency and is in fact an excellent reader and writer of English, both academic and literary. So central is this belief in the primacy of English that we would easily be able to shrug off his struggles with other languages; even if there are “foreign language” requirements on the books at a given institution, they are generally regarded as marginal rather than as essential, a luxury that is nice to have because



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it “broadens” one’s experience but not something that one should go out of the way to acquire, something that students need to “get through” somehow rather than something that they will be unable to function without as an adult global citizen. What this thought experiment makes clear, I hope, is that there are some unexamined ideological assumptions underlying the pedagogy both of our current composition courses and of my imagined alternative at Carrothers College. In both cases we begin from an ideological expectation: in the imagined world, a norm of multilingualism; in our real world, a norm of monolingualism. When we don’t articulate these expectations, we end up judging students whose linguistic backgrounds are different from our assumptions according to inappropriate criteria. When multilingual students are judged according to a system that values only literacy in English, we are obscuring at least some of their talents and achievements and missing opportunities to develop these capabilities further.

The Linguistic Diversity Project: Survey Data and Implications “The Linguistic Diversity Project: A Study of Reading, Writing, and Language Background among First-Year Students” was conducted during the fall semester of 2009 at a public urban university. The goal was to bring together several types of information collected from 222 first-year students in ten sections of composition in order to characterize the student population and to conduct basic research on factors that may contribute to or inhibit student writing proficiency. The project had three main components: an education and language background survey, a reading and writing survey, and scores on a “middle-stakes” writing assignment. Here I am going to concentrate on the findings of the education and language background survey, as described in figure 2.1. On examining the data, it’s clear that the linguistic backgrounds of the students completing this survey break down roughly into thirds: • 31 percent monolingual English speakers, U.S.-born • 33 percent immigrants (some of whom are from English-speaking countries) • 35 percent U.S.-born students who make some use of a non-English language

The Linguistic Diversity Project Preliminary Findings from the Education and Language Background Survey Of 222 first-year students who completed the survey,

IMMIGRATION • 33% were born outside the United States • 18% immigrated to the United States after the age of twelve

LANGUAGE • 31% are monolingual English speakers • 67% said that some close relatives speak a non-English language with each other • 35% describe themselves as more comfortable in English, though they use another language regularly and speak it fluently • 41% began speaking English after the age of two • 17% began speaking English after the age of six • 9.5% began speaking English after the age of twelve • 25% described themselves as balanced bilinguals, equally comfortable in English and another language • 14% described themselves as proficient readers and writers in a non-English language • 6% described themselves as more comfortable in another language than in English • 6% use another language to help understand assigned readings in English • 30% have studied a foreign language in U.S. schools for four years or more (93% for at least one year)

Figure 2.1.



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Within these groups, we can drill down to find more specific subgroups: • 6 percent of students report that they are more comfortable in another language than in English. • 6 percent of students report that when reading an assignment in English, they translate into a non-English language to help with comprehension.

These latter two groups, I would submit, are the students whom instructors customarily think of when they hear the phrase “multilingual students”: they are English-language learners at a relatively early stage of acquiring academic skills in English. They are likely to feel challenged in our standard first-year composition courses. These students are going to need additional pedagogical attention and support resources, and we need to make sure that they get them. But I also want to point out that these students are a distinct and rather small minority of the multilingual students—less than 20 percent even of the immigrant population and less than 10 percent of the non-monolingual English-speaking population. What of the rest? The conversation needs to be expanded, to talk not just about integrating students who are in the earlier stages of English language acquisition into academic communities but also about helping all students make the fullest use of their multilingual skills. • 25 percent of students describe themselves as balanced bilinguals, equally comfortable in English and another language.

Probably a lot of these students are focusing on their speaking and listening skills—the question didn’t specify—but even so, this suggests a population with significant skills in two languages, which could be developed in the proper environment. That is, they would thrive at our fictional Carrothers College. • 14 percent of students report that they have significant reading and writing skills in a non-English language—the question (see table 2.1) asked them whether they were able to read and write at a high-school level in that language.

That is, these students could have attended a university in that other language—their skills are perhaps nearly as ready to be developed as their literacy skills in English. Or perhaps even more so—probably some of these students are the same students who are in that 6 percent who are still more comfortable in another language than in English. But this also means that there is a relatively small but significant group who are comfortable with

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Table 2.1. Sample question from Education and Language Background Survey, with results

N

Valid percentage

Response no.

Replies to the question “Which statement best describes your background?”

70

31.5

1

My schooling was never in a language other than English.

82

36.9

2

I studied a language other than English only as a foreign language.

27

12.2

3

I can read and write a language other than English at a simple everyday level, but had little or no formal schooling in it.

11

5.0

4

My schooling was in a language other than English for several years, but today I could not write a high-school level text in this language.

32

14.4

5

I can read a high-school level text and write a high-school level essay in a language other than English.

222

100.0

reading and writing in English and also comfortable reading and writing in another language. The multilingual reading and writing skills of those 14 percent of students with significant academic literacy in their non-English language are going to atrophy if they are not given sufficient opportunities to use them, develop them, and stimulate them during their college coursework. For students who report some significant use of a non-English language but not academic literacy in that language, this is another potential opportunity for both self-development and possible career advancement—one that will be lost if we don’t provide opportunities to practice the non-English



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languages in academic work. For example, there is considerable employment demand, even in this economy, for social workers who are bilingual in English and Spanish, or sometimes in English and other languages, for specific populations. But we know that simply having conversational skills in another language does not mean that one will be able to transfer one’s professional expertise, acquired in English-language courses, into that bilingual context. If we provide opportunities for students to work bilingually during their training, we will both make them more employable and help them to do a better job after they’ve been hired. For the 31 percent of students who are English monolinguals, we need to think long and hard about exactly what kinds of literacy we want them to have. The status quo is that monolingualism rules and multilinguality is regarded as a nice luxury to have. Are we okay with that? Some institutions have done away with “foreign language” requirements altogether, and even where they remain, students are seldom required to go beyond, say, the first year of instruction. The Languages Across the Curriculum movement has not made as many inroads as the English-language Writing Across the Curriculum, and so there are often not very many opportunities for students to develop their intermediate-level skills in an academic context. Literature courses are often taught in various languages, but students with only introductory-level skills are not ready for these. There’s often a gap in the middle—a problem also very familiar to English-language WAC advocates, of course.

Implications for Composition Pedagogy and Research: From Multilingual to Plurilingual Behind any pedagogy is an image of prototypical students—the teacher’s imagined audience. This image embodies a set of assumptions about who the students are, where they come from, where they are going, what they already know, what they need to know, and how best to teach them. —Paul Kei Matsuda, “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity”

So far we have two different kinds of evidence: one is from a thought experiment where we imagine an alternate universe in which a monolingual student is regarded as an inadequate reader and writer, as culturally disadvantaged,

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as possibly cognitively challenged. Of course, we don’t want to create that kind of environment, in which there is a bias against monolingual students, but we do want to pay attention to what this little fable tells us about our current presuppositions in the universe that we actually inhabit, at least in the United States. What I hope is clear from the case of John at his fictional Carrothers College is that our pedagogy—and this is true in every course, but let’s focus right now on first-year composition—always emerges, consciously or unconsciously, from our imagined portrait of our “average” or “mainstream” student. Perhaps this is inevitable: as long as our model is one teacher standing in front of twenty or twenty-five writing students, there may be no way to avoid pitching it to “the middle”—the imagined middle and, as I’ve suggested, the ideologically determined middle. Ruth Spack reluctantly calls this a “shorthand by which we can talk about learners” (765), while Matsuda concedes that without such normative images, “discussing pedagogical issues across institutions would be impossible” (“Myth” 639). If we inevitably must imagine a “mainstream,” let’s base it on the actual students that we have rather than on our preconceptions. And that, of course, is the other kind of evidence that I’ve presented here: evidence about actual language use by the actual students who attend an actual institution. This particular population may very likely be more linguistically diverse than that of many institutions but, I suspect, not radically different—not as different as it might have been even a decade ago—because the demographic trends all suggest that the students in my survey provide a picture of the student body of the future. It is more multilingual, and many of those multilingual students live in contexts that provide them with opportunities to continue to use their non-English languages on a frequent basis. So what would a classroom of the future look like, one constructed on the basis that multilingual students are the mainstream, that monolingual students, to a greater or lesser degree at various places, are the “outliers”?3 Up until now, we have created our courses on the supposition, conscious or unconscious, that our mainstream student is monolingual—and then, as we have become more aware of the existence of multilingual students among us, we have attempted to adapt or accommodate for them. What would happen if we reversed that process—if we start with the conscious assumption that multilinguality is the mainstream and then find ways to fit the monolingual students in around that central fact? Or better yet, as Michelle Cox has suggested, what if we employed a variety of “universal design,” so that we



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create an environment that allows multilingual students to feel that their skills in a non-English language are appreciated and can be employed in this context, at the same time that we continue to provide stimulating opportunities to monolingual students, without making them feel inferior in the way our fictional John was treated at that alternate-universe Carrothers College? The key is that we build in multilingual opportunities beginning at the conceptual level of the course and then in every aspect from syllabus to assignment to classroom procedures. The first step in building the classroom of the future is simply this recognition of our multilingual reality. But as long as we conceive of students’ use of multiple languages to be unrelated, as long as we think of ourselves as “English teachers,” as long as the distinction between “school” and “home” language is held to be a nonporous wall, then we have not really encountered our “New Students” (Hall 35) or understood their experiences. Canagarajah has criticized the label of “multilingual” as misleading, comparing it to the use of “multicultural” to conjure up a vision of various self-contained groups practicing their customs and speaking their languages in isolation from each other and without a medium for exchange or interaction apart from the purely commercial (“Multilingual Strategies”). Canagarajah proposes the term “plurilingual” to signify a situation in which languages do interact and affect each other in ways large and small. Rather than assuming that languages have few points of contact and remain in separate, autonomous “systems,” both at the macro level of language communities and cultures and also within the individual speaker of multiple languages, a plurilingual perspective does not take a “language” to be a single, self-evident, stable, or definitive entity. Rather, it rejects the quest for a “pure” language and recognizes instead that language use is messy, full of promiscuous mixing and imaginative interaction. It begins from the centrality of communicative desire, social purpose, and situational interaction, whether in speaking or writing, and then analyzes how these various components play out in particular contexts. It recognizes that any “standard” variety is arbitrary and contingent, reflecting the values and goals of a particular group of language users. On the micro level, individual students are constantly finding ways of using nuanced, inflected varieties of English in classroom discussion. For the individual speaker, a plurilingual model recognizes that there are many valid language goals other than “mastery” and many levels of meaningful participation in a language different from a “native speaker” ideal:

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Jonathan Hall As an individual person’s experience of language in its cultural contexts expands, from the language of the home to that of society at large and then to the languages of other peoples (whether learnt at school or college, or by direct experience), he or she does not keep these languages and cultures in strictly separated mental compartments, but rather builds up a communicative competence to which all knowledge and experience of language contributes and in which languages interrelate and interact. In different situations, a person can call flexibly upon different parts of this competence to achieve effective communication with a particular interlocutor. (Council of Europe 4)

A plurilinguistic classroom would consciously cultivate these various relationships to a language, inviting students to develop multiple specific competencies across the spectrum of various languages and more general strategies for negotiating meaning in multiple communicative contexts (Neuner 24–26). Whether we label this perspective multilingual or plurilingual or translingual, we are left with the same types of questions: What, exactly, are the literacies and proficiencies that we consider vital for our students to have in the twenty-first century? And are these really necessarily the same for everyone, regardless of language background, educational history, professional aspiration, or personal interest? How do we need to work differently with monolingual English speakers to develop more advanced proficiencies in a second or third language? How do we conceive of and work with the multicompetencies of students who already have access to more than one language code, at least in certain registers (Hall and Navarro)? At the macro level, we need to investigate how U.S. English is changing under the influence of a multiplicity of languages from the most diverse wave of immigration in our national history. It must be changing—and we, as teachers of writing and reading and therefore of language, are going to have to change with it, to rethink the way we work English, in our teaching and our research and in the structure of our institutional programs.

Toward a Multilingual-Friendly Classroom: Catching Up to the Future The future is now, and yet it is still arriving. We remain on academic time, quick to detect change—that’s our job as researchers—but slow to embrace it in our own practices as teachers and administrators.



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In the future, other languages will come into our classrooms. They will not stay outside, at “home,” in the “street,” not even outside in the hallways of our universities. Nor will students turn off their languages the way they are supposed to turn off their cell phones when class begins. No: the languages will be part of the class. In fact, they already are. They are already part of the class, but they are not yet part of the course, part of the curriculum. Our students bring themselves, of which their language identity is an intimate part, to our classrooms and to their coursework. They read as people with experiences of particular languages and cultures, as readers of particular texts and as speaking participants in various conversations in multiple registers in multiple languages. And they write out of those experiences and through those linguistic filters as well; they interact as speakers of multiple languages with the material that we present to them and with the academic conventions we teach them and with our explicit instruction on how to read and write. And the question for us is: how can we leverage that multicompetent experience in the composition classroom?4 How can we allow English as it evolves to be enriched by embracing these plurilingual resources? How can we find a way not to lose those potential insights in translation, in transition to additional identities as a U.S. college student and eventual graduate, as a member of a chosen disciplinary discourse community in his or her major, as an educated citizen of the world? I’m not suggesting that we as composition instructors should be directly focused on helping students to write in their non-English languages. That’s obviously beyond our capabilities: no individual instructor could possibly be competent in all the languages spoken by all the students in even one section of first-year composition. But our students bring their languages and their multiple competencies and their cultural experiences and their linguistic filters of experience with them everywhere they go, including our classrooms. So the question for us as instructors and as researchers is: how can we incorporate this knowledge and experience base into our course design, into our syllabi and our assignments, into our classroom discussions and our handbooks, into our course assessments and our institutional benchmarks, into our capstone courses for our majors, into general education requirements, into our university’s self-image and our departmental mission statements? There is not a corner of what we do that will be unaffected by changes in language, changes in English as it grows and shifts, adjusts and absorbs, drops some conventions and adds new ones, as its grammatical rules evolve, as its syntax, already so beautifully flexible, stretches into new shapes under the

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influence of new blood, new speakers and writers, new readers and listeners, new pronunciations and newly affirmed accents. As students increasingly write with an accent,5 as we learn to accept some of their nonstandard usages as enriching variations rather than as “errors,” as “Standard” English reveals its hidden ideological shape, as that shape gradually changes under pressure, as the underlying ideology is challenged and as it fights back, as the language community struggles and compromises, we will hear new sounds as new local variations and micro varieties, some transitory and some longer lasting, are born in every classroom and every conversation. The languages are already in the classroom, but is the classroom ready for the languages? What, exactly, do we need to do to get ourselves ready, midstream, for what has already begun? Here are a few preliminary suggestions: 1. Cultivate a multilingual workforce in composition instruction. We need people in front of the classroom who understand what it means to learn a language, to try to write in it, to try to think in it, to take on an academic identity in it. The inconvenient fact here is that our current force of instructors is much more monolingual than our student body. What can we do? • For the next generation of faculty, insist upon serious “foreign” language requirements for graduate study in English, even at the master’s level where possible. Include also instruction in teaching of second languages, L2 writing but also speaking. • Encourage present faculty to learn new languages. Strive to create a culture of multiple language acquisition and use. Foreign language faculty do this routinely, but most others do not. Many institutions offer free tuition to employees, which is good for those who want to take language courses, but there needs to be further institutional support: perhaps special “faculty sections” of language courses at night to avoid the embarrassment of being in class alongside their eighteen-year-old students? Perhaps “language clubs” to practice intermediate-level skills? Certainly an institutional commitment to regard language study as a positive investment of faculty time when it comes to reappointment, tenure, and promotion decisions. Without this, full-time faculty who are now monolingual will simply stay monolingual. For part-timers, extending the free tuition to them may help a little, as may, again, clear statements that WPAs value experience with other languages in making hiring and scheduling decisions.



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2. Educate faculty in pedagogy based on interdisciplinary research. Professional development programs for full-time and part-time faculty need to include explicit exposure to specific techniques, attitudes, and insights derived from language learning, second language acquisition research, L2 writing, applied linguistics, and other fields. Rhetoric and composition may have emerged out of roots in the humanities and may be located institutionally in the English department, but the field itself is inherently interdisciplinary. As long as graduate programs in English continue to churn out primarily literature specialists, writing program administrators will have to take responsibility for weaving ongoing professional development, in a coherent and continuous and compensated way, into the work lives of both full-time and part-time faculty who teach writing in our programs. And we have to treat the faculty as partners in this process: we can’t just bring in the “ESL” expert to “train” them; we need their classroom smarts, their intellectual engagement, and their goodwill. They have to understand, both theoretically and practically, what it means to teach writing in a multilingual environment. 3. Engage multiple Englishes—local and global—in the classroom. Our students in first-year composition will continue to write in English. But we need to complicate our own understandings—and our students’ notions— of exactly what “English” is. For one thing, we all know that it is a global language now—does this fact affect our practice at all? We know that the so-called native speaker, however broadly defined, is now a minority user of English, but do we take the initiative in undermining the premise of “native-like” English as our goal? • Varieties of global English: The Internet, judiciously used, is a great tool for helping students to familiarize themselves with the multiple “English” communities in operation. Through structured writing and reading assignments we can have students become rhetorically aware of different approaches to writing in English as one culture after another finds a voice within the language, inflected through its other language(s), influenced by its experiences and beliefs, expressed by individuals who are engaged in the same process of linguistic and cultural exploration and exchange to which we invite our own students to participate. • “Academic English”: Academic English, or the various academic Englishes of the disciplines, is among the most explicitly international subsets of discourses within the language, with many thousands of scholarly articles and books written every year by

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Jonathan Hall “nonnative writers” and published in English. If we see part of our goal in first-year composition as initiating students into the “academic community” and its many ongoing conversations and sub-conversations, then our job is not just to introduce them to English as it functions on this particular campus in this particular physical location but also to expose them to the multifarious varieties of English that are out there, within academia and outside of it, all over the world. • Local English dialects and creoles. On the local level, too, students bring multiple dialects of English to the table, based on their membership in various ethnic and language communities. These dialects have a complicated relationship to “Standard English,” and we need to spend some time with our students in the classroom interrogating that ideological intersection and the institutional constraints that privilege a particular register, or rather various disciplinary registers, in the academic context.

4. Customize curriculum and individualize writing instruction using language profiles and technology. An instrument such as the education and language background survey that I have described can be a useful tool with which to begin to research each institution’s student body, in order to produce both a group portrait that can be used for overall curriculum design and individualized profiles of each student. • Communal data: To the extent that we cannot dispense with some notion of a pedagogical “mainstream,” we should consciously design our approaches to first-year composition based on our specific findings, from surveys and writing samples, on a campus-by-campus basis. What does the data, on each individual campus, tell us about students’ particular backgrounds and needs? What are their particular strengths and weaknesses in terms of reading and writing proficiencies? What is the local “mainstream”? • Individual profiles: New technological tools and pedagogical design advances may permit more differentiated instruction and more personalization for individual students with multiple language background profiles. Once we have detailed information about each individual student’s language background, writing proficiency, and reading and writing habits and strategies, we can use a combination of technology and old-fashioned teacherly expertise to generate individualized approaches to each student’s reading and writing education.



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The Task Ahead If we must have a mainstream, let us remember that multilinguality is, at the very least, a significant part of it. Let us challenge monolingualism and its corollary, the prevalent U.S. cultural notion of multilinguality as a deficit, conceived of as a disadvantage that students need to shed in order to prevent “interference” as they learn to write in English. Instead we need to examine the linguistic multicompetence of student writers in order to help them to draw on their full communicative repertoire, in multiple registers in perhaps multiple languages, as they work on a writing assignment (Hall and Navarro). In the college writing classroom, the presence of students who possess language learning skills, competences in various registers of multiple languages, and experiences in varied communicative contexts provides an opportunity for teaching writing in a different way, one that includes but also goes beyond a focus on the “process” of drafting and revision. This new approach would find ways to invite students to make use of their language knowledge in recognizing, analyzing, and participating in ambiguous communicative situa­ tions with different types of linguistic partners. We need to move toward an active commitment to developing each student’s unique mixture of language resources. In the U.S. context, the idea of a multilingual or plurilingual or translingual approach in education—a more enlightened version of my imagined Carrothers College—remains, frankly, an uphill battle at this point. U.S. society has yet to fully acknowledge, let alone to embrace, an identity even as a multilingual nation. To the extent that it is recognized that recent waves of immigration have produced many speakers of other languages who continue to use their other languages on U.S. soil, there has frequently been a political recoil, in the form of “English-only” legislative proposals or referenda. The momentum would seem to be in the opposite direction, as “foreign” language requirements are watered down at both the college and the secondary education levels. The growth of English as an international lingua franca has produced a sense of complacency: the attitude seems to be, since everyone else is learning English and since a traveler anywhere in the world is likely to be able to find English speakers, why should we make the effort to learn anybody else’s language? Unfortunately, the United States is still very far culturally from understanding the words of former UNESCO executive director General Kochiro Matsuura:

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Jonathan Hall Cada una de [las lenguas] es un universo conceptual, un complejo y fascinante ensamblaje de sonidos y emociones, de asociaciones y símbolos, de representaciones del movimiento y del tiempo. [Every one of these languages is a conceptual universe, a complex and fascinating assembly of sounds and emotions, of associations and symbols, of representations of movement and of time.] (UNESCO, “Dedicado”)

The short run may seem difficult, but in the long run, there is really no alternative, given the demographic trends, to reconceiving our approaches to language diversity. Until we see it as part of our mission, as writing instructors and administrators, to help students leverage their multicompetent proficiencies in ways that contribute to their success both at the university and beyond, we will not have met the challenge of plurilingual reality. We need to retool our pedagogy, our programs, and our institutional structures to catch up with the future that has already begun happening all around us. Notes 1. For further discussion of the “subtractive expectation,” see Hall 36–37. 2. For a discussion of “code-meshing,” see Canagarajah, “Multilingual Strategies.” 3. See Matsuda (“Composition Studies”):

In conducting empirical studies, composition researchers should acknowledge the presence of ESL writers in writing classrooms and try to incltude second-language writers in their research design, analysis, and discussion of implications—rather than excluding them as ‘outliers’ or ‘exceptions,’ as many researchers have done. (716)

4. For a discussion of multicompetence and writing pedagogy, see Hall and Navarro, which applies the concept originated by Cook and later developed by Hall, Cheng, and Carlson. 5. See Coleman’s linguistic approach to this practice in the context of multidialect students.

3.

ENGLISH ONLY THROUGH DISAVOWAL Linguistic Violence in Politics and Pedagogy Brice Nordquist Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain, and mend, categories will always leak. —Trinh T. Minh-ha

LITERACY EDUCATION IN the United States has traditionally served as a means of demarcating, containing, and managing language differences. For the purposes of self-defense and conquest, this system most often presents difference as division to produce the marginal through an investment of authority in an illusory center. Lynn Quitman Troyka and Douglas Hesse’s Simon & Schuster Handbook for Writers offers a familiar example of this tendency in our own field of rhetoric and composition. In this authoritative source of Standard Written English, and in many others like it, SWE is constructed in opposition to the anticipated English-language “mistakes” of nonnative speakers grouped according to various language-nation conflations. Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog

verb before subject

NO: Questioned Avi the teenagers.

YES: Avi questioned the teenagers.

Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Thai

inverted word order confused in questions

NO: The book was it heavy?

YES: Was the book heavy?

Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Thai

sentence adverb misplaced

YES: Possibly, we NO: We will go home possibly now. will go home now. (Troyka and Hesse 819)

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This presentation not only imagines SWE as a stationary target that speakers of different languages from different nations and/or cultures of origin miss consistently and in different ways, but also suggests that the interaction between these variously inflected Englishes does not or cannot change the nature of SWE and that every student intends to pursue the same target. These assumptions foreclose possibilities of linguistic varieties and exchanges and propose a singular purpose for the development of English language skills. Rather than take on the painstaking and ultimately impossible task of defining features that fit within a rubric of linguistic standardization, authorities uphold the illusion of a standard through the public deprecation of linguistic deviance and the invocation of linguistic difference. This philosophy of differentiation undergirds the language politics and pedagogies of American societies past and present. In the discussion that follows, I consider the manners in which strategies of differentiation operate through language politics and literacy pedagogies to maintain “a tacit policy of unidirectional English monolingualism” for the preservation of Anglo-American authority (Horner and Trimbur 594). Drawing upon Joseph Roach’s concept of surrogate doubling, which describes a process by which doubles are “tested at the margins of a culture to bolster the fiction that it has a core,” I argue that America’s pervasive unidirectional English monolingualism is founded upon concepts of linguistic fixity and coherence that themselves depend upon antitypes or doubles for the construction of a pure and stable “standard English” (5). In this way, the illusion of a coherent “Englishness”1 is upheld through the frequent invocation and symbolic purgation of linguistic and cultural doubles. Moreover, the ideologies that work through political discourse to solidify an imaginary core of U.S. society by conflating nation, culture, identity, and language can be located in instances of surrogate doubling that pervade pedagogical materials and practices of language standardization. I begin with a brief introduction to Roach’s memorial surrogation via John Trimbur’s recent appropriation of the concept and proceed to trace out operations of surrogate doubling in representative statements of proponents and critics of the official English movement and in “authoritative” sources of English-language standards.

Surrogate Doubles and the Politics of U.S. English In “Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. English”—and in the subsequent expansion of this article for the collection Cross-Language Relations in



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Composition (Horner, Lu, and Matsuda)—Trimbur offers a critical explanation for the establishment and maintenance of English language hegemony in the United States. Drawing from Roach’s concept of memorial surrogation—in which a perceived or actual vacancy in the social fabric is filled with a satisfactory but almost always incomplete alternate—Trimbur argues that the settlement of English colonies and the War of Independence prompted late colonial and early national thinkers, such as Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster, to “call up an ancestral, free-born Anglo-Saxon surrogate in order to ‘promote myths of monocultural autochthony’” (579–80). In other words, the Anglo-Saxon founders of the United States mythologized their own regional, New England dialect as a language of pure origin and uniformity of expression and presented it as a substitute for a missing static and unified national language. This substitute was intended to serve as a direct expression of American culture, nationality, political structure, and morality (Baron, English-Only 27). Trimbur suggests that this surrogation initiated a process of systematic forgetting to displace, deny, or erase linguistic traces of the violence of North American colonization and U.S. imperialism by offering a myth of linguistic origin intended to unite the nation as a homogeneous community (582–83). While Trimbur’s application of Roach’s concept of surrogation works well to describe the process by which an “Anglo-Saxon spirit” came to constitute and continues to dominate our national linguistic memory, Roach’s presentation of the surrogate double reveals ways in which systematic processes of memorialization also perpetuate a myth of linguistic fixity and homogeneity. These processes work to substantiate American linguistic culture’s relentless monolingualism by disguising what Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu identify as the “always already ‘mixed’ and fluctuating character” of all languages, including “privileged, mainstream varieties” of English (153). By highlighting one mechanism employed to figure English as fixed and coherent, Roach’s concept of the surrogate double reveals the manners in which strategies of negation work to preserve this fundamental linguistic myth. According to Roach, memorial surrogation requires a process of doubling because societies cannot perform themselves without also performing what and who they think they are not. In this way, American society’s Anglo-Saxon surrogate cannot exist apart from the systematic remembrance of all that is posited as separate from it. Working counter to and in complicity with the construct of Anglo-Saxon surrogation, the reinscription of difference accomplished through surrogate doubling depends upon a paradoxical

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relationship between the preservation of linguistic difference and the promise of Anglo-American assimilation—the rendering of another language for the solidification of a monolithic English and unification of its corresponding imaginary community of speakers. As evidenced in Troyka and Hesse’s handbook, this process of linguistic distinction and fortification requires an emphasis upon differences between languages—what Trinh T. Minh-ha refers to as the apartheid type of difference (28)—and upon an obfuscation of the categorical leakages and spatiotemporal variations that produce differences among and within the social acts that constitute language. Trimbur approaches Roach’s concept of the surrogate double toward the end of his article by suggesting that U.S. English is “a language of forgetting whose very ground of speech is the displacement of other languages,” and thus “linguistic memory virtually guarantees ambivalence about multilingualism in the United States, as traces of other languages collide with English monolingualism and its Anglo-Saxon heritage” (584–85). However, while Trimbur describes a process in which other languages operating in American society crash into the bulwark of U.S. English and subsequently scatter into peripheral arenas of cultural ephemerality—“the names and taste of food, the sound of a word, a style of dress”—in light of Roach’s concept of the surrogate double, Anglo-American hegemony thrives not only on the displacement of and ambivalence about these languages and dialects but also on their continual invocation as sites of linguistic difference for the perpetuation of an illusion of linguistic purity, stasis, and superiority based on racial, economic, cultural, and political distinctions (585). When linguistic and cultural doubles and their imaginary communities of speakers are forgotten, either through assimilation or annihilation, other doubles must take their places to preserve the imaginary borders of Anglo-American language, race, nation, and origin. This recursive system of linguistic preservation and erasure is evidenced in a national history of English language acquisition—and frequent home language eradication—programs for diverse populations of Native Americans, Germans, Jews, Italians, Irish, French, Chinese, Indians, Dutch, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, speakers of West African pidgins and creoles, and many more (Rothstein 677). The assimilation record of many of these populations may be read as evidence of a system that perpetuates a cycle of remembering and symbolically purging, or at least isolating language differences to ensure the preservation of a standard American English. In this way, U.S. linguistic memory serves as a means not only of forgetting the enduring linguistic diversity of American



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society but also of masking the essential heterogeneity, interdependency, and fluidity constitutive of all languages and dialects, including the U.S. English of mythic Anglo-Saxon heritage. This strategy of surrogate doubling is evidenced in the 1984 hearings on Senate Joint Resolution 167, a version of S. I. Hayakawa’s proposed amendment to make English the official language of the United States. In these hearings Walter Huddleston, the resolution’s author, presented the apparently declining status of the English language in U.S. society as a problem of biblical proportions: “The United States is presently at a crucial juncture. We can either continue down the same path we have walked for the last two hundred years, using the melting pot philosophy to forge a strong and united nation, or we can take the new path that leads in the direction of another tower of Babel” (qtd. in Tatalovich 13). In this appeal to linguistic memory, Huddleston frames the official language debate as a question of national unification or inevitable dispersion. Underlying this mono-/multilingual dichotomy is the assumption that beyond the breaking point of linguistic diversity, when the tower of Babel falls, communities of speakers divided by discrete and static languages will face a sudden and mutual incomprehensibility. Moreover, Huddleston’s Judeo-Christian language myth presupposes a causal relationship between public immorality and language decay. In The English-Only Question, Dennis Baron asserts that this myth “assumes that, since a nation’s language is evidence of its moral well-being, we must all honor an obligation to return if not to the monolingual paradise . . . , then at least to a linguistic state that signals through good grammar a return to sound moral principles” (29). Suresh Canagarajah addresses this prevalent language myth in “The Place of World Englishes in Composition” by proposing that instead of the communicative chaos of Babel, we might consider the likenesses between a linguistically diverse society and the biblical account of Pentecost in which “speakers communicate with each other without suppressing (in fact, while celebrating) their differences” (594).2 Canagarajah suggests that according to speech accommodation theory, Pentecost is a more accurate metaphor for linguistic diversity, as “speakers don’t have to be experts in another variety of English in order to speak to other communities. They simply need the metalinguistic, sociolinguistic, and attitudinal preparedness to negotiate differences even as they use their own dialects” (593). Rather than conceiving of linguistic difference as a blessing, as Canagarajah suggests, Huddleston presents linguistic diversity as a curse threatening

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the normative order of U.S. society. Consequently, he seeks to preserve the union by protecting the mythically monolithic force that unites it, equating linguistic fortification with the preservation of national identity to maintain English hegemony. This presentation of the English language as the key to national cohesion continues to dominate the rhetoric of the official English movement. Introducing the English Language Unity Act of 2011, Congressman Steve King proclaimed that a common language is “the most powerful unifying force known throughout history. A nation divided by language cannot pull together effectively as a people.” In Huddleston’s and King’s presentations, American identity is upheld through an appeal to U.S. linguistic memory and a warning of the impending pluralistic future that threatens to dissolve the cohesion of the American polity. Moreover, Huddleston’s and King’s representations of the English language as an essential symbol of American identity obscure the fact that a standardized U.S. English uniting an imaginary community of speakers exists only within what Horner and Trimbur term the “realm of the ideal.” In “English Only and U.S. College Composition,” they suggest that when “located in actual practice, what is called English inevitably adjusts to changing circumstances. Located, however, in the realm of the ideal associated with proper English and with writing, English either remains inviolable or is at risk, either of disappearing altogether or of being debauched” (617). In this way, idealizations of English and the subsequent failures of English-only proponents and critics to address the ontology of the contentious subject result in an almost exclusive focus upon perceived and/or potential causes and effects of linguistic contact—linguistic diversity poses no threat to English, or it produces its inevitable dissolution or debauchment. Consequently, definitions of the language remain shrouded in ambiguity, as “Standard English” can exist only as a sociocognitive construct. In the process of protecting this linguistic ideal and the cultural capital and social privilege it signifies, Huddleston, King, and their official English allies maintain an essential connection between a unified nation-state and a coherent and static U.S. English through strategies of disavowal, invoking and symbolically dispelling surrogate doubles to reify the imaginary boundaries of a national community and its monolithic standard of communication. This articulation of discriminatory identities can be perceived in Senator Hayakawa’s defense of Proposition 63, which amended California’s constitution to declare English the state’s official language in 1986 (Tatalovich 120).



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In an editorial published in the Los Angeles Times four days before the 1986 election, Hayakawa writes, “While the vast majority of immigrants still enter the American mainstream through the time-proven ‘melting pot’ process, some special-interest groups . . . would raise other languages to equal status with English, and promote a bilingual and bicultural state and nation” (2). This desire, he suggests, “is a recipe for disaster,” the proof of which can be seen in “Canada, Belgium, South Africa, Sri Lanka and other areas of the world. The results have ranged from disharmony to bloody strife. Their sad experience should be object lessons to us, rather than models” (5). In this invocation, Hayakawa seeks to intimate the future of an increasingly multilingual America by presenting the fear of communicative chaos and physical violence in the form of foreign doubles. In this invocation and disavowal of national and linguistic difference, the senator collapses the multifaceted conflicts in these spaces to issues of linguistic diversity so that they might serve as surrogate doubles to bolster the fictional core of American society. K. C. McAlpin, the former executive director of ProEnglish, offers a more recent example of surrogate doubling in an opinion piece critiquing Democratic opposition to a 2006 Senate immigration bill that would declare English the “national language” of the United States. In this critique, McAlpin associates language activists with “Marxist-leaning academics,” “Mexican-American extremists,” and “mobs of Muslim youth” to argue that the true motive for the preservation of a multilingual society is “the creation of a linguistically isolated, alienated underclass that can be imbued with grievances and mobilized for political and social revolution like the mobs of Muslim youths that rampaged in dozens of French cities.” According to McAlpin and Hayakawa, as the nation travels further down the path that leads to Babel, the foreign double of linguistic conflict and physical violence threatens to permeate the boundaries of our sovereign national community—if we’re not careful, we may fall victim to “La Reconquista”; suffer the rampages of non-white, non-Christian revolutionaries; or end up thinking, speaking, and behaving more like Canadians than Americans. To avoid such a tragic turn of events, the nation must purge its linguistic diversity to preserve its mythically coherent and monolingual identity. Entering into this dichotomous mono-/multilingual framework to oppose the official English movement, the English Plus Information Clearinghouse (EPIC) established a coalition in 1987 comprising over fifty civil rights and educational organizations including NCTE, NEA, TESOL, MLA, American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages, and the Center for

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Applied Linguistics (English Plus 151). EPIC announced its formation with a resolution to act within the best interest of the nation by promoting “access to effective opportunities to acquire strong English language proficiency plus mastery of a second or multiple languages” for all members of American society (152). Among other founding statements, EPIC asserts that English is and will remain the primary language of the United States. The ability to communicate in English and other languages has promoted and can further enhance American economic, political, and cultural vitality, and contributes to our nation’s productivity, worldwide competitiveness, successful international diplomacy, and national security. The organizations establishing [EPIC] are committed to the principles of democratic and cultural pluralism and encourage respect for the cultural and linguistic heritages of all members of society. (152–53)

While EPIC’s well-hedged position is perhaps necessitated by the impending threat and increasingly successful record of restrictionist language legislation, the message of the “English Plus Alternative” all but ensures the perpetuation of an imaginary fixed and coherent English language positioned against and above other “linguistic heritages” because of its indisputable claim to socioeconomic and political success, productivity, competitiveness, and international prestige and power. Essentially, EPIC suggests that supplementing U.S. English with other economically, politically, and diplomatically useful languages in unique circumstances of global trade, diplomacy, and national security can only serve to enhance the power of the language. For the purposes of this argument, perhaps the most significant aspect of EPIC’s resolution is its adherence to English-only assumptions that protect the myth of linguistic fixity and coherence to ensure the unity of American society. In “Linguistic Utopias,” Mary Louise Pratt suggests that this “impulse to unify the social and linguistic world displaces other quite compelling social logics” by assuming “that all participants are engaged in the same [linguistic] game and that the game is the same for all players” (51–52). Read in this light, EPIC’s socially and politically neutral presentation of English-language acquisition—in which all members of society are assumed to desire English for its guarantee of socioeconomic success—preserves the unity and harmony of the nation-state and its imaginary linguistic community as “styles, registers and varieties are treated not as lines which divide the community, but as shared property, a communal repertoire which belongs to all members and



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which all seek to use in appropriate and orderly ways” (Pratt 55). As EPIC asserts, “Our commitment to cultural and democratic pluralism is essential to enhance our competitiveness and position of international leadership. In an interdependent world, the diversity of our people provides a unique reservoir of understanding and talent” (152–53). Thus, the linguistic plus of U.S. society is figured as a shared resource to help preserve what Benedict Anderson identifies as the perceived finitude, sovereignty, and community of the nation-state (16). Moreover, by affirming the direct association of language, ethnicity, and culture proposed by advocates of English Only—uniting “the cultural and linguistic heritages of all members of society”—EPIC disguises linguistic heterogeneity and fluidity through the invocation of a surrogate double that serves to solidify the core of Anglo-American language and culture (153). Pratt identifies this conflation as a “linguistics of subcommunities” in which separate speech communities are preserved within their own discrete bounds of operation (56). In this sense, those languages that constitute the plus are forever subordinate to English, “the primary language of the United States,” and are lumped together in an amorphous collective that serves as a linguistic double to preserve the illusion of English as a fixed and pure entity and to protect the sociocultural authority that this illusion maintains. In other words, an idealization of the English language is produced in opposition to the linguistic plus of American society rather than revealed as composed of it. Pratt’s theory points to the ways in which a subcommunity approach, such as EPIC’s, fails to consider “the dominated and dominant in their relations with each other” (56; emphasis in original). Collaborative interdependence is masked and the myth of linguistic fixity and purity upheld by a ritual invocation in which “social difference is seen as constituted by distance and separation rather than by ongoing contact and structured relations in a shared social space” (56). Alastair Pennycook asserts that this pervasive impulse to separate and divide languages is driven by an “epistemology of the ‘bi,’” which presents models of bilingualism and multilingualism as little more than “pluralization‍‍‍[s] of monolingualisms” (Language 132). Pennycook suggests that rather than perpetuate the strategies of separation supported by such additive models of language learning, we must question the underlying epistemologies that allow for such “divisions, singularisms and pluralizations” (132). This epistemology of the “bi” can be challenged with more dynamic conceptualizations of translingual literacy (Horner et al., “Language Difference”; Pennycook, Language; Canagarajah, “Place”) that attend

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to communicative practices within, across, and among codes, channels, and resources. However, despite a growing interest in such conceptualizations, strategies of surrogate doubling, such as those that work through political discourse, still largely dominate representations of language education through “authoritative” sources of English-language standards.

Pedagogical Performances of Linguistic Differentiation and Purgation Unsurprisingly, the ideologies that work through political discourse to solidify an imaginary core of U.S. society also circulate in pedagogical environments. As evidenced in the example that opens this chapter, this circulation is propelled by ritual invocations and disavowals of linguistic difference inscribed in language handbooks and performed in writing classrooms that formulate standards of correct and appropriate language for academic contexts. These “authoritative” sources of English-language standards employ strategies of negation for the preservation of the myth of linguistic fixity and purity and the perpetuation of its attendant policies of unidirectional English monolingualism. William Strunk’s Elements of Style, printed privately by the author for his students in 1919 and revised by E. B. White in 1957, provides a precedent for what is now a conventional process in English-language handbooks of standardization through negation. Presenting his “Elementary Principles of Composition,” Strunk cautions his students to “avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language. Use the word not as means of denial or antithesis, never as means of evasion” (19). After explaining how not to use “not,” Strunk seeks to solidify his standard by situating it in columnar opposition to its negative double: She did not think that studying Latin was a sensible way to use one’s time.

She thought the study of Latin was a waste of time. (19)

In this linear progression from left to right, language deviance is invoked and subsequently purged to construct the standard. Of course, there is no mention of what potential meanings and rhetorical effects are lost in the translation—conditioning, politeness, deferment of responsibility for the sentiment, and so on—only that the latter statement is not tame, colorless,



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and hesitating. In this way, Strunk’s standard is solidified through the disavowal of its negative double. White maintains this standard of negation in his most substantial addition to the text, the chapter “An Approach to Style,” by exhorting his readers to not “overwrite,” “overstate,” “affect a breezy manner,” “explain too much,” “construct awkward adverbs,” “use dialect,” “inject opinion,” or “take shortcuts.” Moreover, one should avoid “the use of qualifiers,” “fancy words,” and “foreign language” (72–81). In this chapter, White’s references to all that Standard Written English is not almost double his affirmative statements concerning “appropriate” style. Ultimately, standardized elements of style depend upon the invocation and disavowal of doubles—language standards are unintelligible until they are measured against what they are apparently not. Strunk’s implicit aversion to Latin language instruction—mediated through the opinion of his fictional female student—can most likely be attributed to late nineteenth-century university modernizing initiatives, which, as Horner and Trimbur assert, instituted “a language policy that replaced the bilingualism (in principle if not always in practice) of the classical curriculum with a unidirectional monolingualism” (595). Likewise, White’s explicit discouragement of the use of dialects and foreign languages accords with the policies of linguistic containment and the exclusion of native speakers of nonprivileged varieties of English that Paul Kei Matsuda identifies as characteristic of the mid-twentieth-century academy (“Myth” 647). However, it has become increasingly difficult for contemporary English-language handbooks to dismiss issues of linguistic diversity in presentations of SWE addressed to an increasingly multilingual and multicultural twenty-first-century university audience. To accommodate the sociolinguistic reality of the modern academy, many recently published or updated handbooks include sections for multilingual and multidialectical writers that adapt the generic conventions of their predecessors to present a monolithic conception of SWE. These handbooks reflect current composition pedagogies of language differentiation, including code-switching pedagogies. For instance, Robert Perrin’s Beacon Handbook informs “ESL” students that, in American universities, they “will be expected to communicate—both in writing and in speaking—in an American fashion” (339). According to Perrin, “American writing” is characterized by “individuality,” “personal experience,” “directness,” “diversity,” “linear organization,” and “growth and development” (339–40). While the handbook is careful not to present these qualities as universal standards, Perrin’s essentialized union

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of language, nation, and culture—his easy conflation of “American-ness” and “individuality,” “personal experience,” “directness,” and the like—perpetuates a policy of unidirectional monolingualism in the university by proposing a national and cultural language standard substantiated by an underlying assumption of linguistic fixity and purity. This denial of linguistic exchange also informs the “Cultural-Language Guide” of Jane E. Aaron’s Little, Brown Handbook, which explains that the United States contains “scores of regional, social, and ethnic groups with their own distinct dialects, or versions of English. Standard American English is one of those dialects, and so are Black English, Appalachian English, Creole, and the English of coastal Maine” (156–57). Aaron goes on to suggest that “forms imported from one dialect into another may be perceived as unclear or incorrect”; consequently, students should “edit to eliminate expressions that differ from standard English. These expressions may include theirselves, hisn, them books, and others labeled ‘nonstandard’ by a dictionary” (157). Aaron’s handbook disguises the essential heterogeneity of SWE, solidifying its imaginary core and fortifying its invisible boundaries, by invoking and disavowing linguistic doubles or antitypes. Because Standard English “can only be defined socio-cognitively,” as Nikolas Coupland claims (627), Aaron must employ a strategy of negation to formulate the conception of a standard flexible enough to accommodate the expectations of various and divergent contexts—“school, business, the professions, government, and communications media” (156). In other words, because all languages and language varieties are heterogeneous and fluid, the handbook cannot safely provide definitive examples of appropriate SWE for various socio-discursive events, which are themselves in constant states of flux (142). Instead it must invoke and symbolically isolate those varieties consistently marked “unacceptable” by agents of linguistic and social normalization for usage in academia and the labor market. So while “theirselves” should not be used in “the professions,” it is acceptable in “journals, notes, and drafts, which should be composed as freely as possible” (157). In the end, such sources of English standardization formulate a conception of SWE in opposition to static and coherent linguistic doubles, which are consistently relegated to various “prewriting” activities to be conducted in the service of a future public draft composed in the acceptable standard. This process of linguistic invocation and relegation is also frequently advocated and represented in composition scholarship as teachers are advised to encourage their students to transition from nonprivileged to standard



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varieties of English when moving their work toward final written products. In the same way that Aaron’s Little, Brown Handbook designates certain forms and genres as acceptable for multidialectical and/or multilingual drafting but ultimately recommends SWE for “polished” papers, composition scholarship often suggests we might encourage students to write and speak in “their own languages” as long as students then remember to purge traces of these languages from their final drafts. As Janet Bean and her coauthors concede, there are a “few limiting contexts in which it probably does make sense” to invite students to write in “home languages”—“for example, for purely private exploratory writing or for comparing the grammar and rhetoric of a home language with standard written English.” They go on to assert that writing in a “home language” or dialect is acceptable when the text “is not intended for the eyes of others—or even discarded. The goal of such writing is not to create a product but rather to help students think something through or explore their reactions” (26). Likewise, Peter Elbow proposes that writing teachers might “invite students to leave their exercises and low stakes writing in the home dialect—helping send the message that nonmainstream dialects don’t need to be ‘corrected’ into SWE to be legitimate” (378). While Elbow and Bean and her colleagues concede that the distinction between “home language” and standardized English can be questionable in some contexts, their maintenance of this distinction through pedagogies of linguistic invocation and isolation reinforces the imaginary boundaries of a Standard Written English by constructing it in opposition to discrete linguistic doubles, which are relegated to “low stakes writing” and purged from “academic or formal registers.” As Bean and her coauthors assert, “For pieces of writing in an academic or formal register, it would . . . seem to make little sense to use a home language or dialect” (29). While these attempts to create space for multiple dialects and languages in the composition classroom are commendable, they ultimately serve to reinforce unidirectional English monolingualism by advocating what Matsuda identifies as strategies of linguistic containment that create conditions for the dismissal of language differences (“Myth” 638). Through these strategies, students are encouraged to read and write texts that demonstrate linguistic diversity and heterogeneity while their linguistic progress is ultimately measured according to finished products in SWE. Thus, if we follow pedagogical recommendations such as those offered by Elbow and Bean and her colleagues, among others, many writing teachers engage, perhaps unwittingly, in strategies that serve to reify the linguistic ideologies of the educational market and reinforce the

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hierarchical system of linguistic exchange that establishes and maintains relations of power between dominant and dominated groups. Moreover, this “conversion” model fails to acknowledge the difference between spoken and written languages and thereby puts students in the precarious position of writing in primarily oral and apparently discrete “home languages.” By invoking and symbolically purging “home languages,” composition scholars and teachers figure languages as static, dichotomous, and expendable. In “‘Nah, We Straight’: An Argument against Code Switching,” Vershawn Ashanti Young identifies the models proposed by Bean and her coauthors, Elbow, and others as forms of code-switching, which he defines as strategies “whereby black [and other] students are taught contrastive analysis—a method comparing black English to standard English so that they can learn to switch from one to the other in different settings” (52). While Young is careful not to suggest that those who teach code-switching are racist, he does imply that code-switching perpetuates racist ideology, as it teaches “students that the two language varieties cannot mix and [thus] belies the claim of linguistic equality and replicates the same phony logic of Jim Crow legislation” (53). This separate-but-equal claim of code-switching pedagogies might also be read as a strategy of surrogate doubling that works to disguise collaborative interdependency across imaginary linguistic, cultural, and racial borders. As Roach suggests, “Without failures of memory to obscure the mixtures, blends, and provisional antitypes necessary to its production ‘whiteness’ could not exist even as a perjury” (6). Likewise, code-switching might be conceived as a process of disavowal reifying an “American racial logic [that] exaggerates the differences between black and white people, which leads to exaggerations between black and white languages” and masks a “reality that the languages aren’t so disparate after all” (Young, “‘Nah, We Straight’” 59). In manners similar to Huddleston’s, King’s, Hayakawa’s, and McAlpin’s strategies of surrogate doubling, code-switching pedagogies situate a version of SWE against a symbol of negation to reinscribe the racial, cultural, and linguistic superiority of speakers of a privileged standard of English and thereby maintain the conception of a pure and stable “Englishness” by producing it through a strategy of disavowal. Through the systematic invocation of language difference and the symbolic purgation or containment of language deviance, writing handbooks and pedagogical recommendations for language conversion—like English-only proponents and critics—function as agents of linguistic and social normalization to preserve an imaginary core of American society and its mythically



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monolithic standard of communication. This myth of linguistic fixity and purity and the relentless unidirectional English monolingualism of U.S. society that it supports contribute to patterns of symbolic violence pervading the language politics of American societies past and present. Unfortunately, dispelling myths is no easy task, especially since the conceptual shift from the fear of Babel to the glory of Pentecost requires strategies to develop “metalinguistic, sociolinguistic, and attitudinal preparedness to negotiate differences” that are often easier to theorize than to implement (Canagarajah, “Place” 593). However, rather than figure linguistic difference as division or deviation, we might utilize our positions as teachers and scholars of writing to refuse participation in patterns of symbolic violence by considering the manners in which individuals draw upon diverse representational resources to reposition themselves within dynamic, multiple, overlapping, and often conflicting discourses. In this way, literacy learning can be conceived as a negotiation of intersecting and often conflicting discourses, as students and teachers learn to identify, reflect upon, and employ language choices to negotiate the demands of concurrent and often conflicting contexts, investments, allegiances, and ideologies. This translingual (Horner et al., “Language Difference”) approach to literacy teaching and learning can provide a way of understanding the ways in which students and teachers contribute to the (re)assemblage of educational and geopolitical landscapes by employing a diversity of representational resources in the production of space-time through language. Notes 1. Following James Slevin, I’m using “English” here and throughout the text as a figure of speech, as “not just a language but also a culture, and not just English or European culture but a whole range of things to be known and powers to be developed and manners to be observed that accompany learning to read and write” (69). 2. While I see Canagarajah’s substitution of the metaphor of Pentecost for Babel as a step in the right direction, it also presents other problematic associations with rhetorics of conversion, divine inspiration, salvation, and so on.

4.

CRITICAL LITERACY AND WRITING IN ENGLISH Teaching English in a Cross-Cultural Context Weiguo Qu THE QUESTION TO be addressed is: how can we best make English work effectively and equitably in public deliberations, cultural expressions, and educational practices? To answer the question we need to discuss some important related notions. The first to be looked into is the notion of “critical literacy.” There is a growing consensus concerning the need to cultivate students’ critical literacy, but there is also some confusion over what one can be critical of, or even worse, over what is actually meant by the term “critical.” The second has to do with cultural differences. For all the precautions and cautions on the part of many scholars in the fields of cross-cultural studies, applied linguistics, rhetoric studies, and the like, the common practice is to attribute distinctive labels to cultures to help fix the distinctions between them, even though most scholars are against the practice of cultural stereotyping. While labels facilitate imposing a structural order on reality, they deceptively simplify it, concealing some important complexities both in cross-cultural and intracultural contexts. The discussion of cultural differences has led to a concept of the cultural ecology of literacy modeled on the term “ecology of nature,” which presupposes the necessity and importance of natural diversity. But the question is: are cultural differences of the same kind as natural differences, which are ordered in a way that disregards the dignities of each species? While natural differences are decided according to some scientific classificatory principles, what principles can dictate the construction of an identity for a culture? My reservations about linguistic colonialism or imperialism will be the general background for the discussion. Given that interaction invariably involves powerwork and power relations, I will raise the question of whether colonialism can be extended to apply to all instances of cross-cultural interaction 64



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that involve the imbalance of power. If so, colonization can take place in intracultural interaction as well. More specifically, I will explore the implications for the extended use of colonialism to describe both former colonies and noncolonies. It should be noted and certainly expected that I do not have any ready answers for these questions. However, by discussing the implications of these notions, I intend to show that critical awareness is all the more needed in the process when we set up frameworks for the analysis of cross-cultural issues. I agree to a large extent with critiques of traditional depoliticized and de-ideologized English teaching practices in cross-cultural contexts, but my stance based on my teaching of English argumentation in China is that English as a foreign culture can defamiliarize and de-automatize the habituated cognitive activities of a student’s own culture, participating in and contributing to the cultivation of critical literacy in that culture. Instead of indiscriminately accusing English as the perpetrator of linguistic or cultural colonialism, we want to stress “the liberatory potential” of a foreign language in “facilitating critical thinking” (Canagarajah, Resisting 2) and the privilege an intercultural speaker has in critical thinking (Kramsch, “Privilege”).

“Problematizing the Givens” Generally, critical literacy now refers to the practice of adopting a critical perspective in the learning process.1 But the word “critical” is not easy to define since its basic assumptions are based on the hypothesis that because one can never be free from the prejudices developed over time in socialization, one sees the world inevitably through his or her own frame of mind. We are faced with a paradox here: how can one be critical when one is trapped inescapably in his or her own thinking paradigms? Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer attempt a definition that can make it feasible: “Basically, ‘critical’ is to be understood as having distance to the data, embedding the data in the social, taking a political stance explicitly, and having a focus on self-reflection as scholars doing research” (9). Although Wodak and Meyer’s definition grants prominence to social contextualization and political stance in social cognition, they still cannot resolve the paradox: one can never have the distance that they view as the essential step in being critical because the practice of embedding or contextualization is politically selective, and a level of neutrality or objectivity as insinuated by the term “distance to the data” is denied by the very definition itself.

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If we follow the practice of critical discourse analysis carefully, it is not difficult to find that it is not about distancing or self-reflection; rather, its mission is what Homi Bhabha has defined as “interrupt‍[ing] the dominant and dominating strategies of generalization within a cultural or communicative or interpretational community” (4). Or, as Teun A. van Dijk has specified more explicitly in his definition of critical discourse analysis: Critical discourse analysis is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take explicit positions, and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social identity. (352)

Simply put, critical discourse analysis targets and critiques power that dominates. This summary is, to a large extent, too simplistic to be fair, but most of the discussions on the role of English in the international arena in terms of critical literacy are of that nature, for all the obvious or subtle differences. To be critically aware of the role of English is to pit the local language or culture against it. Given the status of English in today’s world, English is easily seen as a kind of linguistic imperialist power that culturally dominates and colonizes in the wake of military and economic colonization (Phillipson). English learning with a critical pedagogy is to resist the linguistic imperialism that threatens other cultures. However, we find that in the efforts to resist the colonizing influence of English, the critical perspective takes for granted that we have well-defined and monolithic cultures that represent the powerless and the subjugated and on which the powerless and the subjugated can safely rely. It also assumes with certainty that the English language or culture as a whole is imperialistic. This practice ignores the complex power relations within that culture and, more important perhaps, the fact that English itself is a product of human sharing if we take a look at its history. The content of the English culture, thanks to its powerful status, has been politicized to be imperialistic, and its interactions with other cultures are perceived as hostile confrontations of different ideologies. But in critics’ eagerness to protect the voices of minorities, or the so-called powerless in postcolonial communities, they forget that there are identical power relations that result in subjugation within those cultures, falsely assuming homogeneity of cultural perceptions and values within a “single culture.”



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In the criticism of English as linguistic imperialism in terms of asymmetrical cross-cultural power relations, we tend to ignore similar asymmetrical power relations existing in any intracultural context as well. Upon reflection, we may see that what is politicized by the critical literacy hypothesis in the cross-cultural context is depoliticized in an intracultural context. Homogeneity, which is so detested in the cross-cultural context, is handily imposed on both the powerless and the powerful in an intracultural context in order to dramatize the confrontation between cultures. The hypothesis that cultures are different underlies the issues mentioned above. Anyone in contact with other cultures can feel the differences, experience their subtleties, and marvel at their complexities. Cultural differences have long been taken for granted in the untested hypothesis that different ethnic groups must have different ways of living, different ways of thinking, and different ways of speaking, all of which form the core of cultural differences. However, when invited to talk about these differences, we may find that we are in an embarrassing situation because if we allow for the differences to be there, we need to confront a simple but fundamental question: are the differences inherent? If yes, the implication is that a certain ethnic group associated with a nationality will necessarily behave and think in a certain manner different from others. As the differences are constructed on ethnicity, the implications are that physical differences between human beings necessarily translate into cultural differences. Cultures are programmed by biology or geographic origin. The yes-version is certainly hard to subscribe to. If the answer is no, we suppose that cultural differences result from development. Then we need to decide on the definitive form of a culture so as to describe differences. At what stage can this definitive form be finalized? Ruth Benedict labels the definitive form of culture as “the final form” of culture: “The final form of any traditional institution . . . goes far beyond the original human impulse. In great measure this final form depends upon the way in which the trait has merged with other traits from different fields of experience” (37). The final form hypothesis is surely spurious because it denies possibilities of further change and development. The final form, which can be one of the many forms a culture takes in the long run of history, is only a convenience for categorization and comparison, but this convenience transforms a temporality into a finality. Even if we are entitled to use the final form hypothesis, how can we handle the differences owing to development? If we acknowledge that cultures can and will evolve and develop, and development does not abide by one single prescribed pattern, then is it fair

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and justified to compare and contrast two cultures that do not follow the identical track of development? Each culture may have developed along its own line thanks to the different challenges it faces, and yet as most cultures interact with each other in their development, how can we decide on the purity of a certain final form of a culture? Experience for each culture is a dynamic process, and the conception of a final form of a culture denies dynamism of cultural experience by fossilizing the traits formed in a certain period and putting an end to possible further merging of other traits. It seems to suggest that once traits are formed, they are definitive. However, since there are so many traits for each culture to choose from in the different stages of its experience, which stage is supposed to be final and conclusive? Who has the authority to decide? We may use English as an example. Which is the final form of English? Can we deny the importance of its interaction with other languages and cultures in its development? Without Latin, French, Norse, and many other languages, could English have developed into its present shape? Can we simply say that the change of English from Old English, to a degree of unrecognizability or identity reconstruction, was bad for the English language and culture? If we look at the lexicon of the English language, we may say that although English is a “colonizer” now, it was being colonized at different stages in its history. The present form of English is undeniably a hybridity, resulting from its colonized experience and its interactions with others. The discussion of English as a linguistic power, more often than not, seems to have turned a blind eye to the development and hybridization of English, treating Modern English as the final form whereas a discussion following a similar logic will disallow and even condemn the development and hybridization happening to other “weaker” cultures. When the discussion serves to characterize non-English languages, it tends to regard as the final forms those before development and hybridization. Even if we manage to work out a way to resolve the final form dilemma, the discussion of cultural differences still has other equally intricate dilemmas. For one thing, even though we conceive it as unjustified to essentialize and homogenize a culture, if we are to describe the differences or to name the distinctive traits of cultures, we will find ourselves ensnared in the inadequacy and paucity of expressivity of language. Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham in their seminal book Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial have outlined critical theory’s objection to totalization, and yet whether formally or informally, in outlining the differences between cultures, one has to resort



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to totalization, which results invariably in stereotyping, positive or negative, since stereotyping is a fundamental way of cognizing the world. According to David L. Hamilton and Tina K. Trolier, stereotyping is a cognitive structure containing the perceiver’s knowledge, beliefs, and expectancies. To cognize a culture, one has to essentialize and homogenize it, supposing that all the members of the culture share the same features in line with the perceiver’s knowledge, beliefs, and expectancies, not to mention the purpose of cognition. We may say that difference in culture is a “particular constructed discourse,” as Bhabha thinks. Here Chinese culture can serve as a good example. China is rich in dialects, which are located in different regions with a significant population in each and are mostly mutually incomprehensible. One convenient classification is that there are basically seven types of dialects: Mandarin (northern dialect), Wu dialect, Min dialect, Cantonese, Gan dialect, Hakka dialect, and Xiang dialect. Most Chinese can feel the cultural differences among these dialects. So, when it comes to giving a label to Chinese culture, which one do we typically have in mind? Mandarin, and we delineate the characteristics of the Chinese language and culture exclusively based on Mandarin because it has dominated the rest. Not only that. Even Mandarin is de-historicized for the convenience of stereotyping. China has a long history. To make it simple for our purpose, we may claim that the history of China can be crudely chunked into feudalism (before 1911), nationalism (1911–48), communism before reform (1949–77), and communism after reform (1978–). It is interesting to note that when we try to essentialize the Chinese language and culture, we must travel back to the time of Confucianism, approximately 500 bce. Most Chinese cultural features are understood to have been formed as early as the Confucian times. In this argument, the final form of Chinese culture took shape two thousand years ago, for later development has been filtered out as “non-Chinese” due to the visible influence of Western cultures. By contrast, when we essentialize English culture, and especially the English language, we do not trace it back to the Anglo-Saxon times or even to the Norman times for the core or the final form. We accept English as it is, refusing to see the glaringly visible traces of foreign influences. A further baffling issue is that to set up a comparative scheme, we need a perspective to evaluate the differences. Physical differences are assessed on the principle of visible discontinuity, as Eugene S. Hunn convincingly expounds. But as has been pointed out, cultural differences are metaphysical,

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hence the question arises again: do the physical differences on the principle of visible discontinuity necessarily suggest cultural discontinuities? The answer is most likely no, since few of us will embrace the deterministic undertones of a yes answer. Therefore, we need a theoretical framework that can address the differences not on the basis of physical discontinuity but of metaphysical discontinuity. Whose perspective do we adopt now when we discuss cross-cultural differences? While cultural differences clearly exist, many cross-cultural differences are more theoretical than real. The so-called distinctive traits of a language or a culture depend heavily on the concoction of a hypothetic final form. Thus, critical literacy, if one can be critical at all in the sense of critical theory, should not be applied simply to pit one culture as a monolithic whole against other cultures envisioned as purities. Alastair Pennycook has offered a better description of the critical perspective in his discussion of critical applied linguistics: Critical applied linguistics is not only about relating micro relations of applied linguistics to macro relations of social and political power; neither is it only concerned with relating such questions to a prior critical analysis of inequality; rather, it is also concerned with questioning what is meant by and what is maintained by many of the everyday categories of applied linguistics. (Critical 8)

Seen in this light, critical literacy involves the cultivation of the awareness of or sensitivity to the differences within one’s own culture as well as between cultures, and such awareness or sensitivity, which does not mean negative resistance but positive openness, can be achieved through de-automatization of habituated cognition, in which English or any other language, as a foreign tongue, has a good role to play.

Teaching Argumentation in English in China Douglas Walton may have given us a good summary of the English tradition of argumentation. Argumentation is to tackle uncertainty or certainty. In other words, it is to make a certainty uncertain and an uncertainty certain: “The purpose of an argument is to resolve some uncertainty, instability, or conflict that attaches to a particular proposition. There is a kind of unsettledness about this particular proposition, so to speak, and the purpose of the argument is to remove this unsettledness if possible, or at least to deal



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with it” (18). If we read the traditional Chinese argumentation manuals, we find some striking differences. In the Chinese tradition, good argument presupposes some certainty before the argument even starts. That is to say, the main business of argument is not to prove but to expound on a certainty. In the Chinese language, we actually have a different term for this genre of writing: lunshuowen. Both lun and shou in Chinese mean “discussion” or “explication.” But where does this certainty come from? The answer is simple: authority. Who is the authority? The established or sanctified ideology. The argumentation or lunshuowen in the traditional practice usually forbids students’ questioning or challenging the well-established authority. Related to the issue of certainty is the mode of reasoning. It is quite common to see Chinese use dialectal reasoning, which presupposes premises that are accepted opinions. Chaim Perelman points out that dialectic reasoning differs in Aristotelian terms from analytical reasoning in that the latter is concerned with truth, whereas the former is concerned with justifiable opinions. The manuals in Chinese argumentation demand the students in their dialectical reasoning achieve a nice balance of (1) abstract and concrete, (2) rational and emotional, and (3) logical and evidential (Wu). Consequently, one of the confusions for foreign English teachers in China is that students writing argumentative essays quite often will give a yes-but-no or a yes-and-no answer. This is only a cursory summary of the Chinese argumentation tradition. Some people hold the view that differences evolve from different cultural paradigms, as can be seen in the discussions of contrastive rhetoric (L. Liu), but not all. Andy Kirkpatrick, for example, argues, “To sum up this discussion of the advice given to writers on ways to organize paragraphs and arguments, there would appear to be very little advice here that appears uniquely Chinese. In fact I would argue that the advice given here does not appear uniquely Chinese at all” (255). I would argue that the outlined differences between the two modes of argumentation bear limited relevance to cultural differences. In other words, it is not the cultural differences that dictate the differences in mode of argumentation but rather the power relations within a social formation at a certain historical period that prioritize some items or modes of argumentation. The cause of the difference mostly comes from the political sector. Societies subject to repressive regimes that tolerate virtually no dissent have prescribed the practices of argumentation. As Xiaoye You remarks regarding Chinese compositional practice: “Whether the dominant ideology was Confucianism

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or Marxism, the themes always needed to be correct, or in alignment with the dominant ideology” (“From Confucianism” 254). Zhongyu Xu stipulates in the most simple and convenient terms three criteria for good argument: it should be (1) correct, (2) clear, and (3) original. To be correct is to obey the authority; to be clear is to not equivocate on stances; and to be original is to not present an original idea but to be unique in one’s ways of presentation. Has Xu’s stipulation to do with Chinese culture? The answer can be yes since the culture is rich in ways of presentation, but our answer here is definitely no because he is describing the argumentative practice sanctioned by a political power at a certain historical stage. Behind the tradition of rhetoric lurks the oppressive political tradition. The outcome is that argumentation originally supposed to be an assault on the unthinking has been transmuted into an assault on thinking and an eradication of thinking. It is not culture but politics that has caused the transmogrification. To problematize the dominant mode of argumentation is no easy job since there has been a forced marriage between tradition and power, which has been reinforced through formal education on the conscious level and media brainwashing on the subliminal level, resulting in habituated ways of cognition. A foreign language such as English may be a good candidate to de-automatize habituated ways of thinking, challenging, and subverting the power relations embedded in Chinese traditional rhetoric. And so far we have been successful, at least at Fudan University. In our English argumentation class, we have been using a model based on Toulmin’s theory (Qu, Introducing), making full use of the foreignness of English to highlight differences between Chinese and English ways of argumentation. As students are required to use English to lexicalize things and notions, a practice different from the Chinese one, they have to stop to think and work for a way of cognition that does not rest on the easy assumption of certainty in traditional definition practices, because the established authorities may not be able to assist them in a foreign context. This is evidently an illustrative instance of what Claire Kramsch has called the “privilege of the intercultural speaker,” who is capable of “shuttling” between languages and cultures (Canagarajah, “Rhetoric”). Translation or thinking in a language that is not native de-automatizes perception and thinking. The difficulty with which Chinese students are faced in using English to express an idea in a translingual context is the assault on unthinking. The assumption of certainty they are so accustomed to starts to crumble. They have to choose between the English and the Chinese definitions. Edward Schiappa points out that



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definition dictates our way of perceiving reality. The English writing process enables students to see different possibilities of perception, just as Goethe beautifully put it in a poetic manner: “Whoever learns a foreign language learns a new world.”2 When students struggle with how to lexicalize a claim and a definition in a foreign language, they are compelled to confront new possibilities of constructing a discourse. They start to detect differences and other possibilities that otherwise are not supposed to be there in traditional writing practice. Confronted with different languages imbued with different cultural heritages, students have to and are able to make decisions and choices. Critical thinking and literacy are possible only when students have more than one way of perceiving the world. In the English argumentation class, we focus on those issues where the two traditions differ and where the languages verbalize them differently. From being forced to make a decision and a choice, gradually students are changed to cognize the world in line with their own decisions and with what they themselves believe in. They want their own definitions, English or Chinese. It is in this way that English as a foreign language with relevant cultural heritage participates in and contributes to the cultivation of critical literacy in an alien country like China. It is in this way that students have begun to develop a type of critical literacy that Bhabha calls “a crucial ability to be responsible to yourself, to make your own reading within a situation of political and cultural choice” (Olson and Worsham 29). We do not see this process as English colonizing the Chinese tradition. We see it as liberatory and enriching. It is liberatory because it makes it possible for us to free ourselves from the chains of tradition, the habituated mode of perception, and the influence of one power, given the fact that we have to be subject to powers. It is enriching because we can have more alternative ways of perceiving reality and constructing discourses. Critical literacy is about opening up possibilities of cognition. Freedom and independent choices are what make critical literacy possible. When the argument concerning cultural differences is carried too far, the putative differences between cultures, which are only particular constructed discourses, become the reality. We may reach a paradoxical situation in which the fight against disparaging stereotyping is fueled with stereotyping, equally removed from the truth, if not farther away from it. Notions of the cultural ecology of literacy, if founded on the groundwork of such differences that denies and defies development, can only reinforce an unfair reality much

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to the disadvantages of many cultures. Critical literacy that targets only the most powerful and the dominant disenfranchises the powerless and the subjugated, since it induces them to accept an ahistorical philosophy that justifies where they are. To return to the opening question: how can we best make English work effectively and equitably in public deliberations, cultural expressions, and educational practices? The tentative answer is that we can make English best serve our interests only when English, whose international use is simply a historical accident, is seen as a tool but not a power with which we can expand our capital in a world that has a growing demand for multilingual and multicultural practices. We cannot change the world with a language. Languages change with the world. Notes 1. The phrase “problematizing the givens” is borrowed from Pennycook (Critical 7–8). 2. I owe this to personal correspondence with Professor James Engell.

II.

LOCATIONS AND MIGRATIONS: GLOBAL/LOCAL INTERROGATIONS

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FROM THE SPREAD OF ENGLISH TO THE FORMATION OF AN INDIGENOUS RHETORIC LuMing Mao THE USE OF English has spread quite significantly in China in the past few decades, extending its reach and influence in ways that have not been seen or even imagined before. English is almost ubiquitous these days in major cities in China: it can be seen on billboards, on restaurant menus, in banks, and in department stores. English is taught as a foreign language at elementary and secondary schools and at universities and colleges. Even some kindergartens are now teaching English to their students. There is almost an “English fever” sweeping around the country, both competing against Chinese ways of speaking and contributing to the birth of what has now been referred to as “China English” (X. Hu).1 Corollary to this development is a visible decline in the use of Chinese in public spaces such as in shop names and posters. Code-mixing with English loan words has also become a popular discursive strategy among many Chinese-speaking youths. In spite of these developments and the economic and cultural capital English has amassed in China, English cannot help being the linguistic and cultural Other because it is inevitably associated with, or seen as a synecdoche for, the exogenous West.2 At the same time, as Weiguo Qu in this collection notes, English can also serve to subvert the power asymmetry underpinning Chinese traditional rhetoric. The rise and further nurturing of “China English” or the English of China in part reflects this schizophrenic attitude toward English and embodies a growing need and desire to develop a viable linguistic and cultural alternative to the dominant variety of North American or British English. These developments in fact speak to an ever-present tension between the clamor for more English because of its social and cultural values and the persistent call by Chinese nationalists to promote the mother tongue (putonghua) as a distinctive linguistic and cultural signifier to stand 77

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up to English. Incidentally, this call is also being accompanied by a push to put an end to Latinization 3 and to ensure that ordinary Chinese can read the classical Chinese texts and access China’s cultural history encoded in its traditional register (Guo 95–97). Parallel to this development to promote Chinese and to counter the spread of English is the rise of a new discourse—one that is as much a reaction against the cultural nihilisms of the 1980s as an outcome of discursive clashes and realignments in the age of globalization. I am calling this new discourse the “rhetoric of cultural nationalism.” As I will show in this chapter, this new rhetoric contests and further recalibrates such concepts as dominance and resistance, identification and division, inside and outside, and being and becoming. It complicates and further enriches the relationship between what is importantly present inside China and what is importantly present outside China. In the process, it helps shine a new light on the understanding and conceptualization of indigenous rhetoric in the present time. In what follows, I first provide a brief context for the rhetoric of cultural nationalism. Drawing from my discussion of indigenous rhetoric, I move to characterize the rhetoric of cultural nationalism as an example of indigenous rhetoric. I argue that the rhetoric of cultural nationalism is marked by what may be called “interdependence-in-difference”—features that are outcomes of engagements and selections with local and global discourses. As such, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism challenges the myth of discursive or linguistic coherence or fixity (see Brice Nordquist in this collection). Following that, I use one example to illustrate the forms and functions this new rhetoric may take, shedding new light on how translingual practices are actually being constructed and enacted (Horner et al., “Language Difference”). I conclude by further teasing out a few implications for the spread of English and the rise of the rhetoric of cultural nationalism as an indigenous rhetoric. Competing ideological projects have been launched since the 1980s in China to search for and develop new discourses. These projects all aim to rid China of its past perpetual and paralyzing ideological struggles and to legitimate its unfolding social, political, and economic transformations. The rhetoric of cultural nationalism owes its emergence and influence to these projects. Since then it has grown to represent a legitimate alternative to the bankrupt or discredited ideologies of the past, on the one hand, and to the various forms of Orientalism,4 on the other.



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What is, then, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism? How did it exactly become part of the twenty-first-century discursive imaginary in China? What are its conditions of existence? If it is an example of indigenous rhetoric, as I intend to suggest below, what specific forms does it take and what are its central characteristics? First, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism arose in the early 1990s as a direct response to the self-negation of traditional Chinese culture in the 1980s. The fervor of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) had virtually swept away anything that was connected to or colored with Chinese traditions and Confucian values. The rejection again in the 1980s of these same traditions and values, which had staged their fitful comeback only after the end of the Cultural Revolution, was largely mobilized by China’s introduction to and subsequent embrace of market capitalism and its attending ideologies. To resist and reverse this “westward” trend, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism stakes out an explicit claim to recover and reconstitute “native knowledge” or what has been referred to as “national learning” (guoxue)—not only because such native knowledge is far from being fully restored and recovered after the long and disastrous Cultural Revolution but also because it is now facing new challenges posed by Western capitalist ideologies. To assume the mantle of recovery, reconstitution, and renewal, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism associates itself with a set of distinctive, though not entirely unexpected, features. For example, it seeks to openly resist colonial culture and champion traditional Chinese values by directly appealing to Confucianism. Specifically, it rebrands Confucian ideology with a strong dose of humanism in hopes of remaking China into a Confucian nation. As part of its rebranding, it redefines what it means to be Chinese by promoting the values of (rebranded) Confucianism, catapulting Confucian ideology to the forefront of the Chinese discursive imaginary (Guo 72–90). Because Confucian ideology both represents native, authentic knowledge and provides the Chinese a sense of ideological independence, this kind of rebranding helps legitimate and promote authentic and autonomous participation by the Chinese in this new context of globalizing capitalism (K. Liu 173). Second, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism is much more than reconstituted or rebranded Confucianism. As it emerges to capture the attention of the Chinese people, it is also grappling with and creatively engages other discourses on the twenty-first-century Chinese discursive terrain as it transitions from a discourse of resistance (to this “westward” trend) to a discourse of growing importance and dominance. These other discourses

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include Chinese postcolonialism, the ideology of individualism, and Chinese Marxism. By rejecting and denouncing various forms of Orientalism, Chinese postcolonialism embraces Edward Said’s work and stresses cultural uniqueness and native knowledge (Guo 110). It unabashedly contests global capitalism and its attending value systems, both of which seem to have been accepted as reality in China. The Western ideology of individualism, which made its debut in China during the New Culture and May 4 Movement at the turn of the twentieth century, conceives of an individual as a bounded, distinctive, and independent whole, which is set both against other such wholes and against its own social and cultural background (Geertz 59). Considered an archenemy of socialism during the Cultural Revolution, the ideology of individualism has now staged a remarkable comeback as a result of the ongoing economic and social reform. Not to be completely “upstaged,” Chinese Marxism has also entered the ideological fray as it reasserts itself by providing a revolutionary context to and impetus for the rise of nationalism and China’s drive to become a central international power (K. Liu 168–71). The rhetoric of cultural nationalism engages and selects from these competing discourses, forming and solidifying its own discursive field—a textual space where related concepts and categories speak to one another and where semantic alignments and subject positions take shape. For example, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism joins Chinese postcolonialism in promoting cultural uniqueness and native knowledge and in developing a new language with which to articulate alternative values and visions for China. On the other hand, Chinese postcolonialism, in its critique of Orientalist constructions of China, often essentializes the difference between the East and the West, creating a totalizing divide between “an imagined Orientalist ‘them’ and a subjugated ‘us’” (Guo 130). The rhetoric of cultural nationalism eschews this kind of totalizing discourse. Similarly, as it draws from the Western ideology of individualism in stressing the importance of the self in finding and realizing the (Confucian) Way, it shies away from the latter’s exclusive emphasis on seeing the individual as a bounded, distinctive, and independent whole. Instead, it embeds the individual within the collective, cultural identity of the community and the nation. The rhetoric of cultural nationalism has repeatedly stated its intention to reject the ideology of class struggle and other Marxist dogmas and to free ongoing cultural commitment and revival of politics, thus distancing itself from Chinese Marxism. At the same time, it cherry-picks from the latter elements



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that are deemed advantageous to its own advancement within and acceptance by the Party-state. They include loyalty to the country and concern for the affairs of the state and the well-being of the people (Guo 74). In so doing, it moves to form a strategic, if not tenuous, alliance with Chinese Marxism. In the process of its engagements with these other discourses, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism cannot help but become a hybrid rhetoric. By “hybrid” I mean that it mixes several competing, if not disparate, discourses to respond to, and further transform, the political, cultural, and economic exigencies of its own time. And through cultivating a sense of coexistence or codependence among its constituents, it establishes a new discursive alliance that reshapes or reorders the existing discursive imaginary in China. As I have argued elsewhere, the use of “hybrid” to characterize the coming together of different discourses may risk severing the link between different histories and experiences and their corresponding particularizing contexts. On the other hand, it is precisely this very link and its internal dynamics that generate and inform the specific manifestations and distinctive experiences of any given rhetoric (Reading 25–27). To properly recognize this tension and risk attending the making of any hybrid rhetoric, it is therefore necessary to emphasize that the rhetoric of cultural nationalism does not transcend situated rhetorical differences and dominance and that its complex forms are made meaningful only by the situated and the specific. To better characterize these interwoven relationships, I suggest that this kind of hybrid rhetoric be called a rhetoric of interdependence-in-difference. Having the characteristic of interdependence-in-difference does not mean at all that the rhetoric of cultural nationalism can resolve or dissolve differences between Confucianism, Chinese postcolonialism, the Western ideology of individualism, and Chinese Marxism, much less engineer any kind of stable, conflict-free fusion or harmony. That these competing discourses have been brought together is in fact fraught with tension, indeterminacy, and even contradiction as they contend with, and become connected to, one another. Togetherness of this kind, however, does call on us to reconsider boundaries that separate dominance and resistance, being and becoming, permanence and process, self and other, and inside and outside. Out of this togetherness comes a set of new discursive alignments. For example, Confucian ideology now takes on new significances as it responds to global capitalism or its lack of moral strictures by stressing social harmony and the moral health of society; Chinese postcolonialism receives an additional boost from Chinese Marxism, whose essentialized critique of Westernized discourses .

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lends Chinese postcolonialism a welcome ammunition for its own rejection of an imagined Orientalist “them”; and the Western ideology of individualism or its emphasis on self as the unbounded whole is being reevaluated as it becomes entangled with Chinese familial structures of expectations. These kinds of alignments, in turn, give voice and legitimacy to new discursive experiences and imaginations. Third, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism, by wearing an unmistakable cultural and nationalistic imperative on its sleeve, moves a step closer to becoming an indigenous rhetoric—not only because this rhetoric originated within China but also because Confucian ideology, its core constituent, has been subordinated, repudiated, and rejected at various moments in Chinese history. By recovering and, more important, rebranding Confucian ideology, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism rises to address the ideological and cultural exigencies of our time and reshapes the relationship between what is “importantly present” and what is “merely present” both within and outside China.5 No less important is the fact that the rhetoric of cultural nationalism itself now represents a major discursive terrain where other competing or adversarial ideas are battling one another for ideological dominance and control (Y. Liu 149). To claim that the rhetoric of cultural nationalism is an indigenous rhetoric is simply to bring attention to its recovery or reclaiming agenda and to its particular focus on reconstituting a native (Confucian) past that has been ignored, ill-regarded, or altogether erased. On the other hand, I want to suggest that the rhetoric of cultural nationalism, like any other indigenous rhetoric of the twenty-first century, cannot be tethered all the time to its place of origin and that our representation of it must take into account the global context to which it has become inextricably connected. According to Walter Mignolo, the current stage of globalization—transnational corporations and technoglobalism—is “creating the condition for and enacting the relocation of languages and the fracture of culture,” thus engineering “the uncoupling of the ‘natural’ link between languages and nations, languages and national memories, languages and national literature” (42). The rhetoric of cultural nationalism cannot help but experience this process of uncoupling as well. That is, it no longer confines its presence to a place defined by physical boundaries; further, it moves into a space populated by exigencies it aims to respond to, experiences it aims to transform, and communities of practices it aims to build. It establishes new discursive alliances that defy and redefine the existing hierarchy, which almost invariably



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privileges the ideology of the state over any other competing or emerging ideology. Whatever original link, natural or otherwise, ties the rhetoric of cultural nationalism to its place of origin thus loses its gripping power and in fact becomes irrelevant in this new space where discursive interdependence, not discursive provenance, is the modus operandi. To state the matter another way, what makes the rhetoric of cultural nationalism indigenous is not so much about the place that claims its provenance as about the space where it becomes importantly present as it defines, shapes, and qualifies the discursive orders in the present time. In addition, such a rhetoric is never complete, and it is always in the process of being constituted in a multiauthored act of representation and re-representation, forever preparing for new relationships and new alignments to emerge without forgetting “the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires” (Lyons, “Rhetorical” 449; emphasis in original). As a matter of fact, interdependence-in-difference already implies that the place of origin can no longer define the rhetoric of cultural nationalism and that what is importantly present from within necessarily speaks to and interacts with what is importantly present from without. For example, the reconstitution of Confucianism in China in the past two decades or so as an indigenous ideology is meant to help legitimize a new cultural and national autonomy for both the state and individual Chinese. However, the revival of Confucianism is inevitably a global phenomenon. According to Kang Liu, “Contemporary Confucian discourse itself is constituted globally as an integral part of the ideology of capitalist globalization itself ” (172) because it assists the Party leadership both in resisting capitalist ideology and in turning it into global Confucianism (173).6 In other words, the importance of (reconstituted) Confucianism is being sustained both by the external ideology of capitalist globalization (to be resisted and replaced) and by the internal hollowness of bankrupt ideologies. To draw upon Kang Liu again, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism moves “between historically changing fields of struggle and habitus of discrete dispositions” (169; emphasis in original)—out of which its significance and cultural capital are being legitimated, recognized, and experienced. Finally, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism is a work in progress. Therefore, its ownership is very much up for grabs. In fact, the more important or the more influential it grows, the less unified or homogeneous its forms or its purposes of operation may become. Not only can individual Chinese deploy this new rhetoric to help them grasp their own discursive experiences as they try to make sense of the clashes or conflicts between Chinese

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tradition and discourses of global capitalism in their daily lives, but also groups and institutions are likely to claim this new rhetoric as their very own, as representing or validating their own voice and vision for China. Even dominant discourses may jump on the bandwagon of the rhetoric of cultural nationalism as they fend off challenges on the ground and hold onto their positions of dominance. In short, there is no shortage of efforts being expended, especially by the dominant power, to use the rhetoric of cultural nationalism to accommodate ideological needs or to advance political agendas—a topic to which I now turn. On 2 July 2003 the People’s Daily, the Chinese government’s main newspaper, published a speech delivered by Chinese president Hu Jintao a day before, the eighty-second anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. In the speech President Hu began for the first time to develop what would soon become known as the “Putting People First” principle associated with his administration—one that revolved around the wants, needs, and interests of the Chinese people. For example, he asked Party leaders at every level to measure their policies or determine their success based on whether the people supported them or not; whether they approved or not; whether they were happy or not; and whether they allowed them to carry out these policies or not. He further urged them to “solidly establish the mindset of serving the people wholeheartedly and the spirit of being unconditionally accountable to the people.” He insisted that “they exercise power for the people; empathize with the people; seek benefits for the people; solve concrete problems for the people with sincerity; make every effort to address difficult situations for the people; and perform good deeds for the people without fail.” This “Putting People First” principle did not arise ex nihilo. As President Hu explained in the speech, the “Putting People First” principle was built upon the policy of his predecessor, President Jiang Zemin, whose main policy was famously encapsulated by his “Three Represents.” The Party, Jiang declared in a speech on 25 February 2000, represents (1) the demands for the development of advanced productive forces, (2) the forward direction of advanced culture, and (3) the fundamental interests of the greatest majority of the Chinese people (qtd. in Lu and Simons 273). In fact, according to Hu, developing and promoting the “Putting People First” principle was the only way to ensure that the “Three Represents” would be successfully implemented. The primary objective of his speech was to demonstrate how the Party and his government could put this principle to work.



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There is more here than meets the eye, though. Instead of repeating Jiang’s “Third Represent,” which actually deals with “the fundamental interests of the greatest majority of the Chinese people,” Hu appealed to a famous Confucian phrase, “putting people first” (xianmin). He then rebranded it by expanding and enriching its meaning with a strong dose of humanism. In so doing, he presented his own response to China’s widening disparity between the haves and have-nots in the wake of the unprecedented economic reform. The “Putting People First” principle unequivocally renewed the Party’s commitment to the people and to their interests above everything else. At the same time, it could also be viewed as an indirect rebuke of his predecessor’s inattention to, if not total neglect of, the interests of the poor and the underprivileged in spite of what the “Third Represent” purported to focus on. The direct appeal to this Confucian ideology enabled Hu both to hew to the Party line by ostensibly adhering to the policy of his predecessor and to begin to diverge from it by explicitly speaking on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden, whose fortunes had not been seriously attended to by his predecessor. The Confucian phrase “putting people first” comes from Mencius, a devout follower and defender of Confucius. Like Confucius, Mencius, who lived in the fourth century bce, advocated humane or benevolent government and urged state kings to think and act in the interests of the people by strictly complying with the moral principles of rites, righteousness, and wisdom. By borrowing this phrase from the Confucian canon, Hu wanted his government to be exemplified by benevolence and people-centeredness, with emphasis on social equality, wealth of the people, and national greatness. Doing so not only would lend support to the importance of Confucian ideology in the present time but also would place him and his government on a much-needed moral and political high ground. The “Putting People First” principle also found an unexpected ally in Chinese Marxism. In developing this principle, Hu revived a somewhat forgotten, if not discredited, discursive field, a textual space that is dominated by such phrases as “serving the people,” “plain living and arduous struggle,” and “remembering the bitter past to treasure the sweet present.” His repeated references to these phrases in the same speech almost amounted to an expression of nostalgia for the revolutionary era when these phrases dominated both the airwaves and the everyday discourse. By incorporating these revolutionary phrases into the “Putting People First” principle, Hu aimed to establish a new discursive order that would bring together Confucian

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ideology and Maoist revolutionary ideals and engender an unusual dialogue between them. This kind of dialogue would create a much-needed sense of policy continuity and provide legitimacy and authority for Hu’s call to show compassion and understanding to the less fortunate in society. The “Putting People First” principle further made its presence felt on a global stage. It did so by both directly responding to and providing a remedy for the unintended consequences of market economy and global capitalism and by joining this global effort to turn Confucianism into a viable alternative to socialism and inhumane capitalism. Similarly, the emphasis on benevolence and people-centeredness challenged the Western ideology of individualism as it privileged the experience of the collective over the will of the individual. Consequently, the “Putting People First” principle became part of this ongoing ideological tug-of-war between marching inexorably toward capitalism and contesting its ideology with an alternative value system. There is a soupçon of irony here, though. As the “Putting People First” principle engaged and remixed these competing discourses in the process of its own becoming, it veered off the path of traditional Confucianism. By aiming to close the gap between the rich and the poor, Hu’s “Putting People First” principle challenged and sought to reform the existing social hierarchy. In so doing, it parted company with traditional Confucianism, as the latter never fails to champion the virtue of protecting and preserving a top-down social and familial order marked with clear boundaries and distinctive rituals. As the rebranded “Putting People First” principle moved away from traditional Confucianism, it also inched ever closer toward aiding the dominant discourses. By reinventing Confucian values, and by putting them in direct dialogue with other competing discourses of the present time, it turned into an iteration of the rhetoric of cultural nationalism. This kind of discursive engagement, as was on full display in President Hu’s speech, served as the Party’s response to the glaring wealth gap that has threatened China’s stability and security and to the growing lack of trust of the people in the Party. In short, the “Putting People First” principle, by seeking to restore the people’s trust and to lend legitimacy and confidence to his government, succeeded in advancing President Hu’s political agenda and strengthening his own credibility and authority as a trustworthy, people-first president. The spread of English and the rise of the rhetoric of cultural nationalism are two major discursive phenomena unfolding in China right now. While it is a stretch, at least at this moment, to claim any direct causal relationship between



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them, it will be a missed opportunity if we fail to pay attention to their co-presence and to examine their significances. We must ask, for example, what kinds of relationships does this co-presence bring about? What opportunities does togetherness of this kind afford, and what challenges does it present? Both the spread of English and the rise of the rhetoric of cultural nationalism in China can be attributed in part to the current stage of capitalist globalization. On the one hand, it has spurred English to travel to places it has never visited before. It has unmoored English from its “anchoring countries” and brought it to many new “host countries.” What has been transpiring in China regarding the spread of English and the subsequent birth of China English is an example of how China disconnects English from its places of origin as it connects to capitalist globalization. In the process, English takes on new discursive roles that can be at variance with, if not in direct challenge to, traditional Chinese communicative imperatives or other local discursive ideologies (see Qu, as well as Bou Ayash, in this collection). On the other hand, the current stage of capitalist globalization has also made it possible for the rhetoric of cultural nationalism to emerge and become a hybrid discourse. With rebranded Confucian ideology as its anchoring constituent, this new rhetoric engages and selects from other discourses, taking on, in the process, the characteristic of interdependence-in-difference. Just as English undergoes the decoupling process spawning distinctive varieties in host countries, so the rhetoric of cultural nationalism experiences a similar process as it intensifies its engagement with other discourses and as it becomes more importantly present both in and outside China. Out of this kind of co-presence come opportunities for reflection and engagement. Not only does such co-presence allow us to critically examine the conditions that have contributed to the emergence of new discourses and new discursive alliances, but it also makes it possible for us to interrogate our own conditions of existence, spurring us to reevaluate our own assumptions regarding, for example, self and other, local and global, and dominance and resistance. Just as important, this kind of co-presence opens up new spaces for constructive work. By definition, the spread of English and the rise of the rhetoric of cultural nationalism are boundary-crossing discursive acts. Using them as examples, we can begin to imagine new ways that knowledge can be created, discursive relationships established, and histories and traditions renewed and reconstituted. And we can begin to develop and enact new identities that are more becoming of, and further generative of, the dynamics and complexities that are integral to these boundary-crossing discursive acts.

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Challenges do remain as well. Admittedly, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism has given ordinary Chinese a discourse that they can call their own, not only because it champions native knowledge, which they can readily identify with, but also because it reconnects to a revolutionary heritage (Chinese Marxism) that has brought them nostalgia for its promised harmony and equality for all walks of people. They can now appeal to this new discourse for comfort and support as they try to make sense of what is taking place in their daily lives. On the other hand, because the rhetoric of cultural nationalism arises, circulates, and acquires value and legitimacy in the public domain, its ownership becomes very much up for grabs. In fact, it is more likely than ever to be co-opted by members of the Party leadership as they try to find new ways to represent and validate their own voices and visions for China and to hold on to their position of power. The advancement of the “Putting People First” principle by President Hu precisely reflects this unavoidable tension. It remains an open question whether or not the rhetoric of cultural nationalism can truly advance the wants and needs of the people or simply those of an elite few. As the forms and functions of this new rhetoric continue to evolve and grow, we must therefore pay close attention to how different forces of ideology contend for the right to shape and speak for this new rhetoric and to how their outcomes determine its influence and its fate. In other words, interdependence-in-difference or discursive hybridity may very well be the beginning, rather than the end, of liberating and sustainable transformations that the rise of the rhetoric of cultural nationalism may hold for us. Notes 1. In response to this relentless march of English in China, many English educators have been calling for a national standard with which to rein in all those “Chinese” forms of English or “Chinglish” and slow down their “unruly proliferation” (Jacobs). 2. For a history of how English has been taught in China and how English has been viewed either as “the devil’s tongue” or as a tool of Western enlightenment, see You, Writing. 3. The use of the Romanized alphabetic system has aided in teaching the sounds of standard Chinese. It has been hoped that it will eventually evolve into a full-fledged independent writing system (Rohsenow 23). 4. By Orientalism I loosely refer to a Western narrative that represents the East as exotic and inferior and in want of enlightenment and that has served as a primary modus operandi for European American discursive productions since the eighteenth century (Said).



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5. By “importantly present” I draw upon “the Principle of Mere Presence” proposed by the comparative philosopher David Hall and the sinologist Roger Ames. According to this principle, the importance of any particular belief or any set of ideologies in a culture depends not on its mere presence but on whether it is importantly present “in such a way that it significantly qualifies, defines, or otherwise shapes the culture” (Hall and Ames xv). The Principle of Mere Presence, I might add, also applies to the global space at any given moment in time. 6. The mushrooming of Confucius Institutes around the world financed entirely by the state speaks powerfully to its global reach and presence.

6.

THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE HERE Localizing Transrhetorical Texts in Gl/Oklahoma Classrooms Rachel C. Jackson My People Are not quaint They’re not colorful They ain’t odd nor funny nor picturesque Nor strange, Nor humorous, And they’re not strangers You introduce with big long words. It makes me sore to hear or to see or to read How you big long haired writers Whack away at my people Chew and cut and saw away at my people Grind and drill and whittle away at them Trying to make like you are their savior Or their way shower Or their finder, Or their discoverer, Like Balboa, like Columbo . . . —Woody Guthrie, Oklahoma folk musician, “My People”

GLOBALIZATION, THOUGH CONCEIVED and usually discussed in monumental terms as a universal phenomenon, occurs most intensely at the local level where individuals experience it in their lives. Surely the forward slash (or in some cases a hyphen) in the term “global/local” indicates this relationship between these two apparent antonyms. The global precedes the local and yet depends upon it as well, leans into it in fact, ultimately becoming it. The 90



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forward slash joins the opposing terms into one even as it punctuates the ambiguous space between them. Where does the global end and the local begin? For rhetoric scholars and composition teachers, this question merits consideration in our efforts to understand the impact of globalization on our work and on our students. What rhetorical models do we offer them in our composition classrooms as we train them to navigate discourse and debates concerning globalization in their homes and communities, and to what degree are these models locally effective? As citizens, writers, rhetors, and rhetoricians, students will certainly encounter globalization most immediately at the local level and engage with it at the level of local rhetoric. In their homes, on their campuses, and in their communities, students confront not only the particular local material realities of globalization but arguments being made about them as well. As Woody Guthrie asserts in his poem, likely in response to Dust Bowl era identifications of Oklahomans, the best people to rhetorically represent a place are the people who live in that place. In Oklahoma generally, discourse on globalization will not appear in the language of global capitalism or academic theory. Likely it will occur in the language of the people who live here, ripe with their values, histories, idioms, and dialects—and rich with examples of shared local experience and subsequent transcultural linguistic exchange. Oklahoma was first a home to a widely diverse population of indigenous peoples, some of whom were native to the region and others who were forcefully relocated here, and to African Americans and African Native Americans who suffered removal from the South as slaves of tribal members. African Americans seeking autonomy in the political climate of Reconstruction and European Americans chasing prosperity in the Progressive Era came to Indian Territory in their pursuit. This complex history has long qualified the state as a site of useful investigation into the issue of transcultural literacy, to borrow a term from Patricia Bizzell’s argument herein. But globalization itself and the patterns of globalization that have emerged over the course of time obscure local manifestations and thereby distort conversations that attempt to address them. As Brice Nordquist characterizes literacy education in his chapter in this volume, Standardized Written English and standardized composition curricula that attends it present “difference as division” and thereby marginalize certain voices and rhetorical practices while ascribing dominance to others. While the goals of translingual literacy animate Nordquist’s argument, and transcultural literacy likewise inhabits Bizzell’s exploration, I am concerned with working toward the goal of what I will call local transrhetorical

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literacy. In the argument that follows, I use “local” to mean those histories, rhetorics, cultures, economies, and discourses occurring primarily within state boundaries, including smaller civic boundaries within the state as well, such as towns, campuses, and communities. By “transrhetorical” I mean those rhetorical practices arising from and facilitating transcultural movement, interaction, and exchange, between both individuals and groups. Local transrhetorical literacy thus focuses on understanding and utilizing local sites of rhetorical exchange between cultural groups. Because of the import of standardized rhetoric and rhetorical models from beyond the state via both mass media and composition and rhetoric textbooks, Oklahoma writers and rhetorics, and certainly texts produced at local historical sites of cultural intersection, receive little if any study by composition students. This lack of local texts not only reinscribes globalization in curricula but also diminishes student ability to rhetorically construct a response to local manifestations of globalization outside the classroom. I believe this deficit in the attention given to local rhetorics should be a primary concern to our discipline if we seek to successfully address globalization in composition classrooms and thereby enable our students to address globalization in their lives. As a native Oklahoman and Cherokee/Scots-Irish/Welsh/German descendant, my work focuses on the cultural exchange of various rhetorics circulating historically in Oklahoma, in particular indigenous and transcultural working-class rhetorics operating at sites of resistance to industrial capitalism, land allotment, statehood, labor exploitation, and World War I. The goal for this work is to restore these local rhetorics and the models of cross-cultural conduct they offer so as to open up discursive space for transcultural alliance building in current resistance and social justice efforts in the state. Though shaped by various local histories and specific instantiations, the basic rhetorical challenge for activists in Oklahoma is likely what it is for activists anywhere who are operating from a culturally and politically marginalized position: to find a way to build rhetorical solidarity between parts of our state’s population that are presented to the public both at home and at large as being so disparate as to be incompatible. Across race lines, across all lines drawn by hegemony, people would likely be more rhetorically successful in the struggle against oppressive global economic forces if they worked together on behalf of themselves and each other. Oklahoma’s history, despite the stereotypes of whiteness and indian-ness that typically limit the official narrative, is actually a useful model to consult in the effort to build transrhetorical literacy and support efforts to address globalization locally. As Nancy Bou Ayash makes clear



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in her examination of English language learning in Singapore and Lebanon, promoting the local rather than the global requires “an increased sensitivity” to the needs of “individual language users and learners, rather than to those in power” (this volume). While studying globalization through global texts provides critical connection-making between students, their communities at home, and communities beyond, local texts allow for inquiry into the histories, cultures, landscapes, and politics that affect the success of student writing that seeks to address globalization for local audiences or to represent the local impact of globalization to nonlocal audiences. It is rhetorically problematic for students not to engage these local exigencies as they write in the midst of and in response to globalization. As David A. Jolliffe laments, literacy education has historically insisted through skills-transfer rhetoric that “it doesn’t matter where or when you study reading and writing.” Increasing, the goal of literacy education has become global in nature, so that literacy skills transfer “anyplace in the world” (this volume). Local literacies have become likewise devalued so that in Oklahoma, for instance, few students know state history in accurate detail, and what they do know of it glosses over rhetorically relevant, critical transcultural sites in the historic narrative. For example, few students (indeed, few Oklahomans) know that at the time Oklahoma attained statehood in 1907, it had the largest Socialist Party state chapter in the country, with a large number of Socialists elected to public positions at all levels of its government.1 Part of what made the Socialist Party successful in Oklahoma at that time was the rhetorical attention given in its platform and other publications to issues affecting tenant farmers and sharecroppers, a population comprising Native Americans of various tribal affiliations, African Americans, and European Americans. Collectively the Socialists had a significant electoral impact and challenged both the white Democrats who were advocating for Jim Crow and the Republicans who would not take a strong stand against them. The historical narrative that Oklahomans and students are more familiar with proceeds from a far more reductive formulation: a whole bunch of Indians, a whole bunch of white farmers, a whole bunch of oil. The truth is, as the work of Native American literary studies scholars and Oklahoma natives Craig Womack (Mvskoke-Creek/Cherokee) and Tol Foster (Mvskoke-Creek) illuminates, Oklahoma has always been far more diverse cultural grounds than the dominant narrative and subsequent stereotypes suggest, a place rich with suppressed and unexamined rhetorical examples of movement across borders of land and race, some of which occur around

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issues of class.2 The transcultural, translingual, and transrhetorical literacy that emerged from Oklahoma’s history is what Scott Lyons identifies as a “cosmopolitan” and “classically indigenous” characteristic in his Ojibwe community (“Fine Art” 85). In Oklahoma, cultural contact and the resultant hybridity certainly created fierce instances of triracial frictions but also examples of transracial class solidarity, both of which provide rich sites for rhetorical investigation, recovery, and literacy education.3 And, of course, the state’s historical archives offer local examples of how solidarity can be disrupted and erased, as vulnerable as it is dangerous to those in positions of power in the state and beyond. George Milburn provides a useful local textual entrance to my argument through a characterization he offers of his home state in his essay “Oklahoma,” published in the March 1946 issue of Yale Review. Milburn was actually born in Indian Territory in 1906, a year before Oklahoma entered the union as a state, in Coweta—a small town close to Tulsa in Mvskoke-Creek country. In his efforts to describe Oklahoma to the readers of the Yale Review, Milburn employs a sardonic but nonetheless revealing tone in order to address his readers’ lack of general knowledge about the state—an ignorance he assumes from his prior experience as an Oklahoma author trying to make a name among fashionable literati in the world’s more sophisticated cultural centers. He wrote at a time when the Broadway musical Oklahoma! was at the height of popularity. This musical, which still enjoys successful stage runs around the world, is based on a play by Oklahoma Cherokee Lynn Riggs and adapted by the famous songwriting duo Rogers and Hammerstein. Milburn explains, “When I visit such distant Babylons as New York, or London, I have learned to go braced for people, well-informed otherwise, who have only the vaguest notions of what Oklahoma (without the exclamation point) is, much less any idea of where it is” (4). He continues wryly: Oklahoma, in spite of skeptics, is easy to find on up-to-date maps of America. The official state guidebook says that its outline is that of “a butcher’s cleaver; the Panhandle of the west representing the handle, the north line its straight-back edge, the east line its square-cut end, the Red River on the south its irregular cutting edge.” A more prosaic description of Oklahoma’s outline would be hard to think up. The same stretch of fancy might have discerned the shape of a sawed-off shotgun, or a chewed-up tomahawk. Either of these blunt instruments is more symbolic of Oklahoma than a dull meat ax. (4)



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In providing these potent visual descriptions of the state’s geographic shape, Milburn also subtly references the common stereotypes associated with Oklahoma. These stereotypes result from the state’s complex history as the federal repository for removed southern and northeastern tribes, the final forced holding place of many plains and prairie tribes, and the last hope for economic independence for midwestern and southern tenant farmers and sharecroppers (Fixico). Oklahoma’s history also includes African Americans who found unparalleled (though still limited) freedom in Oklahoma and Indian Territories both before and after the Civil War and used it to establish all-black townships with healthy economies throughout the state. Mexico held claim over what is now Oklahoma until 1848, and the ranching culture of the state arises largely from the influence of vaqueros coming through Oklahoma on the Chisholm and Shawnee trails (Smith). European Americans were well represented as migrant workers in mining communities and railroad camps as they began to appear in the territories. Yet, in his attempt to place Oklahoma on the nation’s map for readers who might otherwise not know where to locate it, Milburn’s barbed wit disguises the cultural anxiety of an Oklahoma writer and social critic whose identity and success depends upon rhetorical representations of the state and its history and upon stereotypes that effectively silence the rich and multivocal complexity of Oklahoma’s diverse cultures and peoples in both national and local discourse. While there is no strong evidence for Milburn being of indigenous descent in the scant attention given to him in the state’s archives, there is a good chance, due to his being born in Indian Territory, that Milburn had some degree of native descendancy, perhaps long obscured in avoidant family history out of the intense social and economic pressure to “pass” in the culture of whiteness that came to dominate the state after the Land Run of 1889 and throughout the allotment period. As Milburn explains later in his essay: A hundred years ago, Oklahoma was turned into a vast concentration camp for Red Indians, because it was such worthless land. Fifty years ago, white people from every State in the union swarmed in to dispossess the banished Indians, because Oklahoma was such valuable land. Land was free for the taking in Oklahoma a generation ago. So today Oklahoma has a greater percentage of white farm tenancy than any other State in the Union. (5)

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He easily connects the exploitation of Native peoples during the era of land allotment, land runs, and statehood with the exploitation of labor as industrial capitalism developed the territories. As his essay “Oklahoma” continues to problematize the state’s history and complicate the shallow understanding of outsiders who Milburn assumes conceive of the state—if at all—in terms of stereotypes, I recognize what Malea Powell (Indiana Miami/Eastern Shawnee) calls “a kind of cross-blood understanding,” “a rhetoric based on relationality and movement across cultural/institutional boundaries” (10). Milburn’s writing, as evidenced in this essay (and regardless of his actual descendancy), models the kind of local rhetorical analysis and community-driven critique that Native American studies scholars in the fields of both literature and composition and rhetoric practice and promote. Through their emphasis on tribal literatures and rhetorics, the historically situated experiences of writers and rhetors as they emerge from tribal cultures, and the goal of serving their own tribal communities with their scholarship, these scholars provide a means to approach the treatment of local texts in the composition classroom particularly relevant to historically indigenous cultural landscapes, which, of course, includes not just Oklahoma but all of the Americas. The scholarship of Lyons, Powell, Womack, and Foster has enormous relevance and theoretical potential in composition classrooms in Oklahoma, where transcultural rhetorics reflect the histories and landscapes from which composition students write. Their work provides a particularly appropriate framework for helping students to understand not only place but also audience in that place. Oklahoma communities, after all, are the venues in which Oklahoma students most immediately practice their message making. These students, now several decades removed from the 1930s and 1940s milieu of leftist social criticism that defined the era of writers contemporary to Milburn, still have much the same trouble locating themselves that Milburn’s audience had with locating Oklahoma. Where I teach, for instance, at the University of Oklahoma, few of the students I have asked can explain the meaning of the university’s mascot “the Sooner.” The closest they can come is an explanation akin to that of “the early bird gets the worm,” the idea (albeit deeply suspect) that ambition leads to success. In actuality, the term stems from a far more problematic source: the rhetoric surrounding the land runs through which Oklahoma and Indian Territories were settled. In the discourse around these events, “boomers” were settlers who waited for the official gun blast that announced the lands were open before rushing in to grab their claim on a



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piece of it. “Sooners,” on the other hand, were settlers who did not wait for the official opening of the land and came in to stake their claim before it was legal to do so. In the cultural memory of the state’s indigenous people, for whom the land runs were deeply traumatic, “sooner” is synonymous with land theft. Regardless, it is not uncommon on the OU campus to see students wearing the ironic combination of Sooner T-shirts and ball caps with the currently fashionable, socially conscious TOMS shoes—reinscribing the cultural genocide against indigenous people that occurred in their own place while expressing solidarity with and providing material support for impoverished indigenous children in other places around the globe.4 This lack of local rhetorical awareness that characterizes students in Oklahoma results in part from another sort of settlement that has occurred in composition classrooms in the state. More specifically, the voices and perspectives studied in Oklahoma classrooms as rhetorical models are not our own. In my own life as a native Oklahoman, as well as a lifetime student and a college composition teacher for the last fifteen years at various institutions across the state, I have observed this lack of local texts in the state’s classrooms. Lyons notes a similar phenomenon in the textbooks used in the public schools on Ojibwe land; the Ojibwe as a living people are not present in them (“Fine Art” 83). Certainly this misrepresentation/erasure of the local is common, and perhaps as naturalized, in other similar places across the United States into which news, entertainment, fashion, and their accompanying values are piped from parts of the country considered more cosmopolitan or culturally significant. And certainly these superimposed texts have value and use here, as they would anywhere. Nevertheless, they are entirely imported. In studying esteemed texts generated elsewhere, Oklahoma students do gain insight and literacy education, but these students also—over the course of years and with other forms of social reiteration—lose their sense of local identity and the value and issues of their own geographic places. Worse yet is the extent to which the assumptions about Oklahoma implicit in the exclusion of local texts come to inform their identities as writers—that no significant texts have been produced by Oklahomans. More practically, in terms of student learning in the composition classroom, they lose a valuable asset—that is, models of rhetoric from their own cultural and political places. Global models displace local models and thus obscure the immediate material concerns that globalization creates. In local composition classrooms, rhetorics that are historic to Oklahoma, including local voices and texts from Native American, African American, Asian American, Arab

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American, Latino/Mexicano/Chicano American, working-class, and resistance rhetorics, among others, might as well not exist insofar as they have no presence in composition curricula in the state. Even dominant voices currently circulating in state discourses disappear. This phenomenon of the displacement of local texts in favor of texts generated in other cultural/historical/political contexts is eerily similar to the displacement of Native peoples in Oklahoma’s history. Damián Baca observes the same pattern, perhaps the long view of globalization, in his book Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing: In studying written communication, we are instructed to gaze back across the Atlantic to Ancient Greece and Aristotle. From Aristotle to the unexplained present-day arrival of American composition instructors, writing East-to-West is sheltered by the dominant pedagogical mantle under which our minds and writing practices are disciplined. (xvi)

Directing students to study colonial texts as supreme examples of rhetoric reinforces colonization insofar as it communicates to students that their own voices are of no consequence and their own struggles are of no significance. Baca asserts the study of “Mestiz@ rhetorics” as a means to subvert colonial hegemony. He argues: The study of Mestiz@ rhetorics not only calls for new ways to think about communicative practice; it also helps reveal the memories, politicization, colonization, and social economic conditions of subjugated peoples across the United States . . . [and] create‍[s] symbolic spaces in which it becomes possible to understand multiple local histories, memories, and rhetorics coexisting, beyond dichotomous assumptions. (5)

Echoing Powell’s construction of “cross-blood” rhetorics, Baca claims that Mestiz@ rhetorics “defy hierarchal binaries by creating permeable ways of crossing and ‘inventing between’ colonial oppositions” to finally “subvert, adapt, and revise historical narratives of assimilation” (5). The transrhetorical literacy operating at local transcultural sites provides models and practices that would enable our students to develop their abilities to do the same. Most Oklahoma students accept uncritically the generalizations about Oklahoma/ns inherent in official historical representations of white settlers as ambitious and successful and other cultural groups as marginal, insignificant, and erased—even as they embrace and practice “more cosmopolitan”



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values emanating from national cultural and media centers. Likewise, these students accept other red state, redneck identifications of Oklahomans at play in the broader national discourse—many times holding themselves out as exceptions. Studying critical local rhetorics both current and historic would in the very least confound the singular view. As Baca urges in “Rethinking Composition, 500 Years Later,” rhetoric scholars (and composition students by extension) should “interrogate why and where for a new geography of invention, a geography that cannot be divorced from economy and the material realities of living experience” (233). Localizing the rhetorical texts deployed in the classroom would provide Oklahoma’s students with the multiple histories and perspectives at work in their communities and privilege the particular factors that give rise to various voices within them. While I argue for the curricular incorporation of local texts and rhetorics in writing instruction in an era of globalization, which in Oklahoma (and throughout the Americas) necessarily includes indigenous examples, it is necessary for me to do so as well. The Kiowa Humanities Course developed by my good friend and co-teacher Jay Goombi (Kiowa/Apache), several Kiowa elders, and the late Dr. Howard Meredith (Cherokee), provides me a means of doing so. The course is offered through the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma—the state’s public liberal arts college. I have taught the course with Jay, his father, J. T. Goombi, and Jay’s aunt Alecia Keahbone Gonzales for several years now.5 Many times Jay has used the Turkey Dance, a traditional Caddo dance, in class discussion as a heuristic for understanding the construction of history through indigenous experience. Meredith and Vynola Beaver Newkumet describe and interpret the Turkey Dance in a coauthored book titled Hasinai: A Traditional History of the Caddo Confederacy.6 This book presents Caddo culture and history through the narrative of traditional Caddo dances. The Caddo people are among the peoples most indigenous to the land currently called Oklahoma. Though their homeland also includes portions of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, their tribal headquarters is now located in Binger, Oklahoma, in the southwestern part of the state toward the Texas panhandle. Caddo culture predates European contact by several centuries, according to Western history, and by thousands of years, according to Caddo oral tradition. Only the Spiro Mound Builders and the Wichita predate them. Caddo history, and the cultural and intellectual values inherent within it, is rhetorically represented in the Turkey Dance. Oklahomans recognize Native dancers when they see them and many have attended public powwows and performances. Few outside of tribal circles, however, could likely

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identify the tribal affiliation of a Native dancer or articulate the history of the dances or what these dances mean. The Caddo’s Turkey Dance begins with the singers calling the turkey dancers (women in this case) to dance in a series of seven songs, each in a different dialect used in the Hasinai Confederacy.7 The next series of songs is the longest, and while the dancers imitate a turkey’s gait and behavior in the wild, “the songs relate the events of the Hasinai past,” including the creation of historic topographical landmarks and military engagements with other tribes (Newkumet and Meredith 102–3). While the dance’s origin “is lost to human memory,” a common explanation is that the dance was inspired by the behavior of turkey hens in the wild and the belief that “Hasinai Civilization was closely related to the turkey and its roosts, which served as an important criterion for the location of village life” (104). In the third segment of the dance, the women spread out to the edge of the dance grounds and then return to the center, “moving their bodies from left to right and then right to left,” repeating these movements as they move out to the edge and back again until the segment is over (104). The dance ends with a sequence in which male partners join the female dancers. Jay Goombi values the Turkey Dance for the intellectual symbolism and transrhetorical model it offers. As he explains it, to the Caddo, the behavior of the turkey hen, mimicked throughout the dance, symbolizes a spiritually important mental habit: the intellectual habit of examining a subject from all perspectives in order to know it best. Newkumet and Meredith claim that “this dance and the drum dance stand at the very heart of the Hasinai nation. The history of the Hasinai is linked with the Turkey Dance” (105). They go on to explain that the dance is a performance of the Hasinai awareness of “the major differences among the peoples of the Americas” (105). Hasinai stories tell of journeys “to the tundra regions in the north and to the Andes Mountains in the south” and of Mayan boats crossing the Gulf of Mexico “for the purposes of trade and colonization” (105). This Hasinai epistemology, present in the dances of the peoples of the Caddo Confederacy, exemplifies the sort of critical historical consciousness that emerges from cross-cultural contact. The deeply local rhetoric present in the Turkey Dance models the central need for consulting multiple perspectives in making and communicating meaning, constructing and sustaining collective identity, and identifying and meeting collective goals. In 2000 Lyons defined “rhetorical sovereignty” as “the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires” (“Rhetorical” 450). More than sixty-five years since George Milburn



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published his essay “Oklahoma” in the Yale Review, misrepresentations about Oklahoma and erasures of place and peoples still abound in state and national discourse, and composition students from multiple backgrounds and at multiple sites in the state still navigate these erasures in coming to understand themselves as authors who write from this place. Lyons states that “it is precisely [the] commitment to place that makes the concept of rhetorical sovereignty an empowering device for all forms of community” (457). Given Oklahoma’s history and the complex relationships between indigenous and nonindigenous cultures that live with and within the state’s history, putting students to work with rhetorics and texts that reflect the multiple perspectives, agencies, and agendas in the mix would better prepare them to conceive of themselves both as writers within a particular community and as representatives of Oklahoma to audiences outside of it. In order to situate these students for their role as rhetors in Oklahoma, for Oklahoma, composition teachers should, as Baca suggests regarding Mestiz@ texts, treat local rhetorics as “parallel” or “co-evolutionary” to global rhetorics emanating from elsewhere (“Rethinking Composition” 239). Instead of being erased entirely, local rhetorics should at least be placed alongside, and as David Jolliffe insists, we must give students the chance to understand “literacy-in-use-in-context” as a means of social action and cultural transformation. In “The Fine Art of Fencing,” Lyons adds another dimension to his argument for rhetorical sovereignty that is profoundly applicable in Oklahoma to the indigenous peoples, African American peoples, European American peoples, Meso-American peoples, and all others living in the state. In a global era of assault on the transracial, transnational working class in the United States and throughout the world, Lyons argues for a bilingual resolution for Native peoples according to which, for example, Ojibwe students learn how to communicate in both their own communities and communities beyond: one language should not be sacrificed for the other. This insight applies everywhere working peoples struggle to build the political coalition and rhetorical solidarity so desperately needed for the progress of all across cultures through resistance to global power structures. Just as the punctuation in global/local (or global-local) signifies, we need the boundaries—the fences Lyons describes—that allow us to see multiple positions and learn from all perspectives without erasing our own. We must respect and honor the cultural distinctiveness, sovereignty, and transcultural experience of all peoples, including our own people. This is work that lies before us in Oklahoma and beyond.

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Notes 1. Of the several books that examine the rise and fall of the Socialist Party in Oklahoma, Jim Bissett’s Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904–1920 provides a detailed historical analysis of the local factors that led to the party’s success in those years as well as a critical treatment of the differences that distinguish the Oklahoma Socialists from their political counterparts in other areas of the country during this era. 2. In particular, I am invoking Womack’s Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism and Foster’s “Of One Blood: An Argument for Relations and Regionality in Native American Literary Studies.” 3. The list of these sites includes the “Crazy Snake Rebellion,” named after the Mvskoke-Creek traditionalist Chitto Harjo, who was a leading figure in the indigenous resistance to land allotment in Indian Territory in the years prior to and just after statehood in 1907. 4. According to the TOMS website: In 2006, American traveler Blake Mycoskie befriended children in Ar­ gentina and found they had no shoes to protect their feet. Wanting to help, he created TOMS, a company that would match every pair of shoes purchased with a pair of new shoes given to a child in need. One for One. Blake returned to Argentina with a group of family, friends, and staff later that year with 10,000 pairs of shoes made possible by TOMS customers.

For more information, see www.toms.com. 5. Spring 2012 will be the first semester we will teach the class without Alecia Keahbone Gonzales (Kiowa/Apache), who passed away in April 2011. Alecia authored Thaum Khoiye Tdoen Gyah: Beginning Kiowa Language in addition to a series of children’s books based on Kiowa traditional songs and stories written in both English and Kiowa. She taught Kiowa language classes at USAO and Anadarko High School for many years and up until her death at age eighty-five. She was a dear woman and cultural teacher to many. 6. The preface and cover of Hasinai explain that the late Vynola Beaver Newkumet, a Hasinai, was “with the Hasinai Cultural Center in Caddo County, Oklahoma.” She was a traditional dancer who worked with her husband, Phil Newkumet, to document and preserve Hasinai oral tradition and language. 7. According to Newkumet and Meredith, “The traditions of affiliate communities of the Hasinai show continuity in terms of customs, standards, beliefs, and relative geographic proximity. These communities include the Haish, Hainai, Yona, Kechai, Nadaco, Nasoni, Kadohadacho, as well as the Natchitoche” (xiii–xiv).

7.

WORKING ENGLISH THROUGH CODE-MESHING Implications for Denigrated Language Varieties and Their Users Vivette Milson-Whyte AS INCREASING NUMBERS of multilingual students populate and are acknowledged in U.S. classrooms, rhetoric and composition scholars and administrators continue to consider and propose pedagogical approaches and strategies to enable students to engage with their various linguistic communities. Multidisciplinary academic Suresh Canagarajah and cultural and literacy theorist Vershawn Ashanti Young suggest pedagogical changes that could draw on the rhetorical practices of these students. Specifically, Canagarajah proposes that code-meshing, a common strategy among multilinguals, can serve as a pedagogical tool that invites students to incorporate new codes into the boundaries of dominant texts. In Canagarajah’s “radically multilingual” cultural tradition, languages have been used to contest each other since precolonial times (“Lingua Franca” 930). However, because of the highly multilingual nature of his and other such societies, languages are often complementary. Canagarajah has also observed the tendency among some of his African American and World Englishes–speaking students to refuse (or be unable) to edit out their dialects and other languages from materials in Standard English because multilingual students seem to have an integrated system of languages (“Place” 597; “Multilingual Strategies” 26). He has found these inclusions to be fruitful rather than distracting. Based on his experiences and observations, Canagarajah views code-meshing as a way to acknowledge all of the linguistic resources of multilingual students. Canagarajah’s proposal intersects with that of Young, who argues against the ideology undergirding and the pedagogy attending code-switching. For Young, racism underpins pedagogies demanding code-switching, and high failure among underprivileged African American students arises from its 103

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use in the teaching of language/literacy. Young draws on Peter Auer to acknowledge the standard/traditional definition of code-switching—“the use of more than one language or language variety concurrently in conversation” (“‘Nah, We Straight’” 49). Code-switching thus defined involves “hybrid language performance” (49). However, Young indicates that this kind of hybrid language performance is not promoted in teaching where code-switching emerges as “acquiring the facility to transition from one language variety to a different one” (50). For him, the intent in code-switching pedagogies is to separate language varieties—African American English and Standard American English—and their users in a discriminatory way that recalls segregationism. As a counterstrategy, he proposes code-meshing—“blending, merging, meshing dialects” (72)—because it promotes the view that students’ language varieties are “always already co-existent” (57), an idea similar to Canagarajah’s view that multilinguals have an integrated system of languages on which they draw for communication. Young believes that if educators allow African American students to use “a thorough, seamless mixture” of their vernacular and the standard rather than exaggerate the differences between the two varieties, the benefits would “extend beyond producing better papers” and have an affective value because teachers would stop considering students’ “linguistic habits as subliterate, fundamentally incompatible with what’s considered standard” (Your Average 106). He proposes that should African American students be allowed to code-mesh, such students would feel that they and their language habits are validated and would probably engage more with school and realize increased literacy levels. As a Jamaican educator-researcher who has lived, studied, and taught in the United States and who has concerns similar to Young’s and Canagarajah’s, I can appreciate the potential value of code-meshing for many students, including Jamaicans. Indeed, I consider code-meshing a salutary pedagogical strategy because it incorporates, rather than merely accommodates, linguistic difference, and I agree that “code-meshing promotes linguistic democracy, as students are not called to choose but rather allowed to blend language and identities” (Young, Martinez, and Naviaux xxiv). However, as commendable as code-meshing is, I find that proponents risk ignoring critical aspects of the lived realities of the groups that could benefit most from it. I argue that although deliberate code-meshing seems a useful strategy to help teachers attend to students who use various language varieties, considerations of its application should include the complex realities in which individuals work and are worked by English. Chief among these realities is that languages used



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by the marginalized are often denigrated. Therefore, advocates of code-meshing need to consider moving beyond merely valorizing such languages to helping establish their legitimacy. Such legitimacy requires codification (or support for efforts at codification), and codification risks establishing boundaries and promoting fixity—all of which seem inconsistent with recent discussions about language difference and change.

Potential Benefits of Code-Meshing Based on the proposals from Young and Canagarajah, code-meshing promises intertwined political, psychological, and pedagogical benefits of valuing minoritized languages and subverting the hegemonic role of English; reducing tensions in language communities; improving teachers’ affective responses to differences in language use; increasing student engagement with learning and yielding better papers arising from development of cognitive fluency; and broadening students’ interest in and exploration of language issues. First, allowing code-meshing in teaching is a way to counter linguistic chauvinism (the belief in the superiority of one’s language, especially in the case of a standard language such as English) and linguistic imperialism (the imposition of one language, such as English, as dominant over another or others).1 By allowing code-meshing, teachers can help students subvert the hegemonic role of English by valuing minoritized languages. As I have written elsewhere, “By addressing linguistic prejudice, teachers fulfill an ideological agenda and help students to modify their attitudes to language or at least consider unwarranted linguistic prejudices” (“Dialogism” 145). Also, as Young’s work suggests, allowing students to blend their dialects with the standard is a channel for addressing a history of racial problems: “When we ask black students to give up one set of codes in favor of another, their BEV [Black English Vernacular] for something we call more standard, we’re not asking them to make choices about language, we’re asking them to choose different ways to perform their racial identities through language” (Your Average 142). Therefore, allowing students to code-mesh suggests allowing them to function in a way that preserves their merged/mixed identities. Beyond preservation, however, code-meshing enables presentation of complexity/ multiplicity through blending of languages and the information and values attending such codes. As Canagarajah writes, “Code meshing in English writing has a politics of its own. . . . This activity serves to infuse not only new codes, but also new knowledge and values, into dominant texts” (“Place” 611).

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Second, code-meshing may also provide socio-psychological benefits for students. If they are invited to incorporate their code(s) in the standard code in the classroom, students may question the power that attends language use or the use of certain languages (as we see in Min-Zhan Lu, “Composition’s Word” and “Professing”), but more important, students may get a sense of the value of their language(s), understand their own language development, and feel encouraged to engage with the education process. As Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “If you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (Borderlands 81). By extension, valuing minoritized languages—by allowing students to blend them with standard languages—can result in less tension between different language communities. Whereas Standard English Only in the classroom renders peripheral and irrelevant other dialects/languages and users, creating tension (Blanton 139; Lu, “Composition’s Word” 195), an inclusive policy that allows students to merge their dialects/languages may suggest that minoritized students and their communities matter. Third, perhaps the most immediately obvious benefit of code-meshing is cognitive fluency for students who may have difficulty expressing ideas in one language only; that is, while code-meshing, students may experience richness and complexity of thinking that comes quickly and naturally. Peter Elbow, drawing on Walter Ong, argues that an individual’s mother tongue is closest to that person’s unconscious. Expressivist that he is, Elbow contends that if students are able to plan essays and do early drafts in their home dialects, they will achieve more voice, fluency, and force in writing. Certainly, students access ideas more readily if they write and focus on issues of content and organization instead of grammar, for example, in early drafts. However, as other scholars observe, Elbow’s pragmatic proposal that teachers allow students to draft in home languages but present final drafts in standard edited English, unfortunately, seems to support the view that one (set) of the languages is more important than the other (Canagarajah, “Place” 597–98; Young, Martinez, and Naviaux xxiii). Still, I argue that Elbow’s ideas can reinforce proposals for code-meshing. Elbow states, “When language is in touch with the unconscious and draws on it, that language usually has more force and resonance” (364). This is one of the points that Young makes about how African Americans would benefit from being able to compose in school as they do outside of school. In other words, if bi-/multilingual students draw on languages from an integrated rather than discrete system, then they can



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process information and formulate ideas in mixed languages, and it is this kind of mixing that will be closest to their unconscious—because it is the way they usually process information and speak. In this way, Elbow paves the way for code-meshing when he proposes that “writing gains energy, life, and voice when it is fed by the various linguistic elements that permeate the unconscious” (364). Additionally, as Canagarajah proposes, “valuing the varieties that matter to students can lessen the inhibitions against dominant codes, reduce the exclusive focus of those codes, and enable students to accommodate them in their repertoire of Englishes” (“Place” 592).

Implications of Code-Meshing for Denigrated Language Varieties and Their Users: “Jamaican” Cases Code-meshing, rather than code-switching, appears to be a viable pedagogical alternative to the many failed approaches used in schools in places where languages exist in unequal relationships. However, the stated benefits only hint at complexities involving speakers of denigrated codes. To illustrate my concerns regarding arguments in circulation about deliberate code-meshing, I draw on Jamaica. The benefits of code-meshing could be realized by Jamaican students in classrooms in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas; however, there are critical concerns regarding legitimizing the language spoken by the majority of Jamaicans. Jamaicans, and others like Jamaicans with similar linguistic experiences, are the kinds of people who can draw on the elements of two or more languages. In Jamaica, two significant language varieties can be identified: Standard Jamaican English (SJE), which is the country’s superimposed official language, and Jamaican Creole (JC), which is the native language of the majority (Devonish 9). SJE, a variety that shares the syntax and morphology of Internationally Accepted English, is evident in the formal writing and careful speech of educated Jamaicans. JC is understood, if not spoken, by all Jamaicans. While its lexicon is English-based, JC differs significantly from English in terms of formation and expression of plurals, tenses, possession, and negatives (see Bailey; Milson-Whyte, “Comparison”). Although some Jamaicans are simultaneous bilinguals (having acquired two languages as a first language), only a small minority of the Jamaican population can claim English alone as their first language. The majority of Jamaican children, then, are born into Creole-speaking situations. Until recently, around the turn of the century, such children were “officially” cut off from their language

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when they entered the schoolroom. They were expected to understand and use English in what was a “formal” situation (see, for example, Carrington 86; Maxwell). Many became linguistic orphans created by implementation of government language policies. Such students were, like those in the U.S. Virgin Islands described by Patricia Irvine and Nan Elsasser, “expected to deny the existence of their first language and read and write in a second one” that they did not really know (314). If they failed to give up the conventions of their first language (that is, to code-switch as Young describes), they often failed to perform well in SJE. Today, in the average classroom in a Jamaican public school, most pupils are monolingual JC speakers, a few may be bilingual, some may speak SJE and JC with varying degrees of facility, and very few may be monolingual English speakers. As various scholars recognize, this situation renders difficult the adopting of strategies directed exclusively to first language, second language, or foreign language teaching (see Bryan, “Language” 87; McCourtie 111). Jamaicans are, as Beverley Bryan says in her book title, “between two grammars”—in a quasi-, almost liminal, linguistic place—and can draw on the elements of two or more languages and benefit from explicit code-meshing. Indeed, despite the requirements for Jamaicans to code-switch (really code-shift through a semipermanent movement from one language variety to another for a specified period for specific purposes) in educational settings, as happens in other bi-/multilingual societies, Jamaicans engage in various kinds of linguistic play and blends. As Bronwen Low observes, “Jamaican students live and work within a linguistic continuum which explodes static conceptions of language and embodies linguistic variation, change, and choice” (95). Descriptions of the linguistic context as a “continuum” point to the ways in which Jamaicans draw on all of the language varieties at their disposal to create what can sometimes appear as new varieties (see Craig, “Use” 108; Devonish 115; Winford, “Re-examining” 241–42). Code-meshing could, therefore, help with cognitive fluency, as described earlier. However, the very linguistic plays and blends in which Jamaicans engage bring into focus realities that may be ignored/unstated by advocates of code-meshing. Among these complex realities are the often unrecognized “natural” code-meshing that takes place (even in monocodal discourses), resulting in diversification of languages; coexistence of conflicting language practices; and the need for legitimizing previously denigrated languages. First, explicit/deliberate code-meshing that is being proposed in discussions about language differences and ways to incorporate and negotiate them is based



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on a language practice that is common among multilinguals; however, code-meshing also occurs among declared monolinguals. It should not be difficult to imagine that speakers who claim to be monolingual may at times consciously or unconsciously merge different registers of their language, as seen when slang/colloquialisms are included in formal discourse. It is a known fact that such language forms sometimes pass into the language and become part of what is considered acceptable usage—and change the language. Second, divergent language practices coexist in bi-/multilingual settings. In the Jamaican situation, the close lexical similarity between JC and SJE facilitates both deliberate and unconscious blending, leading to a blurring of the boundaries between the two languages (Craig, “Use” 108). While most Jamaicans demonstrate agency in engaging in blending codes, many may reject formal recognition of that language practice, whether that recognition comes in the form of invitation, encouragement, or requirement in formal classroom situations. Many Jamaican code-meshers have also mastered code-switching and may lead a naturalized life of double consciousness. Young criticizes this phenomenon (Your Average 128), which, I imagine, he would consider an unfortunate reality for many West Indians who use both standard and Creole languages. For those individuals who are fluent in different codes, their different language varieties serve mutually exclusive functions—the one for speaking and private affairs, the other for reading and writing. Additionally, Jamaican students whose home language is JC are not literate in it because of a lack of a standard orthography, among other reasons. As well, some such students internalize the stigma against their home language and reject association with it in public.2 Therefore, although Young rightly indicates that code-switching (really code-shifting) indexes differences in languages and that its (enforced) use points to linguistic discrimination in places where languages exist in unequal relationships, it should not be ignored that code-switching is one of the rhetorical strategies commonly practiced by multilinguals and can challenge monolingual ideologies represented in Standard English Only initiatives. In other words, some language users code-switch/shift to demonstrate their agency as speakers/writers and not simply to submit to the demands of the dominant culture. Moreover, code-meshing presupposes the ability to codeswitch because (excepting blending in monocodal discourses) code-meshing requires sound knowledge of at least two dialects of a language or two different languages, even though it may be argued that every dialect or language is already a meshed variety (see, for example, Vance). As Canagarajah

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writes, “Code meshing calls for multidialectalism not monodialectalism.” It “involves a polydialectal competence—i.e., familiarity with standard varieties, expert use of local variants, and the rhetorical strategies of switching” (“Place” 598, 602). In the Jamaican case, Kathryn Shields-Brodber, though not using the term code-meshing, indicates that mainstream Jamaicans have been indulging in blends of English and Creole based on their ability to code-switch. She reports that “speakers who employ the strategy regularly now include some of the best educated and distinguished local leaders of the highest social background, who present themselves as productively bilingual in Standard English . . . and JC” (189). A third, and perhaps the most important, unstated/ignored reality is the need for legitimizing previously denigrated languages. Deliberate code-meshing can complicate matters regarding legitimacy of minoritized languages. Young argues that African American and standard dialects are not very different, so they can be merged, and Canagarajah, writing as an Asian from a situation of radical multilingualism, proposes that students can include their other codes in standard ones because that practice has been happening since precolonial times. The concern here is that in some of the same classrooms where code-meshing may be allowed, there may be Jamaican and other Caribbean students and others like them whose languages and language practices are not considered legitimate. The reality is that although there may be increasing valorization of JC, Jamaicans are still a far way from legitimizing it for more than passing/peripheral use in official circumstances—and legitimizing is crucial to linguistic and other forms of development. As Donald Winford writes: There is growing consensus among Caribbeanists that recognition of the autonomy of creole vernaculars as distinct systems from the lexically related official languages is a prerequisite to addressing practical concerns such as reform of educational policy, improvement of literacy, and the instrumentalization of creole in wider areas of public life. (“Sociolinguistic” 58)

The need to first establish the legitimacy of the nonstandard language (JC) seems critical so that when students include JC items in standardized English, they will understand the terms as such and be able to interrogate the power structures attending such items as well as those in English. For this to be done on a large scale, the country and the speakers themselves need to recognize the legitimacy of JC. However, my proposal for establishing



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the legitimacy of a denigrated language such as JC is predicated not only on recognition in the form of societal acceptance but on first teaching students to understand that language’s structures, vocabulary, and other features. In other words, for Jamaican students to deliberately code-mesh in formal settings, they need to be able to distinguish JC from SE if they are to understand when they are code-meshing—in terms of actually blending two different varieties. The reality is that some Jamaican students do not demonstrate abilities that suggest mastery in effectively switching or blending codes, as indicated by high failure rates on tests in writing3 and by shifts to JC when English is required (see Craig, Teaching 42; Pollard 10). I agree that code-switching as taught (in Jamaica and in the United States) promotes inequality and that literacy teachers are often unwitting accomplices. In the Jamaican situation, however, the concern is class rather than race—although there is a continuation of race in class in Jamaica. Additionally, one of Rebecca Wheeler and Rachel Sword’s recommendations of facilitating students’ understanding of differences in grammar between their home language and the standard—which Young cites and criticizes (Your Average 50)—may actually be useful for Jamaicans. That kind of teaching has been only recently recommended, and for years there has been massive failure in a system where it was assumed that English was every student’s mother tongue. So, whereas Young’s point about ensuring that facilitators teach linguistic equality is germane, Creole-speaking (or nonstandard dialect–speaking) students in Jamaica (or the United States) could benefit from understanding differences in the languages they use. In other words, if all Jamaicans (or other minoritized students) who enter schools could be given the opportunity to develop metacognitive awareness of the differences in the languages they use so that when they engage in linguistic play or do what comes naturally, in terms of drawing on their integrated language system as Canagarajah writes (“Multilingual Strategies” 26), they would do so skillfully to enable audiences to comprehend the basics of their communication. My proposal for establishing the legitimacy of JC may seem to be an erection of language boundaries at a time when proposals are for minimizing these boundaries as interlocutors attempt to negotiate differences to make meaning (see Horner et al., “Language Difference”; Horner and Trimbur). It seems critical to run this inherent risk in any discussion of code-meshing. Proposals for this common language practice (code-meshing) to be used as a formal pedagogical strategy risk blurring language boundaries when said boundaries need to be maintained to establish legitimacy of certain groups

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and their languages. Still, I want to clarify that my proposal is not meant to approach, say, Native American scholar Scott Richard Lyons’s critique of code-meshing. Lyons seems to recognize the linguistic reality of ongoing code-meshing but appears to reject explicit efforts to engage in it. On allowing code-meshing in classes, Lyons writes that “code switching is a completely reasonable way to demystify these different languages [dialects and grapholects] while simultaneously helping students to gain access to the code used in school and elsewhere. Code switching is bilingualism. Code meshing is hybridity and violates the elders’ rule of mutually assured separatism” (“Fine Art” 102). I understand Lyons’s cultural concerns but feel that falling back on “the elders’ rule” seems to be a way to evade the argument about how to demystify languages. Certainly, code-meshing involves acknowledging differences that are/can be brought in contact (see examples in Milson-Whyte, “Dialogism” 156–61). Still, Lyons’s concerns underscore the importance of recognizing that what works in highly multilingual societies may translate in startlingly different ways for students from other societies. This difference can be seen when one considers Canagarajah’s work, which is useful for understanding attitudes toward language both in Jamaica and elsewhere, but also raises questions about working English. Canagarajah writes that “the different languages that constitute one’s repertoire are part of a continuum, not segregated” (“Multilingual Strategies” 23). This is perhaps most true for Jamaicans, but teachers have struggled for decades with students who function primarily at the left end of the continuum, in what is considered basilectal Creole, and who are not fluent in the right side of the continuum, acrolectal English. For Jamaicans, what Canagarajah refers to as “the repertoire—the way the different languages constitute an integrated competence” is not recognized; while “equal or advanced proficiency is not expected in all the languages” (23), advanced proficiency is expected in English in Jamaica. This underscores the need to first establish the legitimacy of minoritized languages like JC before proposals for meshing it with English in education are likely to be accepted. Additionally, as mentioned, there are Jamaicans who are expert code-switchers and who engage in linguistic inventiveness. Such inventiveness is most evident in the creative writers, musicians, and Rastafarians. However, while linguistic inventiveness is acceptable for artistic means/purposes, as is the case in other countries, it is not really accommodated in higher education in Jamaica. A few graduate students have blended codes in sections of their



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dissertations, but such writing is generally not accepted in students’ academic papers. Today, many undergraduates explain that they think that it is difficult to speak and write in English but are prepared to try because they know they need to demonstrate mastery of English—usually most evident in being able to code-shift to English and use appropriate English idioms and structures. Below, I present a case of some of these constraints and contradictions: that of a research participant in a study that a colleague and I conducted to understand students’ perceptions of writing. This student has been overworked by English. He even admits that perhaps he would have been more successful had it not been for the language obstacle in his way. However, he is determined to work English and make it work for him, pointing to the need for establishing legitimacy of marginalized languages before reasonably arguing for code-meshing. I have underlined the portions of the student’s unedited statements that speak to his struggles with English/language. Week 5: This week I found it a bit challenging to speak in proper English when my tutor required it of me. It caused me to not have answered the questions as effectively as I should even though I thought I did fairly well at them. At that point I realized what my true weakness is in English and reading and writing well. This I can’t speak very well so each time I try to translate my thoughts to written formality it’s a burden. . . . After Monday’s seminar session I sat and thought of why I didn’t answer a lot of questions that I really knew the answer to this and it is because require formality. This formality that is required makes all my ideas turn into something else. . . . I think it made feel like a mad man because it can’t write what I think. . . . I persons of high intellectual skills probably would wonder how I got here. . . . Week 8: This week was a good in that my favourite language Patois was being was the hot topic of the seminar session. . . . It was good to hear that so many persons have faith and hope for in the future of our native language. It gave me strength to utilize my native tongue but remembering to use English for formality and which is key to propel me through the academic world and in the educated social strata. The most memorable moment in the seminar was when [the tutor] said that Patois is our mother tongue not English and persons would learn more if they were taught in the language that is their mother tongue. That made me think of myself and writing probably I could have been a scholar of some sort if it were not for English. But I

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After sharing these thoughts, some of which I asked him to clarify, the student declared in an exit interview that he is determined to succeed in English in his studies and to use English effectively in his future role as a community leader. He refused a suggestion that perhaps students could be allowed to prepare early drafts in Creole and then carefully edit to present final drafts in English (as Elbow proposes). This is not a student who is able to work language as in the kind of integrated system of which Canagarajah writes. The student tries—often unsuccessfully—to translate his Creole into English because he is expected to write in English. Something that seems as basic as the qualitative difference in language competence of multilinguals versus that of monolinguals is not widely recognized in Jamaica because of nonrecognition or limited recognition of JC as a language. Recent inclusions of the home language in the primary school curriculum and calls for teachers to facilitate students’ transition from it to English are just that—recent. The student under study, like many other Creole-speaking Jamaican students, has been overworked by English because, as Canagarajah writes regarding attitudes to multilinguals’ language use, “monolingualist orientations impute deficiency to the unique strategies that multilinguals employ to work English” (“Multilingual Strategies” 17). Canagarajah also writes that “for multilinguals languages are not discrete and separate. They are a continuum that can be accessed at will for different purposes. In this sense languages don’t interfere with one other in communication or competence; they serve as resources for one other” (19). This may be the experience of expert language users; however, the reality is that in Jamaican classrooms, students are expected to see languages/varieties as separate—that is, to code-shift from one discrete system to another. Proposals for code-meshing, if preceded by establishing legitimacy of the marginalized JC, could yield an integrated approach to languages.



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Working English through Code-Meshing—In Context With increasingly diverse cohorts of students, administrators and teachers of English cannot merely continue to uphold English as the sole grapholect. It is incumbent on them/us to consider meaningful ways to enable students to work English so that they may simultaneously engage with and feel comfortable in (their) different linguistic habits. For these reasons, subject English and its many codes must continue to be put to work for all language users’ development—with one of the ways being to incorporate other codes in it. Code-meshing seems a useful strategy to help teachers attend to the students who use various languages. However, considerations for its application have to include the complex realities in which individuals work and are worked by English: code-meshing as language practice is a lived reality in multilingual situations, but unrecognized “natural” code-meshing also occurs in monocodal discourses, resulting in diversification of languages; there is coexistence of conflicting language practices in multilingual societies; and, while code-meshing as a contestable and complementary language practice is commendable for use in classrooms, there is also the need for language difference to be acknowledged and maintained as a first step to acknowledging the legitimacy of certain minoritized groups and their language practices. Discussions about how to negotiate language boundaries and differences in classrooms require recognition that participants are often working in complex situations that make it necessary to consider proposals in historical, social, and linguistic contexts.4 Notes 1. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas provides extensive illustrations of the detrimental consequences of such linguistic biases. 2. See also Milson-Whyte, “Pedagogical” 121–22. 3. See Craig, Teaching 227; Ministry of Education 3; Task Force 56–57; Taylor 1–2; and UNESCO, Jamaica 74. 4. I wish to thank Bruce Horner and Karen Kopelson for their comments that enriched the revision of earlier versions of this chapter.

8.

U.S. TRANSLINGUALISM THROUGH A CROSS-NATIONAL AND CROSS-LINGUISTIC LENS Nancy Bou Ayash AMID THE SHIFTING demographics of faculty and student bodies in U.S. college writing programs, the interaction and interpenetration of languages and emergent Englishes is not unusual in written communicative contexts, and multilingualism is gradually becoming what Paul Kei Matsuda describes as the new linguistic “default” (“Myth” 649). As writing practitioners and scholars increasingly acknowledge the rapidly accelerating dissemination of linguistic heterogeneity across the nation and worldwide, more questions arise about the most responsible and adequate way to respond to language difference in teaching and assessment practices. In light of continuing demographic changes and sweeping forces of globalization, the notion of multilingualism has been heavily used in disciplinary scholarship and conversations over the past decade or so to refer to language differences in writing, often uncritically and without careful scrutiny of the contested language ideologies underlying certain usages of this newly celebrated term (see Horner, NeCamp, and Donahue for a more thorough critique). One disconcerting conception of multilingualism considers language users as possessing competence in and shuttling between a variety of linguistic systems that remain static and separate. Such models of multilingualism can be best described as promoting “additive” multilingualism, which takes the form of reproductions and layerings of traditional monolingualism (Makoni and Pennycook, Disinventing 28). In contrast, Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur’s model of translingualism embraces the “variety, fluidity, intermingling, and changeability of languages” (“Language Difference” 305), thus enabling educators to move beyond tendencies toward language quantification and reification that certain conceptions of multilingualism might inherently invoke. 116



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In a recent position statement, Horner and his colleagues have advanced a “translingual” approach that challenges common dispositions toward linguistic heterogeneity in the writing classroom as being among problems to be resolved or individual rights to be tolerated and that recognizes these differences as epistemological “resources” to be promoted and productively utilized by inculcating a positive view toward them even in writing students (“Language Difference” 304). Through acknowledging and valuing the resourcefulness of language users and writers, Horner and his cowriters encourage a fundamental shift from a policing inquiry that concentrates on whether or not compositions in the writing classroom conform to nonnegotiable language standards into “deliberative inquiry” that asks “what the writers are doing with the language and why” (304–5). (Re)imagining the composition classroom as a translingual space, therefore, entails honoring the linguistic and cultural repertoires that writers already draw on in their daily life and the agency of writers in constantly recontextualizing these “in pursuit of new knowledge, new ways of knowing, and more peaceful relations” (307). Undoubtedly, the productivity of such emerging translingual work in composition, as argued by its advocates, is closely bound to collaborations with “literacy workers using diverse languages, from outside as well as within the Anglo-American sphere” (310). In response to Horner and his colleagues’ exigent calls for the institutionalization of translingualism in U.S. writing programs and for increased interdependence on the work of other countries, this essay draws on cross-linguistic and cross-national perspectives to highlight the lived challenges and promises of grappling with economically and politically driven monolingual ideologies and of struggling for official recognition of translingual practices by the state and its various institutions. I focus my analysis on the specific locations of Lebanon and Singapore, where societal multilingualism, unlike in the United States, is both the statistical and cultural norm: Lebanon, a former French colony, has shifted from bilingualism to multilingualism in both society at large as well as in education, whereas Singapore, an ex-British colony, is still struggling with ethnic tensions as a result of its language policies. In alignment with a growing push toward internationalization that contests the hegemonic flow of ideas in college writing research and instruction,1 I argue that U.S. compositionists with a translingual take on language difference can indeed draw, especially in planning the proper course of their new line of translingual work, from the successes and struggles of other multilingual contexts across the globe where translingualism is “a way of life”

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(Foster and Russell 31). Building on and extending Horner and his coauthors’ framework, I argue that the histories of these uniquely positioned nations and the differences in their responses to linguistic and cultural diversity through policies and practices demonstrate that successfully developing translingual approaches in U.S. writing programs largely depends on laboring over a multilingual language policy and ambitious writing curriculum design, both of which need to fully capture the uniqueness of the U.S. sociolingual landscape. In pursuit of that interest, I offer a brief description of language policy, ongoing histories of language education, and responses to language difference in the writing classroom in both Lebanon and Singapore in relation to the active use of languages and language practices on the ground. I conclude by offering a comparison of the dynamic interrelationships between geopolitical relations and the globalizing economy, language policy, sociolinguistic realities, and composition pedagogy in these locations and exploring their possible implications for institutionalizing translingualism in U.S. writing programs. A close look at intersections and divergences in the level of commitment to translingualism in each multilingual location leads me to determine that writing pedagogy needs to strongly mediate between local language policy on one hand and the actual translingual language practices of language learners and writers on the other.

Language Relations in the Case of Lebanon and Singapore The current section has two main parts. After a brief description in the first part of sociolinguistic realities at each site and of how these influence and are influenced by language policies and broad educational policy issues at the primary and secondary levels, I consider in the second part what language ideologies are promoted in postsecondary writing classrooms, and more particularly how writing teachers have been directly affected by official policies and how they have, in turn, affected the implementation of these in their own teaching practices. Sociolinguistic Landscape and Language Policy Lebanon is a multilingual nation with a dynamic use of major languages, such as Arabic, French, and English, that serve basic communicative, vocational, and educational purposes. In addition to the diglossic native Arabic language with a colloquial and a standard variety, the majority in Lebanon



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use French as a second foreign language after English or as the first foreign language and English as the second. Other languages, such as Armenian, German, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Farsi, are also actively used by minority groups as home languages and even more recently as languages of instruction in certain regions. Amid the active interaction of this specific diversity of languages and language varieties, Arabic, English, and French remain the most widely utilized languages in which daily affairs are conducted in contemporary Lebanese society.2 Bilingual schools and institutions of higher education were established by Western missionaries in the first half of the nineteenth century and taught only one of the two foreign languages, French or English, alongside Arabic. The status of the English language in Lebanon, however, altered drastically in the middle of the twentieth century when French rule imposed a strict language policy, which chiefly promoted the use of French as the official language, alongside Arabic, though with the far-reaching dominance of the former. After reclaiming its independence in 1943, the Lebanese government in its pre-university educational reform efforts was faced with the challenge of compromising between the historical and cultural influences of French in the Lebanese society and the accelerated spread of English both locally and globally as an international language of communication. Up until the late twentieth century, discussions about language policy and educational planning spurred a series of heated debates among various groups in Lebanese society. With the country emerging from an extended civil war period, the choice of language of communication and education was immediately associated with ideological orientations toward either Arabization or Westernization. Kassim Shaaban and Ghazi Ghaith describe how the choice of foreign language during that period carried strong religious and political implications: Catholics and Maronite Christians who held strong affinities for France as their “savior” in a Muslim-dominated Arab region learned only French; most Muslims favored Arabizing education; and the Druzes, the Greek Orthodox, and a few Muslims who all had strong ties with American Protestants preferred English (qtd. in Diab 178). Such controversy surrounding national identity in relation to language status and the choice of language media of instruction was gradually resolved through declaring Arabic the only official language and placing equal emphasis on French and English as foreign languages in the national curricula. Under the revised Lebanese educational plan of 1997, equal weight at all levels of education is given to the native language and either one of the two foreign languages,

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and instruction in the other foreign language is first introduced in grade 7 or earlier (Shaaban and Ghaith). Current language and educational policies advocate Arabic-French-English trilingualism, which reflects an official movement toward increased attention to the multiplicity of languages used in daily functions on the ground and to the various privileges that multilingualism ensures Lebanese citizens both locally and globally. Singapore is also characterized by the complexity of its linguistic situation. It has three major ethnic groups of Chinese, Malay, and Indians that speak a diversity of home languages and language varieties. English in the Singaporean society is used to facilitate communication and cultural transmission within these ethnic communities. As a result of the interaction and intermingling of English with other home languages and varieties in the Singaporean culture, Singlish is widely used by growing numbers of Singaporeans as a unique local hybrid variety of English (Chua 86). The independent Singaporean government retained the language of its British colonizers and appointed it the role of a lingua franca that mainly facilitates interethnic and intra-ethnic communication among major groups across the country (Rubdy et al. 40). Under the official language policy, while English is the language of interethnic communication, the other three official mother tongues (Mandarin for the Chinese, Malay for the Malays, and Tamil for the Indians) that are designated a second language status are prominent markers of Singaporean speakers’ ethnicity. With English considered the “pragmatic language,” the mother tongues are the “languages of cultural transmission” due to their symbolic power (Rubdy and Tupas 330). In light of this policy, Singapore has molded an educational system that caters to the demands of economic globalization and designates English the sole language of all content-area instruction. Alongside English, instruction in one of the mother tongues through primary, secondary, and junior college levels is compulsory. The basic motivation behind this bilingual education policy is to provide people with English language skills necessary to survive and thrive in a fiercely competitive global market while simultaneously grounding them in the local culture’s heritage and history (318). Various concerns have been raised about the choice of mother tongues, ownership of English, and Singaporean speakers’ authority over their own varieties. The notion of mother tongue in the case of Singapore is officially defined as a communal property based on one’s ethnicity, which is primarily determined by that of the father, instead of on individual experiences and linguistic exposure or affinity (Wee 285). In a multiracial society like Singapore,



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it is no surprise that many Singaporeans find themselves in problematic situations where they are forced to study a mother language and claim it to be so though they might not perceive it as such or might not even consider themselves native speakers of that language. Most members of the Chinese community, for instance, have grown up with dialects other than Mandarin, like Hokkien, Cantonese, or Teochew, and a number of Indians speak other Indo-European languages at home, like Hindi or Punjabi (Dixon 26). Lionel Wee describes the situation of Eurasian communities, consisting of colonial subjects who were born to European fathers and Asian mothers (288), as a lucid illustration of the ongoing struggles of some ethnic communities with linguistic ownership. As a marginalized group, Eurasians end up struggling with studying two second languages, neither of which is their mother tongue. While recognizing the inevitable tensions and complexities experienced by any multilingual nation, there are key instances of monolingualist thinking about language and identity underpinning Singapore’s official agenda that are not observed in the Lebanese situation. Amid an ethnically and linguistically diverse population, Singapore’s official language policy and subsequent language-in-education policies have been described as “reductionist,” given their failure to “capture the complexity of the country’s multilingual realities,” and “restrictive” because ethnicity is linked to only one mother tongue (Gopinathan, Ho, and Saravanan 234). Apart from the need to question this policy’s lack of acknowledgment of the full multiplicity of languages and language practices on the ground, a further contested assumption behind Singaporean legislations is that language-identity relationships are represented as similar across ethnic groups and individuals and not fluctuating over time. It suffices to say that there are ongoing political, cultural, and ideological tensions resulting from the complexity of the sociocultural and sociolinguistic landscape and from the failure of Singapore’s official language policy and language-in-education legislations to fully capture this complexity. Language Difference, Conflicting Language Ideologies, and Writing Instruction To more fully understand the positionalities of Lebanon and Singapore in relation to language difference, it is important to also consider the power of economic and geopolitical agendas in determining the place of translingualism in college-level writing instruction and the survival of deeply infiltrated monolingual ideologies. As economically and politically oriented legislations operate differently in each site (as I will illustrate in the

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forthcoming section), we observe distinct patterns of educational and writing curriculum planning. In the case of Lebanon, for instance, recent invitations for translingualism in writing courses with a long tradition of monolingual approaches are motivated by the growing need for working in and out of English in the workplace.3 The majority of university graduates find jobs in Lebanon, neighboring Arabic countries, France, or other French-speaking countries in Europe and Africa where written communication in Arabic and/or French alongside English is a must. Local professional writing instructors are gradually acknowledging the importance of transporting the linguistic realities and real challenges of cross-border exchanges in the business and technical world into writing classrooms by encouraging the process of composing business and technical correspondences and documents in multiple languages. Students in these courses are accordingly encouraged to reflect on their stylistic and linguistic choices when working with a plurality of languages and meanings as they perform their identities as future business writers and technical communicators. Official recognition of the central role of the interaction of languages and the absence of the “rigid classificatory” legislations (Wee 293) that we clearly see in Singapore can be credited with playing a major role in enabling literacy laborers in the professional realm to start redesigning writing curricula in ways that produce learners with translingual abilities to work with various languages, language practices, and genres according to purpose, need, and context. The dispersion of similar pedagogies into academic writing courses, however, has been extremely slow. The use of languages other than English in the academic writing classroom is limited to oral interactions and clarifications for complex content. Even teachers who explicitly make textual spaces for World Englishes and encourage a critical engagement with unconventional linguistic designs evident in these texts still accentuate adherence to universal standards of written English in their assessment criteria. Strong justifications from the push of the job market have empowered only professional writing teachers to take initial steps toward translingual work, while the dominance of monolingualist ideologies in the academic knowledge market in Lebanon as well as internationally has kept those in the academic realm clinging to conformity to standardized writing rules. It is worth considering these particularities of the Lebanese scenario in relation to official responses toward language difference in Singapore. Of particular interest here is the launch of the nationwide “Speak Good English Movement” (SGEM) in 2000 by Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong



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as an official response to perceived threats from the local English variety, Singlish.4 With the slogan of “Speak Well, Be Understood,” this movement highlights what the Singaporean government regards as the importance of maintaining national and international intelligibility through preserving and promoting specific aspects of Standard English (McKay and Bokhorst-Heng 93). This pro–Standard English campaign has forced its way into the scenes of teaching and learning written English. Persistence of Singlish is viewed by Singaporean officials as “hurt‍[ing] the Republic’s aim to be a First World Economy” and contaminating the command of written and spoken Standard English, as Catherine Chua has observed, quoting reporter Nirmala of the Sunday Times (82). Such economic rationalizations have portrayed Standard English as having been and continuing to be the nation’s raison d’être (349–50). While linguists like Chua affirm that “Singlish and [Standard] English can co-exist,” it is quite clear that the Singaporean government’s main objective is to eradicate what it describes as a cultural and linguistic anomaly. In addressing the Singlish debate and the influence of “language politicking” on instruction, Sandra Lee McKay and Wendy Bokhorst-Heng describe governmental decisions to send eight thousand “negligent” teachers from various educational levels to remedial English classes for failing to serve as “standard bearers.” Under SGEM, literacy laborers are viewed as “morally obligated to compensate for” what is perceived as “a lack, a deficit,” and a broken, “bastardized” form of English propagating among young speakers and writers of English in Singapore (106–7). But despite official eradicationist efforts, Singlish remains an integral part of the literacy and language use of overwhelmingly large numbers of Singaporeans as a national identity marker and a form of what Pierre Bourdieu terms social capital, “the aggregate of an individual’s group memberships and social connections” (Silver 49). While we see greater evidence of official and practical orientations toward translingualism in Lebanon, the more aggressive official standardization efforts in Singapore and attempts to overlook valid concerns about identity issues continue to serve as fertile ground for further ethnic and social identity conflicts.

U.S. Translingualism: Lessons “with” Lebanon and Singapore The postcolonial sites of Lebanon and Singapore seem to share various concerns pertaining to the negotiation of tensions between translingualism and residual monolingual ideologies in policies and practices. Even in naturally

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translingual spaces like Lebanon and Singapore, where ordinary language users shape language resources to specific ends on a day-to-day basis, monolingual assumptions still persist through the promotion of the singularity of relations between individuals’ ethnic and linguistic identities, as evidenced in Singapore, and through the desire among some writing practitioners and academics in Lebanon and, to a larger extent, in Singapore to preserve language standards. There is evidence in both locations for powerful tensions between the use value of translingualism and the exchange value of Standard English. The current comparative analysis pinpoints that individuals in various geographic locations and social positions, ranging from ordinary language users and practitioners to policy makers and politicians, situate themselves differently in relation to various forms of living languages and have different stakes in either preserving the symbolic power of language standards or pursuing cross-language relations. In a small Mediterranean country like Lebanon and a small island like Singapore, both of which have no natural resources but their strategic geographic location and strong dependence on trade and commerce, negotiations of conflicting language ideologies are mainly driven by geopolitical relations and economic considerations. Interestingly, the local specificity of economic and vocational considerations in Lebanon has strongly motivated the gradual endorsement of translingual work in the professional writing realm, whereas the changing demands of the globalized economy have necessitated the official persistence in Singapore of Standard English as a commodified global lingua franca as well as an ostensible cross-ethnic link language. The linking of desired language competences and skills to economic and vocational opportunities is evident in both trade-dependent locations. Lebanon’s historical relations with France and Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East render emerging cross-language initiatives a necessity for cultural openness and ongoing political, economic, and cross-cultural relations. However, the rhetoric of language policy and political discourse in Singapore explicitly links international recognition and the development of greater economic capital to the possession of Standard English as the sole variety deemed recognizable in the global market by those in power. While Singapore represents mastery of Standard English as an investment in economic and cultural capital that retains high exchange value in the labor market, Lebanon seems to be heading toward commodified translingualism, with translingual abilities being viewed as a highly marketable commodity in the business domain. In this sense, investments in cross-language relations



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on one hand and the dominance of Standard English in language education on the other are structured differently in Lebanon and Singapore in light of differentials in economic and geopolitical realities. Under this market-based system, the changing dynamics of the political economy of language have heavily shaped the patterns of language use and linguistic standardization. An official push in Lebanon toward translingualism sharply contrasts with a push toward standardization evident in Singapore, both of which are produced and maintained by various forces of globalization. The present description of language difference in these multilingual societies with linguistically and culturally diverse populations has mainly focused on three interrelated dimensions: 1. Language relations on the ground: the nature of sociolinguistic landscapes as language users dynamically produce meaning through utilizing a diversity of languages and language practices for specific purposes, needs, and contexts in their daily functions 2. Language relations in policies: the official language policy and language-in-education legislations and their degree of attention to the linguistic landscaping of locality and underpinning identity issues 3. Language relations in practices: the degree to which unavoidable sociolinguistic realities are translated into curricular design and teaching and assessment practices

Sufficiently accounting in policies and practices for the interactional and sociolinguistic dimensions of languages on the ground constitutes an ideal condition for the institutionalization of translingualism in writing programs. We can think of the three multilingual locations of Lebanon, Singapore, and the United States as representing three different scenarios with regard to their level of commitment to translingualism in relation to their corresponding responses to each of the above dimensions. To begin with, given its official recognition of the multiplicity of language resources on the ground coupled with growing efforts for the gradual translation of these into the writing curriculum, Lebanon to some extent is the closest to satisfying favorable conditions for translingualism despite surviving traces of conservatism in some teaching practices and gradual directions toward commodification of translingual language practices. What is noteworthy about Lebanon’s language policy and educational legislations

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is that they are to some extent realistic in mirroring and maintaining the waves of cultural plurality and diverse language practices in an ever-changing globalized society and are thus more relevant to local language users and learners’ actual lived experiences. At the same time, however, though Lebanon adopts an official policy of multilingualism that captures the dynamism of local linguistic resources, the encroachment of other languages and local language practices into the traditional sphere of English in the academic writing classroom remains heavily determined by the nature of language ideologies governing curriculum design. Such observations from Lebanon can therefore demonstrate the insufficiency of having a multilingual language policy if not coupled with aggressive changes in the design of writing curricula that would more forcefully invite translingual work. As for Singapore, in spite of the vibrant nature of its sociolinguistic landscapes, its language policy, the government-sponsored SGEM, and subsequent curriculum design are still predominantly guided by monolingual ideologies. The situation in Singapore illustrates the case of “additive” multilingualism, which some might argue is equivalent to the “pluralization of monolingualism” (Makoni and Pennycook, Disinventing 22). Singaporean policies and practices have invested Standard English with overwhelming economic and cultural capital, at the expense of translingual language practices that mark people’s identities as national citizens. In order to move beyond a pedagogical focus on the mastery of standard forms and instead establish translingual language relations, what is needed in the Singaporean scenario is official recognition of the distinctive patterns of Singaporean languages and Englishes “as legitimate variants in their own right” (Rubdy and Tupas 320) and no longer as errors or deviations from Standard English. How are these cross-national and cross-linguistic observations of significance to the U.S. language situation and U.S. writing programs? In comparison to Lebanon and Singapore, which more readily adopt and adapt their language and educational policies and teaching practices under global changes, the geopolitical domination of the United States alongside its leading economic role might explain its prevailing dissemination of monolingualism. In one of the world’s most culturally and linguistically diverse nations, U.S. multilingualism remains the statistical but not the cultural norm. Despite the richness of the U.S. linguistic situation, insufficient attention at the level of state and national educational policies and practices to the actual multiplicity of cultural and linguistic repertoires on the ground still persists. In



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light of tacit English-only legislations, longstanding monolingual ideologies continue to heavily influence the theory and practice of U.S. college composition (Horner and Trimbur). Differences in the navigation of linguistic resources in these multilingual locations illustrate the exigency for closer attention by U.S. compositionists, especially those embracing a translingual approach to language difference, to the interaction among all three dimensions outlined above. Future prospects of institutionalizing translingualism in our writing programs and advancing translingual approaches in our own writing classrooms necessitate careful examinations of language relations on the ground, in our policies, and in our practices. Perspectives from Lebanon and Singapore, nations that have had their own share of dealing with the complexities of language difference, lead to the following conclusions. First, a full appreciation of the wealth of U.S. sociolinguistic landscapes requires careful handling of the problematics of the association of language with ethnic and racial identities and increased attention to the use value of translingualism. Second, the kind of “actively multilingual language policy” (Horner and Trimbur 597) seen in Lebanon is exactly what U.S. translinguals have to continue fighting for, a language policy where, as John Trimbur argues, all U.S. citizens would be able to engage in translingual practices in their public, personal, academic, and professional lives (“Linguistic” 587). Third, fighting for curriculum change through bridging the gap between language learning and actual language use in ways that attend to the dynamic sociolinguistic dimensions of language use where no language operates in isolation is yet another promising challenge for U.S. translinguals. In sum, prioritizing the “emic” (locally-centered) over the “etic” (globally-centered) (Pennycook, Language; Firth and Wagner) through having an increased sensitivity toward what is of relevance to individual language users and learners, rather than to those in power, deserves our central attention as we consider the future directions of U.S. translingualism. Acknowledgments I am deeply indebted to Bruce Horner, who considerably expanded my interest in and intellectual grasp of pursuing interdisciplinary, transnational, and translingual relations in my work in composition. I am also very grateful to Min-Zhan Lu for frequent discussions, always intellectually challenging and continuing sources of inspiration. I also thank Mark Williams for his helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

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Notes 1. As represented by Muchiri et al.; Donahue, “‘Internationalization’”; Foster and Russell; and Ninnes and Hellstén, among many others. or Hi? Translingual Practices from Leba 2. See my essay “Hi-ein, Hi non and Mainstream Literacy Education” for a more detailed description of translingual language relations emerging in Lebanese sociolinguistic landscapes and of the politics of translingual meaning making by ordinary language users in day-to-day affairs on the street. 3. Perspectives are drawn from one particular American-style university, the American University of Beirut, based on my past teaching experiences in its English department and from personal oral and written communication with two writing instructors in the communication skills program. 4. See http://www.goodenglish.org.sg for more on the Speak Good English Movement (accessed 25 Nov. 2010).

III.

PEDAGOGICAL/INSTITUTIONAL INTERVENTIONS

9.

TOWARD “TRANSCULTURAL LITERACY” AT A LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE Patricia Bizzell AT A SPRING 2011 faculty workshop on how to help multilingual students at the College of the Holy Cross, I heard a heated argument between two professors who are both native Spanish speakers. One wanted to encourage students who could do so to write their papers in Spanish for her course on Latin American history. The other strongly opposed such an option for fear it would hamper those students’ progress in academic English. It could be said that the historian wanted to open up her students’ varied language capabilities as learning resources for her class, tacitly acknowledging what is the “statistical but not the cultural norm” in the United States, namely that it is “one of the world’s most culturally and linguistically diverse nations,” as Nancy Bou Ayash has observed (this volume). The other professor felt compelled to defend the bastion of Standard English from pollution by a minority tongue (even though it is her own heritage language), setting up the kind of dynamic analyzed by Brice Nordquist (this volume) in which “Anglo-American hegemony” maintains its dominance precisely by the invocation of other languages as “sites of linguistic difference for the perpetuation of an illusion of linguistic purity, stasis, and superiority.” As a composition teacher listening to my colleagues’ debate, I inferred that if I wanted to please the one who advocated English Only for academic purposes, my writing class should push those conventional linguistic standards. But if I wanted to please the historian, I would need to find a way to teach writing that valued our students’ varied language capabilities as much as she did. Current scholarship on language variation and the teaching of academic writing suggests, in effect, that I shouldn’t side with either of my colleagues wholeheartedly. Certainly, the defender of “Standard English Only” supports an obsolete concept of what kinds of linguistic competence are now 131

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most useful in a globalized world. But the historian shares with her, or so it seems, an obsolete view of a language as an entity. As Bou Ayash and others have argued, we should beware of any approach that treats any language as a static entity; we should discard the concept of “additive multilingualism,” in which language users are imagined as “shuttling between a variety of linguistic systems that remain static and separate” (Bou Ayash, this volume). Gail Shuck explains that such attitudes “reif‍[y] language as static, clearly bounded, and evaluated according to a narrow canon of rules”; in the case of English, this approach valorizes “a linguistic and social order in which the ideal speaker is thought to be a monolingual native speaker of a prestige variety of English” (Shuck, “Combating” 59). Claire Kramsch suggests that the notion of “native speaker” itself, in any language, is a “myth,” and she states that “the dichotomy between native versus nonnative speakers has outlived its use” (“Privilege” 23, 27). Why? Because, Kramsch says, we live “at a time of large-scale migrations, cross-national and cross-cultural encounters, and increasing linguistic and pragmatic differences among speakers of the same language” (16). Groundbreaking work on this modern situation was published over a decade ago by Lachman M. Khubchandani, who concluded from his studies of interactions among South Asian languages that “historical bias in favor of treating language as an autonomous system within the confines of sharp boundaries and with its distinct history and tradition” has worked to obscure “the characteristics of variability, openness, ambiguity, vagueness and fuzziness in a ‘living’ language—hallmarks of communication in everyday life” that “acquire greater visibility in verbal repertoires of plurilingual societies” (5; emphasis in original). It is increasingly clear that we live in a world of “plurilinguals,” as Suresh Canagarajah argues (“Multilingual Strategies” 22–24). Plurilinguals know more than one language but have varied relationships with the languages they know: one may be a language they have spoken fluently from birth but never learned to write; another may be a language that has official status in their homeland for public business and for schooling, which they can write well but not speak fluently; and a third may be a language they can hear and read with only a little comprehension, having encountered it in pop music and on the Internet. Clearly, we are not talking about “additive multilingualism” here. Increasingly, too, whatever languages make up the plurilingual’s repertoire, one of them is likely to be some form of English. But as plurilingualism becomes the norm, putting many languages in play, knowing only English becomes inadequate even as English spreads globally, a process that



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induces a “fragmentation of English, leading to both more interlanguage contact and the establishment of more varieties of English” (Horner, “From English-Only” 5). As Min-Zhan Lu avers, even students who think they are monolingual in English really are not, because they are immersed in the plurilingual world (“Metaphors” 291). Hence a movement is afoot to redirect language instruction. Kramsch notes that “an increasing number of scholars are even questioning the appropriateness of the one native speaker norm” (“Privilege” 16; emphasis in original), and she advocates discarding the goal of native fluency (with its difficulties of definition) and seeking instead to produce “intercultural speakers” who know how to “analyze, reflect upon and interpret foreign cultural phenomena when using the language in contact with foreign nationals” (27– 28). Kramsch develops her argument in the context of teaching French to nonnative speakers of that language, and she contends that the intercultural speaker may ultimately be able to offer insights into French language and culture that are occulted for the native speaker, thus giving the intercultural speaker a new kind of authority as a user of the language (30). These new attitudes have crystalized in a manifesto published in a highly visible and respected venue in English teaching, authored by four nationally known authorities in the field and publicly endorsed by many more (including me): I refer to “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach” by Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur, which appeared in College English in 2011. These scholars state, “We call for a new paradigm: a translingual approach” that “sees difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning” (300). As a student and supporter of this new approach, I observe that little has been published, so far, that advocates students’ writing school papers entirely in languages other than English (I will have more to say about this option, mentioned in my opening anecdote, later). In light of this new approach, one might think that more American composition specialists would be looking for ways to encourage more pedagogical uses of diverse languages, more recovery of heritage languages, and more adaptation to a global linguistic environment in which several languages are always going to be in play. Indeed, these goals are specifically endorsed in Horner and his colleagues’ statement (see 308–12). However, so far, American scholars seem to have spent more time debating how or whether to integrate academic English with other Englishes or other languages. This debate often takes the

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form of “code-meshing versus code-switching.” In brief, those who support “code-meshing” advocate allowing students to blend their various languages within academic English school writing (see Canagarajah, “Multilingual Strategies”; Young, “‘Nah’”), whereas the “code-switchers” want students to keep their languages separate and perform their school writing in academic English only (see Lyons, “Fine Art”). It could be said that both sides in this debate still tend to talk about languages as static entities. Moreover, academic English remains in play. I observe that even some of the most ardent advocates of “code-meshing,” Canagarajah and Young, do not do much code-meshing in their own scholarly texts. Moreover, in Canagarajah’s essay that I am citing here, his example of a code-meshed student essay is written almost entirely in English save for a few Arabic epigraphs and decorative phrases in French. There are two broad strands here, and both must be woven into the new language practices we need. One strand, as emphasized by translingual scholarship to date, valorizes the many languages and versions of English that people bring to intellectual work. The other strand, however, keeps in mind that what I would like to call a “Common” English becomes increasingly important as a transcultural medium of communication. It is desirable to have a form of English in common to facilitate communication across (increasingly frayed and permeable) cultural and political boundaries, but this shared form of English is not the immutable set of rigid rules implied by designating it as “Standard.” Rather, it is a living language, adapting as it encounters other languages and other forms of English and changing what counts as “correct” Common English over time. As Alastair Pennycook has shown, the evolution of this Common English is already being profoundly influenced by its use outside the so-called inner circle of locations where English has traditionally been spoken as a native language (Global 21). Pennycook wishes to call our attention to “the communicative practices of people interacting across different linguistic and communicative codes, borrowing, bending and blending languages into new modes of expression” (47). Thus “those apparently on the receiving end of cultural and linguistic domination select, appropriate, refashion and return new cultural and linguistic forms through complex interactive cultural groups” (47), a process also illustrated in Xiaoye You’s account of English’s permutations in China. Pennycook further avers that this process, while accelerated by contemporary electronic media, far predates it (47), an observation amply borne out by Melvin Bragg’s account in The Adventure of English, which narrates the history of the language,



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from beginnings in Gaelic and Frisian forward, as essentially a process of cross-breeding with other languages. Weiguo Qu aptly observes (this volume) that “although English is a ‘colonizer’ now, it was being colonized at different stages in its history.” Thus English has always been something of a commons, and the process of mixing certainly continues today. If so, then to advocate mixing other languages with English and other versions of English with the academic is simply to assent to an evolutionary process that is already ongoing. Inculcating the rules of an ever-moving target “Standard” English would seem to be a waste of time; yet, too, students need access to Common English just as other intellectual workers do. What, then, should composition teachers do, if they are to take a translingual approach and aim to encourage intercultural competence? I offer here an account of how I try to answer this question at Holy Cross. A fundamental goal of my courses is to teach Common English and academic argument while at the same time encouraging my students to employ all of their varied linguistic resources. I share with Wendy Hesford, Edgar Singleton, and Ivonne M. García the view that “one of the major goals of first-year writing instruction is to introduce students to academic writing conventions” with “full awareness of how they are created and legitimated by use and cultural practices” (117). I teach what Shuck calls a “cross-cultural” composition course in which students with diverse languages are mixed, and I aim “to acknowledge all students’ varied linguistic identities,” as she recommends (“Combating” 70). First, let me describe where I teach, at a small liberal arts college that is academically challenging and highly competitive. Our admissions office hand-selects, on a case-by-case basis, students who seem able to succeed in this environment. No minimum test scores are required, and students need not even submit their SAT scores if they prefer not to; but nonnative-English-speaking students from abroad must let the college know how they did on the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). To graduate, all students must fulfill some very general common area course requirements, as well as the requirements of their academic majors, and demonstrate proficiency in a language other than English equal to four semesters’ worth of college-level language study. There is no graduation requirement for proficiency in English, and there is no required writing course. My two writing courses are electives: composition, which enrolls only first-year students, and expository writing, for students above the first year. I typically volunteer to teach two sections of one or the other every academic year.

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Each class enrolls twelve to fourteen students, and because no enrollment sorting according to ability or language status is done, the population is usually diverse. For instance, here are thumbnail profiles of the students in my spring 2010 composition course (in these, the unmarked social class origin is “middle”): Mario, native speaker of Spanish from a wealthy family in Puerto Rico, well-schooled in English and Spanish; Anthony, native speaker of both Common English and African American English, from a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia; Ashley, native speaker of Common English, New England variety, studying Spanish for her language requirement; Joshua, born in the United States and speaking both English and Korean from birth; Yoavi, from western Africa, first language Mina, second language French, third language Cape Verdean Creole, recent acquisitions English (from school) and Spanish (from watching telenovelas with his grandmother); Mallory, native speaker of Common English, New England variety, studying Spanish; Erika, native speaker of Haitian Creole, from a working-class neighborhood in Boston; Jianxi, native speaker of Chinese, who first encountered an English-speaking environment when he came to prep school in the United States two years ago; Julia, native speaker of Common English, studying Italian; Madelin, born in the United States, from a poor neighborhood in Boston, and speaking both Spanish and English from birth, though with little schooling in Spanish; Katy, native speaker of Common English, born here, who speaks Polish with relatives; Malik, native speaker of Common English, from a middle-class African American background, studying Spanish; and Melissa, a high school senior admitted through a special program, native speaker of her father’s English who also knows her mother’s language, Chinese. Of these students, only Ashley, Mallory, Julia, and Malik might be considered monolingual, but I agree with Lu in suggesting that such students really are not (see “Metaphors” 291–93). All four are serious students of another language and, as you can see from my thumbnail sketches, inhabit a plurilingual environment. The relationships of the others to English are also quite diverse; for some, it is one of their native languages, and for others, it is a recent acquisition and may never have been used in daily life, outside of a school setting, before they came to Holy Cross. So, what do I try to do in writing classes with this sort of population? I want to reemphasize that these courses are electives. Enrollment in them is not driven by requirements of any kind. I will get a few students who are excellent writers, love writing, and want to do more of it; in the class I have profiled, Julia and Malik fit that description. But often students choose these



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courses driven by their own sense—encouraged sometimes by their academic advisors—that they need to repair their writing. And usually they have developed this felt need due to the reception their writing has been getting from other Holy Cross professors. Anis Bawarshi has explained very clearly how both professors’ and students’ “habitualized, socio-cognitive” expectations for various classroom genres—the technical term for such expectations is “uptakes”— affect the reception of writing by transculturally literate students (199). In response to arguments in part 1 of Horner, Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda’s anthology Cross-Language Relations in Composition challenging an English-only focus in composition, Bawarshi cautions that the interventions called for are challenging precisely because they require critical engagement with our uptakes. And this is particularly difficult because uptakes, as learned inclinations that mediate our encounters with language differences, are less textually, materially “visible” and more deeply held as attachments. Yet uptakes are what we have to contend with as we work to create classroom environments that are hospitable to language differences and that make strategic use of students’ various discursive resources. (200)

I will have more to say later about how the uptakes of my colleagues affect my students’ writing environment. Let me just say now that I do want to contend with my students’ own uptakes in the courses I design while at the same time responding respectfully to their self-designated goal of writing “better English.” So: in my composition syllabus, the “Course Plan” states the following: Course Goal #1: to improve your abilities to read and discuss difficult academic texts and to write analytic arguments about them—skills that are needed in many college courses. How to understand challenging reading, how to organize material, how to use evidence, and how to write correctly and elegantly are among the topics we will address. Your effort will be a key component to your success in this course. Course Goal #2: to learn about the contemporary English language, how it has changed over time, how it has spread across the world, and how it has interacted with other languages. This knowledge should help you to understand yourself as an English language user and thus to improve your reading, writing, speaking and listening.1

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In aid of these goals, I divide our course work into four units: “Global Englishes,” “English Only?,” “Which English?,” and “English Plus.”2 I like to start with “Global Englishes” because the notion of English as a language spreading around the globe in multiple varieties is close to the experience of many of my students, and they have a lot to say about it, both as it facilitates physical and intellectual mobility (several of our readings describe the uses of English as an international business lingua franca) and as it threatens local languages and cultures (we read a cluster of articles on the struggles to preserve American Indian languages). We conclude with David Crystal’s “Why a Global Language?,” which discusses the military and economic forces that have propelled different languages to international dominance over the centuries—and speculates about which one will supplant English eventually, and Barbara Wallraff’s “What Global Language?,” which undermines the notion of English as a static entity by describing its various permutations worldwide. We move from here to look at the debates in the United States over English-only legislation and pedagogies. Here is a real point of entry into students’ uptakes, to recall Bawarshi’s concept, because many of them have come into the course thinking that only English is what they need to succeed in school and in life after school. Yet our work in the previous unit has suggested that only English is really not enough for anyone in today’s world—even if we could say with certainty what “English” is. After considering arguments, both serious and comic, on various aspects of these debates, we conclude with Geoffrey Nunberg’s essay “Reimagining America,” which unpacks the concerns for both self-identity and community unity that underlie English-only arguments. This is an essay in which analysis tends to have a debunking function. My students are then asked to write their own arguments about whether English should become the official language of the United States. I am opposed to our country’s taking that step, and my students know that, but some still want to defend such legislation. I’m glad they feel free to do so, and at least our classroom discussions of their positions are more informed for having to acknowledge readings in this unit. Uptakes related to obsessive error-hunting are challenged by the next unit, “Which English?,” which highlights the historical evolution of English and what counts as “correct” English, from before the invention of mechanical printing through the impact of electronic technologies. Dennis Baron’s essay “The New Technologies of the Word” concludes this unit with his speculations about how communicating by e-mail and cell phone have



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changed language usage; and of course, even if that essay had been written a month before class began, it would have already been slightly obsolete. My students know a lot about electronic communication and can bring Baron’s analysis up-to-date. This unit raises the interesting question of whether, since language always changes, we can steer those changes. Our last unit, “English Plus,” allows us to directly address the advantages and challenges of using more than one language. Two sections here look at writers who mingle English and Spanish and Common English and African American English in their writing and who talk about the resistance they encounter to such code-meshing (admittedly, there is no direct address in this unit to the problem of treating the various languages in play as entities, but the readings tend to emphasize languages as practices, not sets of norms). Among our classroom discussion topics in this unit is exploration of the reactions my students have encountered to speaking languages other than English on campus. We also study June Jordan’s powerful enactment of the efficacy of African American English, “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You, and the Future Life of Willie Jordan.” A paper assignment offers the option to evaluate Jordan’s students’ decision to write a letter protesting police brutality in African American English or to consider whether Flor, the Spanish-speaking protagonist in the film Spanglish, did the right thing in removing her daughter from an academically competitive but English-monolingual prep school. The third “English Plus” section considers American Sign Language and explores controversies in the Deaf community over loyalty to Deaf culture versus interaction with the hearing, the pros and cons of cochlear implants, and so on. As it happens, Deaf students are rare at Holy Cross, though I had one as an advisee when I was drafting this essay, but ASL can be studied at Holy Cross in fulfillment of the “foreign” language requirement, and in the class I profiled for you, Mallory and Ashley were studying it, in addition to Spanish. How is being Deaf like or not like being a native Spanish or African American English speaker? Such a question raises provocative issues of authenticity for us. As we are reading and discussing material for these units, I may ask students to comment on the content of something we’ve read in light of their own experience. I may ask them to write a précis of a longer article or an explanation of some key concepts in it. I may invite them to make an argument regarding one of the controversies we have encountered, requiring them to refer to several of our readings as they develop their own positions. At midterm, we spend a week working on a detailed literacy history for each

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student, including self-assessment of current status and goal-setting for the future. Students revisit this project in another self-assessment at the end of the course. They are writing something every week, and I am reading and commenting. Out of this work, five papers are developed for grades. These assignments lean heavily in the direction of teaching academic discourse. As I noted earlier, I agree with Hesford, Singleton, and García about the need to teach academic writing conventions while demystifying them, and I stand with Lyons as well on the need to empower students with access to more-or-less conventional academic discourse in my courses, though I would not go as far as he does to argue that maintaining the “sovereignty” of native/Native languages necessitates avoiding hybridizing or meshing with English altogether (what I mean to say is that I don’t think his position is right for my students, but I am persuaded that it is for his at Leech Lake, and furthermore, I don’t see why we need one-size-fits-all pedagogy; see Lyons, “Fine Art” 78–79). Probably the two issues that dominate my comments on student papers relate to their ability to respond responsibly to the readings they discuss and to craft transitions that guide readers through the structure of their arguments. I correct grammar and punctuation, eventually, though I always work on larger issues of coherence and structure first. One of the required texts is a grammar reference (Keys for Writers, by Ann Raimes, is a current favorite), and I use it to work with students individually and sometimes to do a mini-lesson with everyone in class. I try to pick a grammar book that has a particularly robust section on “ESL” and intercultural language differences. I’m not sure I agree with Nordquist’s complaint (this volume) that such textbooks tend to present languages other than English as deficient. For one thing, I’ve found in practice that students are pleased to see their languages acknowledged at all in the official format of an English grammar book. Moreover, Nordquist does not really propose any alternative method of addressing language differences on the sentence level. Joseph Sung-Yul Park and Lionel Wee offer an interesting suggestion: approach the study of grammar wiki style, that is, as a collaborative, open-ended process, in which students contribute examples of Englishes in use, for classroom comparison and discussion (180). This counters the notion that “correct” English is dictated by an authority whose knowledge of an unchanging entity cannot be challenged by nonexperts. At the same time, I strongly encourage students to do all of their writing in the first person and to use all their discursive resources to do so. Many of them exit my class still “writing with an accent.”



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My students often incorporate other languages in bits and pieces in their Common English compositions, so their plurilingual texts look much like that of Canagarajah’s student Buthainah (see “Multilingual Strategies”). For example, a plurilingual student in my expository writing class (which I describe below) spoke both English and Greek with native fluency and studied written Greek in his church’s supplemental school (and also, by the way, used his rudimentary Spanish to help out in his family’s liquor store). He incorporated Greek epigraphs into his English-language papers much as Buthainah did her Arabic epigraphs. I also encourage my students to reflect on the relationships among their languages, and they often have interesting things to say about them, confirming Shuck’s contention that maintaining a “native/nonnative dichotomy” in our thinking about students’ linguistic identities denies “individuals’ various and shifting investments in each of the languages they claim as their own” (“Language Identity” 121). Drawing on earlier research, Shuck explains that individuals’ “language identity” comprises at least three elements: their “language expertise,” which includes not only the sort of proficiency measured by placement tests but also abilities “to draw effectively upon the resources of multiple languages for multiple purposes”; their “language inheritance,” which denotes traditions important to their families and communities of origin, whatever their own connection to these languages; and their “language affiliation,” which refers to their personal attachment to each language and the degree to which it contributes to the individuals’ sense of self-identity as a whole (121). Not only do plurilinguals have different sorts of expertise, inheritance, and affiliation with the different languages they know, but these elements may well vary from situation to situation, as testified to, for example, by Hana Kang: “Being a Korean Generation 1.5 pursuing a Ph.D. in Chinese linguistics, I have learned that my identities are consistently reconstructed depending on the situations and I need to know how to represent myself by making a choice from three languages in multiple email settings” (Kang 301). I’ll describe just three examples from the class I profiled earlier in this essay (and will reproduce the students’ words as written, with their permission). When Madelin first studied Spanish, in high school, although she “found it easier to speak it, I discovered that my writing as well as my pronunciation in Spanish had become weaker. My English was progressing, yet my native language was slipping away without me being aware of it. Losing my native language meant that I was losing a part of my culture and identity.” Madelin linked this dilemma to problems described in some of the articles

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we were reading about struggles to preserve Native American languages. In the earlier years of her schooling, she had put much energy into developing English language expertise, with her parents’ encouragement, and trusted that her native Spanish would always be there for her. But she had never been schooled in Spanish, and when she was, in high school, she discovered that her language inheritance was somehow found wanting—not a prestige accent, not grammatical in written form—and her language affiliation was somehow becoming problematic. At a moment of increasing triumph in her expertise in English and her pride in herself as an English user, she suddenly encountered an emotional challenge to her Spanish self, mediated by an academically inflected critique of the Spanish she did have. Joshua described an even more harrowing moment of potential deracination: Last summer, while in Korea, I was on a subway with a few friends that I had met during my stay. They were born in Korea but knew how to speak English as they attended schools here in the States. Crowds of Koreans accumulated on the train with every stop as many were on their way home from work. My friends and I conversed and joked in English not particularly concerned about the crowd among us—English gave us a sense of privacy. Midway through the train ride an elderly woman began yelling across the train cart [sic] in our direction, pointing specifically at me. What had I done? “Boy, stop speaking that language . . . nobody speaks it here . . . do you not know how wonderful the Korean language is . . . what kind of Korean do you call yourself?!” The train seemed to stop as all the passengers turned their attention toward me. I remembered being warned once by my mother about publicly speaking English while in Korea because people, especially of the older generation, believed that it was a sign of disrespect towards their language. Nothing could have prepared me for that moment when the elderly woman began scolding me in public telling me that I was a disgrace to Koreans. Embarrassed and quite frightened by this fragile woman, I responded with whimpers of “Yes, yes . . . you are right . . . I’m sorry.” I was speechless the rest of the ride home.

Joshua travels frequently between the United States and Korea with his family, and his Korean is fluent: witness his ability in this anecdote to understand the upbraiding he got from the elderly woman, who spoke Korean to him. In the context of a subway ride in Korea, he felt no need to demonstrate his Korean fluency but rather could enjoy the English expertise he shared with



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his friends as a sort of secret code that gave them “privacy” among the Korean-speaking crowd. Suddenly his playful enjoyment of his English knowledge was cut short by a warning that, like Madelin, he might be risking an affiliation with a language inheritance that his elderly interlocutor did not want him to forget. These stories illustrate the emotional costs involved for plurilinguals in negotiating not only different languages but also different identities: am I the brightest Spanish-speaking student of English in my grade, or the fumbling speaker of a nonstandard Spanish dialect? Am I a clever code-switcher between English and Korean, or a disrespectful smarty-pants? A different experience is related by Erika, reporting on her high school study of Spanish: I remember there would be several times in class where a word in Spanish was very similar to that of Creole or had a different meaning, but the same pronunciation of a word. It was pleasant for me to see the similarities among Spanish and Creole. I felt good that I was able to understand enough Creole to be able to use it as a tool to help me better understand another language.

Erika didn’t feel that her grasp on Haitian Creole was threatened by learning another language. She enjoyed the realization that the language with which she felt the strongest affiliation, the language of her inheritance, actually contributed some expertise to her work with another language. Here we see the plurilinguals’ linguistic advantages in action. Nevertheless, it must be noted that Erika’s struggles with academic English were such that she eventually chose a visual arts major that allowed her to use more of her nonverbal creativity. The students above the first-year level in my expository writing course are very similar to those in my composition course in terms of their language identities, but they are farther along in their studies and have more nuanced perceptions of what they want out of academic English. Here is the “Course Goals” section of the expository writing syllabus: This course focuses on expository writing, which is non-fiction writing that informs, explains, or argues a point; it is the kind of writing you do for most of your college courses. Expository writing is thus quite useful, and varieties of it that employ the English language are spreading around the globe. It requires just as much skill as other kinds of writing in order to be excellent. To develop your skill, we will pursue these goals:

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These goals are basically the same as the goals of the composition class and represent a dual focus on satisfying students’ felt need for improvement in Common English and conventional academic discourse while attempting to challenge limiting “uptakes” they may harbor about writing and to foster full use of their discursive resources. I begin this course with the concepts about language that structured my composition course, under the headings “Global Englishes,” “English Only?,” “Which English?,” and “English Plus,” but we move more quickly to a frontal assault on the demands academic writing makes. For the first half of the course, we proceed week by week through the chapters of two textbooks: They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Graff, Birkenstein, and Durst) and Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (Williams and Colomb). I like They Say / I Say because it demystifies academic argument while putting the emphasis squarely where I want it to be, namely on students developing their own intellectual positions and argument styles. I like Style because it allows us to continue to work on improving English at the sentence level while placing the emphasis, again, where I would like it to be, on comprehension and aesthetics rather than on mere correctness (the first chapter does a good job of debunking correctness as a limiting goal). Again, I encourage students’ use of all their discursive resources. All along, students are writing every week, assignments that are similar in focus to those in composition in that they combine personal reflection with academic aims. In this course, there is a stronger emphasis than in composition on engaging with argumentative positions counter to one’s own. For example, an early brief assignment asks students to review a film they’ve seen (any film, their choice) while disagreeing with another review of the same film, which I ask them to include. In the most recent iteration of this course, I have devoted the second half of the semester to working through the special issue of JAC, from which I have been citing, on language variation; the students read the essays by Canagarajah, Young, Lyons, Lu, Samantha NeCamp, Damián Baca, and Brice Nordquist in that volume. Four graded essays emerge from this work. We then spend the last two weeks working



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together on a final “informed essay” that is longer and makes more use of sources than anything written so far. Students may write this essay on the issues raised by their readings in JAC or on one of the issues addressed by readings in They Say / I Say, supplementing whichever topic they choose with their own experience and some additional research. Be it noted that most likely, students will exit this course as well “writing with an accent” but, I hope, also writing with more intellectual energy and confidence. I want to underscore that in both composition and expository writing, my students are doing almost all their writing in English, albeit in several varieties of English. Other languages make no more of an appearance than they do in the sample paper by Canagarajah’s student Buthainah. I feel that this is a limitation of my plurilingual pedagogy, and I’d like to find ways to get more languages into play. Spanish and Chinese are probably the two most common ones my students present, and especially if there were more than one speaker of either in a class, there should be ways to enable us to at least hear more of these languages occasionally. In the Spanish section of the “English Plus” unit, we do read some Spanish poetry and some Spanglish cartoons, as Kate Mangelsdorf recommends, and I could have done more to engage students in discussion of translation issues (122–23). Lu suggests that such discussions are a good way to bring multiple languages into play in the classroom, and I’d like to try more of it (Lu, “Living-English” 51–52). I did try to bring other languages into play when I was directing the College Honors Program, too, for example by encouraging a student presenting on French Canadian immigrant experiences in Maine to read some of his documentation, family letters, to the student and faculty audience in the original French. At least I hope that by involving students in discussions of language variation, they will see the advantages of plurilingualism and feel reinforced in retaining or acquiring varied language resources themselves. I have to say that I have noticed a striking difference between student attitudes in these writing courses before and after I initiated a plurilingual approach, even in my limited way. Just the very fact that I acknowledge in class that they know other languages, and that it’s a good thing that they do, seems to be greatly empowering. I recall a native speaker of Japanese who was almost in tears in our first one-on-one meeting about her writing, as she expressed her frustration with the negative comments she’d been getting from her other professors. I don’t know much about the Japanese language, but I asked her about it and about her schooling experiences in Japan, and it seemed that no one had ever had these exploratory talks with her before. We discovered an

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argument structuring strategy that worked for her in Japanese and that we thought might work in English: it did, and her writing improved dramatically. I recall another student, a native speaker of Russian, who was a fine writer in English but who had let lapse the French he had learned during his family’s travels from Russia to the United States via Paris. He got interested in reviving his French after reading Canagarajah. But the biggest obstacle to incorporating more different languages in my English-focused writing courses remains my students’ overall perception that these other languages are not much use to them at Holy Cross. The writing environment at Holy Cross generally is not all it should be, though I should first mention some positives. As indicated above, the population in our writing courses, all elective, is mixed in terms of students’ language identities, which makes for a very rich classroom environment (as Shuck recommends, “Combating” 69–70). Also as previously noted, the college requires all students to study a foreign language, so none of them is absolutely monolingual, and those whose language heritage is monolingual in English can have some appreciation of the challenges and advantages of being plurilingual (as Horner and his colleagues recommend [“Language Difference” 308]). With no college-wide policy addressing language difference, as Bawarshi warns, many faculty members have deeply felt and largely unexamined attachments to certain ideas about what college writing should look like, which dramatically affects their uptakes of transculturally literate writing, seen simply as error-ridden. On the other hand, many colleagues respond warmly to the intelligence, insight, and wit shown in much of this writing. Moreover, among students who are native speakers of only English, there are very mixed attitudes toward the plurilingual environment that has been growing at Holy Cross in recent years. I hear of loud arguments and even fistfights occasioned by someone telling someone else to “speak English or go back where you came from.” At the same time, a student in the expository writing class told me that she always felt wistful when she heard classmates talking on their cell phones in languages she could not recognize; she wished she could find out more about those languages and cultures. In spite of these mixed but somewhat positive signs, academic life on the campus is essentially Standard English Only except for foreign and classical language classes and isolated pockets elsewhere (I’m told a liberation theology class is being taught entirely in Spanish in the religious studies department). Moreover, the administration has not yet worked out how to accommodate students’ fulfillment of the foreign language requirement when they come



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to campus speaking a language other than English fluently but with highly varying levels of formal education in that language. At the same time, our common area course requirements drive students away from writing courses by not counting them in fulfillment of any of these (the literature requirement cannot be met with a writing course). We seem to be mired in what Hesford, Singleton, and García call “corporate multiculturalism,” a situation in which “diversity initiatives have emphasized an attitudinal engagement with difference and ignored the potentially productive and reciprocal relations between U.S. English and other languages, and between U.S. English and the ‘Englishes’ that arise within other national and cultural contexts” (113). This is especially troubling if, as Horner and his colleagues suggest, penalties imposed on language differences create “faux-linguistic covers for discrimination against immigrants and minorities” (“Language Difference” 309), something that I know my well-meaning colleagues do not want to be guilty of. What sort of change is needed? It would be helpful if we could offer a few more sections of composition and expository writing and remove the requirement-driven disincentive to take them. Even so, demand often outstrips the number of seats available, but until the fall of 2012, when a new hire joined us, I have been the only member of my department with scholarly interest in rhetoric and composition, and my colleagues seldom volunteer to teach these courses. Faculty development in how to teach them effectively in our newly plurilingual environment is needed, and by the way, I’d put myself at the head of the line to receive such training; I am by no means an expert. At the same time, I agree with Shuck that it’s important to combat the two-pronged “myth” that plurilingual students must take some courses to perfect their English before they can engage in postsecondary-level academic work, and at the same time, that only a few such courses (taught by someone else, of course) are needed to achieve error- and accent-free perfection (“Combating” 62). Faculty development is also needed to help faculty in all disciplines understand that proficiency in English is better defined—for all students, not only for the most apparent plurilinguals—as by Horner, Lu, Royster, and Trimbur: Writers’ proficiency in a language will thus be measured not by their ability to produce an abstracted set of conventional forms. Rather, it will be shown by the range of practices they can draw on; their ability to use these creatively; and their ability to produce meaning out of a wide range of practices in their reading. . . . Translingual fluency would be defined as . . . responsiveness to the diverse range of readers’ social positions and ideological perspectives. (308)

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Convincing more faculty members to see the development of student reading, writing, and speaking according to this paradigm could be the task of a writing-across-the-curriculum program, but I’d want it to focus on using multiple languages (including multiple Englishes). My experience suggests that Michelle Hall Kells is right when she cautions, “If we fail to extend our advocacy efforts across the curriculum, ethnolinguistically diverse students will continue to meet with failure, censure, and discrimination in other courses and writing contexts” (208). In recommending “new structures for a changing world,” the subtitle of its report, the Modern Language Association Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages urges the creation of programs that integrate languages into all areas of study. I imagine that the committee would have supported my colleague in arguing that students in a Latin American history course who could write in Spanish be allowed, indeed encouraged, to do so. The committee urges such innovations because it believes that the old goal of creating “the competence of an educated native speaker” of a foreign language in English-native undergraduates is unrealistic and increasingly outmoded. The committee’s report instead endorses creating “translingual and transcultural competence” enabling students “to operate between languages” and “to function as informed and capable interlocutors with educated native speakers in the target language.” Students would thus be induced “to reflect on the world and themselves through the lens of another language and culture” and, if they are Americans, come to realize that they are “members of a society that is foreign to others.” What Weiguo Qu (this volume) says about the effects of English education in China might obtain for native English speakers learning (about) other languages: “English as a foreign culture can defamiliarize and de-automatize the habituated cognitive activities of a student’s own culture, participating in and contributing to the cultivation of critical literacy in that culture.” It seems to me that a program that attempted to improve students’ abilities in other languages in these ways would have a reciprocal positive effect on their Common English use. If some students in a Latin American history class were writing in Spanish, for example, it seems more likely that some spoken Spanish would creep into classroom interactions and students who don’t know much Spanish might learn some. Students who are not writing in Spanish (whether or not they know Spanish well) might begin to feel free to use a few Spanish words and phrases in their academic writing in Common English. Everyone’s attitude toward what “good” written Common English



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looks like for academic purposes could become more relaxed and responsive to the resources of living language rather than stifled by rigid standards. And faculty and students who are most passionately attached to the defense of rigid standards might learn in this way what intellectual advantages are to be found in such diversification (see also Bizzell, “Intellectual Work”). This, indeed, is how Common English changes and grows. With such developments, I hope, we can move ever closer toward transcultural literacy at our little liberal arts college. Notes 1. From my spring 2010 composition syllabus. 2. These units are based in the structure of a wonderful composition reader by Keith Walters and Michal Brody, What’s Language Got to Do with It? I wish the authors would produce a new edition! 3. From my fall 2010 expository writing syllabus.

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IMPORT/EXPORT WORK? Using Cross-Cultural Theories to Rethink Englishes, Identities, and Genres in Writing Centers Joan Mullin, Carol Peterson Haviland, and Amy Zenger Designing for learning cannot be based on a division of labor between learners and non-learners, between those who organize learning and those who realize it, or between those who create meaning and those who execute it. —Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity

FOR SOME TIME now, U.S. writing center communities have been probing ideas of collaboration, of working on the margins or being in the center, of alternative languages and rhetorics, and of their role as change agents. The results of these inquiries have anchored much writing center research and practice: these are located in what has been called “nondirective” interaction that aims to build on writers’ knowledge; in “peer tutoring” that can mitigate authoritative, rote learning; and in collaboration that fosters writers’ “voices” instead of providing “normalizing” conventions. These ideals, while initially imagined to be uncomplicated when applied to native speakers, have proven to be both more complicated and less well received when applied to speakers of English from outside the United States or to those from inside who grew up with multilingual backgrounds. Indeed, multilingual and nonnative U.S. English speakers seem to resist collaboration, nondirectiveness, and peer tutoring, often leading centers to adopt more top-down conventional practices (Shamoon and Burns). While some writing center researchers have used ESL research (for example, Jacoby; Severino; Harris and Silva) to develop supportive practices that couple 150



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language/genre proficiency with respect for home languages/cultures, these are no longer enough. With the day-to-day press of local calls for accountability; with colleagues’ demands that students should write like native English speakers; and with international students’ desires to pass classes, sound “American,” and get good jobs by writing “well-enough,” writing centers need to more overtly assert their roles as change agents in the university. Very simply, World Englishes and multilanguages/literacies force reconsideration of the pedagogy and theories of writing that shaped the development of U.S. writing centers and that are still their bedrock.

Academic English, Writing, and Genres: Our Theories, Our Practices Internationally, writing centers often start on the margins of institutions. However, informed but not encumbered by both the theories and histories out of which subsequent practices grew, many of these writing centers outside of the United States have been able to position themselves as the center of writing in their institutions (see Ganobscik-Williams; Björk et al.). We look here at the ways both mono- and multilingual English speakers use and want to use writing and at one of the central tenets of writing center work—collaboration—to critique some underlying assumptions that anchor many U.S. writing centers’ practices and may prevent them from being change agents like their counterparts elsewhere. U.S. writing centers have long imagined themselves as covert operations, undermining traditional notions of writing, even as they are encouraging students or institutions to think tutorials are supporting these same notions. Calling for writing centers to be “places where students learn to negotiate and understand the contact and conflicts of differences,” Nancy Maloney Grimm was one of the first to question typical “nondirective” tutoring, which she saw as implicitly supporting standard U.S. English and traditional writing practices (13–14). While many writing centers rose to Grimm’s challenge, valuing students’ rights to their own language and promoting this institutionally, such practices also continued to divide “academic” and “student” language, creating a tension rather than a resolution. That is, students couldn’t understand why they weren’t being taught to “succeed” in their classroom writing, and faculty were perplexed as to why writing centers wouldn’t support “correct” use of language. We claim here that underlying such practices in writing centers and in composition is the assumption that

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tutors and teachers still export something to students, without importing anything from them in return. With the advantage of more than ten years of research that now crosses continents, we expand Grimm’s inquiry, asking how a reciprocal import/ export model might shift assumptions about language/writing/culture and, therefore, change tutoring. If “responsible rhetorical agency is a matter of acknowledging and honoring the responsive nature of agency” (Cooper 422), then altering the interactions between learners and nonlearners should differently shape both student and writing center agency within the university (see also Geller et al.). On one hand, writing centers should play a role in introducing students to the expectations of academic culture; however, if we follow our own theories that attempt to counter colonization, we also should seek ways to restore a balance between institutional expectations and what we know about knowledge-building communication. Through the metaphor of importing and exporting, we reenvision the tutor-writer exchange as a site that positions writing centers to negotiate with multilingual writers as well as to challenge the monolingual practices privileged in most U.S. universities. We begin by looking at how our current tutoring practices have originated in or grown concurrently with writing theories. Writing centers have been influenced by theories of collaboration (Shuman; Ferris; Walkinshaw), genre (Bazerman and Russell; Russell and Yañez), cultural historical activity theory (Prior and Shipka; Lipson and Binkley; Lyon), and more recently by scholars studying transcultural language flow (Pennycook, Global; Kachru and Smith) and the global dominance of English in academic publishing (Lillis and Curry, Academic; Canagarajah, “Place”). However, despite the clearly dynamic, reciprocal processes suggested by such theories, actual writing center pedagogies, as represented on the majority of U.S. writing center websites and in other public documents, suggest a different reality, with most emphasizing only what writing centers and tutors can offer to writers, particularly multilingual writers. These public claims erase concepts of agency and reciprocity of knowledge building that could contribute to disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and university understandings of how writing is socially situated. Paul Prior and Jody Shipka lay the groundwork for such explanations, describing writing as chronotopic laminations—“the dispersed, fluid chains of places, times, people, and artifacts that come to be tied together in trajectories of literate action” (1). In tutorials, such chains are altered, disrupted, and retied, giving these scenes great potential for examining and producing



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new literate (inter)actions and artifacts. Rather than only export an unexamined product (as Grimm previously described), writing centers could instead promote a richer, more capacious understanding of language and its role in shaping our actions as native and nonnative speakers of Englishes. By thus challenging institutional assumptions about language, writing centers could more fully and explicitly engage in interactive work. With colleagues they could then directly challenge those long-questioned notions of correctness, textual ownership, knowledge building, and privilege with which writing centers often find themselves complicit, despite their “good intentions.” We say this not to indict but to encourage writing centers to take advantage of an internationally opportune point in time wherein writing tutors working with mono- and multilingual writers can promote language as transactional and can model how knowledge building might be less oppressively controlled. Tutors might, in fact, be able to heed Kenneth Bruffee’s warning against becoming authoritative “little teachers” by practicing reciprocal knowledge sharing as “literacy brokers” (Lillis and Curry, Academic Writing).

Changing Writing Center Practices: Simple—or Not So Simple? As demonstrated throughout this collection, academics commonly acknowledge that our languages shape and enact identity. We three have certainly seen evidence of this in writing centers and point to our own experiences in Southern California, Texas, the United Kingdom, and Lebanon. In both Southern California and Texas, many tutors and writers bring multilingual backgrounds with them, moving between or among English and Spanish, Chinese, and Vietnamese, for example. Yet their capabilities are often ignored or, as tutors in Texas noted, visibly erased so as to fit within the monolingual culture of the university. Such erasing or the taking up of a counter-identity can negatively complicate the language learning process, as Joan saw in her work with art institutions in London. In these schools with strong multinational student populations, international students without sufficient academic English language skills quickly learn that allowing themselves to be tagged as dyslexic marks them as insufficient intellectually and linguistically but offers payoffs in other ways. Assuming such tags seems worth it, for instead of having to engage in the difficult question of how to build on their language knowledge, they receive extra help with their work (often employing others

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to complete it) and exemption from tasks that are difficult. They take on a learned illiteracy in their academic work, eliciting reactions based on what appears to be purposeful helplessness, an identity that those working with them begin to associate with particular nationalities. Yet for these writers, such constructions are a means to an end; they disregard how others treat them, believing them foolish for not realizing the game they are playing or recognizing their need to do so. While instructors want them to learn to write on their own so they won’t be dependent on others for their writing, students find that posing as dyslexic identifies them not as Standard English language learners but as disadvantaged and thus not at fault, unable to do the work being asked of others, dis-abled.1 Taking on these labels or counter-identities becomes an efficient way for any student to push away from collaboration and can position tutors to teach and even to edit so that students have “correct” papers that allow them to “pass” courses. Unless they do so, tutors are perceived as unfairly withholding answers from writers; writers, on the other hand, are seen at best as lazy, unwilling to do the work necessary to become academically literate. Caught in these constructions and desires, neither group sees past the frame the other has built, and as a consequence, the transactional possibilities of language and writing suffer. Ignored is the fact that these student-writers are already literate, have already been “productive agents” (Cooper 423) in other contexts, and have multiple languages and cultures on which to draw. Thus we must ask how their assumptions about what they must know in order to write in English might foster their desire to take on a disabling identity. How much does that identity then become a kind of reality? How, instead, might students’ prior knowledge of language crossing be valued and inform tutorial practices? How might tutors and writers work to exchange language knowledge, privileging each other as literacy experts in an attempt to create a negotiated language for their tutorial and for the text that is to be written?

Importing and Exporting in Practice, 1 In Lebanon, students most commonly have a local spoken Arabic as a home language—although some have Armenian, Spanish, Ukrainian, or another family language—and their K–13 schooling will have been in Arabic, French, or English. Indeed they often identify themselves as English-, French-, or Arabic-educated, indicating particular experiences of authority and authorship, experiences that affect how they document sources and that drive



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their composing habits. While the complex language learning situations we describe here give students a facility with language acquisition and considerable meta-knowledge about language practices, this knowledge is often not seen—by either faculty or students—as advantageous; instead, it is thought to “interfere” with correctness. In addition, while multilingual students may intuit the shifts between languages and the effect that has on them as individuals and on their construction of self and text, their meta-knowledge is not valued, explored for its possibilities to open up a piece of writing, nor is it encouraged. Traditional tutoring may examine the assumptions writers bring to the table but often seeks to replace, not negotiate, these. An import/export tutoring model could adapt Joseph Harris’s term “writerly moves” (Rewriting 3), which refers to a repertoire of means by which academic writers “make interesting use” of the texts they read (1). By focusing on academic writing as a social practice, Harris sidesteps writing instruction that provides directions for necessarily recreating established textual forms. “Tutorly moves” could similarly help writing centers prepare tutors who think reciprocally about texts and text production; this would be a distinct shift away from preparing tutors by providing them with a set of fixed rules for managing tutorials and away from obsessing about whether tutors are directive or nondirective. Following Anne Ellen Geller and her colleagues, tutors and students could then build on their own cultural capital to identify “moves” that become habits of mind rather than sets of instructions that colonize every tutorial and text. Further, though, tutors—and by extension, writing centers—could model how engaging texts as collaborative knowledge building invites a negotiation of languages. Christine Tardy’s instructional methods for using multilingual writers’ texts in multimodal-focused classrooms exemplify such an approach. She suggests that students choose to translate a text from their home countries/ languages to “explore the rhetorical constraints of [presentation] software” (“Expressions” 334). As students engage in translation, they find that the medium (the technology) and the message (language) must shift to accommodate each other: translation requires reciprocity, not merely application of a formula. Employing parallel moves in a writing center would have tutors asking students to first informally create a translation of an assignment, examine the difficulty of doing so (if any), and then discuss underlying assumptions about writing in their home language(s) that may be transferred to or may not be accommodated in the target language. Such examinations would reinforce writer agency as a basis for incorporating other practices: tutors

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would learn about writers’ moves by locating existing scholarship on issues and thus accounting for their own situatedness. With this knowledge, tutors and writers could collaboratively develop ways to enter this new context by building on (not replacing) their existing knowledge. Tutors and writers could step back from drafts to hear and respect different perspectives and means of expression, situating these so other readers (for example, peers, teachers) can enter into and consider emerging, negotiated texts, not just predictable, static compositions. Writing centers have the advantage over classrooms in that they reduce the teaching-learning ratio to one-on-one; this allows them to identify the tensions between playing the peer or the expert, between exporting and importing, while collaboratively negotiating the risks involved. However, just as Elizabeth Wardle suggests we stop teaching students “to write” and instead teach them “about writing,” we suggest here another shift in how we educate tutors as exporters: rather than teaching “to tutor,” we can teach writing center tutors “about tutoring,” particularly as an import/export process. The majority of texts on tutoring give directions: “do this; don’t do that.” These texts are easy to use and well received by tutors because they impart useful content knowledge about surface features and conventions of writing. Yet such advice duplicates “export-structured” classroom practices that instruct teachers to teach to students. It is no surprise, therefore, that tutors adapting this advice would enact “little teacher” directives that privilege a single way to use language and undermine a collaborative negotiation out of the multiple ways in which languages construct texts. Writing centers can create a richer ground by rethinking their pedagogies, particularly those used in tutor preparation programs and manuals. While export-tutoring is easy to do and easy to assess, and it offers writers appealing short-term gains, it does not move tutors to think reciprocally about tutoring—nor does it hold great potential for moving students to think reciprocally about writing, or about the complexity of languages that reciprocity calls for. Part of tutors’ education should thus include the development of curiosity about writers’ existing strategies, about how writers are thinking about composing, about how these approaches may or may not inform the writing of a particular academic paper. Within an import/export model of tutor education, tutors would do well to question whether English is seen as a static replacement language or as one of several ever-developing disciplinary and linguistic tools students will use in different ways in different parts of the world. For example, potential tutors might look at Geneva



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Smitherman’s work and at Suresh Canagarajah’s reading of how effectively her Talkin and Testifyin pushed against academic expectations of language (“dissin and doggin”) and syntax (“what else was we gon do while we was waitin for the Revolution to come?”) (Canagarajah, “Place” 605, 605, 606). Most writing center practitioners, like the academy at large, neither ask why students might use particular constructions nor advance the option that multilingual students say what they choose to say in ways that best serve them and their listening readers. Few writing center texts engage tutors in talking “about” tutoring, about writerly habits of mind, about rhetorical cultures, about how to think alongside other writers, about how to embrace the tensions and risks from which learning can arise. The works of Elizabeth Boquet, Harry C. Denny, and Geller and her colleagues stand as notable exceptions. The enactment of their suggested practices is difficult, however, if institutional and tutorial environments are still operating within an export-only model. And so writing centers continue as best they can, working as covert operators in the university, trying to bridge theoretical aspirations with mono-discoursal conceptions of academic writing, while waiting for the revolution to come. In some places, often outside the United States, that revolution is already beginning to take place.

Importing and Exporting in Practice, 2 At the American University of Beirut (AUB), Carol and Amy, along with colleague Lina Choueiri, began experimenting with importing instead of only exporting by asking students in a graduate course on academic discourses in English to share their reflections on being multilingual and using English as a transnational language.2 Simply lending an ear to their conversations demonstrated a multilingual ease as these students often used two or three languages in a single sentence, all carefully fitted to the scene and its participants. Further questioning elicited highly nuanced descriptions of acquiring two, three, four, or five languages at different ages, and students were articulate about their current uses of those languages, commonly selecting from several as they spoke with parents, siblings, spouses, grandparents, domestic help, schoolmates and teachers, and friends and as they composed in different modes such as formal writing, texting, and speaking. For example, one student said that she speaks French with her parents, younger siblings, and cousins; Arabic with her grandparents and older brother; English with domestic help; and English with professors and work colleagues. However, she

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uses Arabic when she goes into the community to implement work projects and a mix of English, French, and Arabic with her friends. When she texts, she thinks in Arabic or French but texts in abbreviated English. Another student described herself this way: “I think in my trilingual head. Most of the time, I think in Arabic but my words fail me often and I have to recourse to English and French to save the thought. I find myself using English when I don’t know the pronunciation of the same word in French and vice versa.” To ignore these strengths as rich resources is to ignore that “language acquisition in real life often takes place in multilingual contexts with an engagement with many codes” and that this engagement of contexts and codes “plays a positive role in any language development” (Canagarajah, “Place” 602). The AUB students demonstrated this as they adeptly used multiple languages to make meaning and also ably contrasted the ways academic journals in their different disciplines presented data and handled citations. They showed considerable rhetorical sophistication, noting that “what’s logical in Arabic and French is not always so in English because English is parsimonious and Arabic and French are elaborate.” Explaining the consequences of these different constructions, they observed that “the English system invites students to explore the world in any way that seems possible, while the French system will dictate what information you should have and when to share it.” Tutors, and the writing centers in which they work, can take these responses beyond “interesting” if they encourage colleagues to think more seriously about the “elaborateness” that Western English conventions undercut and about rhetorical moves that might instead be effectively meshed with the parsimonious. Writing centers can support tutors not only in thinking about the values and habits embedded in “parsimonious” but also, by extension, in discussing these same issues with their academic colleagues across the disciplines. Writing faculty and writing center directors can foster reconsideration of the dominance of Western notions of argument that we export to determine whether, in a global exchange, getting directly to the point is indeed the most rhetorically effective choice. Within writing centers it is possible also to think more carefully about the rhythm of English as we speak to writers: sound, which is differently important among languages, often gets lost in our teaching of writing. A tutor might inquire, for example, how sound and rhythm affect a writer’s understanding of the target language of an academic discipline. Generally, no format exists within writing centers to gather this tutorial-specific information and share it more widely within, and outside of, the writing center. Yet this is an opportune, historical moment in



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writing centers as well as institutionally, since colleagues, who are engaging more and more with research partners outside their own countries, are also being challenged with communicative puzzles (see, for example, Fredriksson, Barner-Rassmussen and Piekkari). In Lebanon, other valuable import/export issues that affect tutoring emerged as AUB students discussed ways of reporting research. For example, students moving from Arabic to English often wrote “we can say that”—as in “We can say that narghila smoking is as harmful as tobacco smoking.” The Arabic phrase translated as “we can say that” is a commonplace way of tying evidence to conclusions, but as students read and wrote in English, they acquired the expression “the data show/demonstrate.” They noted how the more personal and less forceful Arabic detracted, for English readers, from the apparent rigor of their research; clearly they were conscious of the ways that language embeds cultural habits and shapes assertions. In considering how to use this observation in AUB tutor education, it was important to not simply supply the “corrected” expression but to discuss the notion of objectivity in research and to consider the kind of authority with which writers might want to press a claim. Considering the students’ explanation of language differences helped to foreground how, for audiences in the United States, erasing an author implies an authority larger than that author or situates the author as an authority larger than the reader. Such discussions of tutorials can lead to questions of how Western author positioning fosters an arcane and false notion of “objectivity” and certainly of agency. Writing center staff can also raise the issue of authority within disciplines among faculty, widening the possibility for alternative literate practices for students and scholars at least on local campuses and setting the stage for institutional/international discussions. Interchanges can call into question the common notion that U.S. English should always be succinct and direct. In an oft-cited example that suggests something quite different, middle-class parents ask their children, “Would you like to get ready for bed now?,” fully expecting those children to brush their teeth and put on pajamas and not reply, “Actually, no, I’d prefer to have a dish of ice cream and play two more video games.” Power and politeness figure into the construction of the request, in this case in a way that collides with the perceived academic value of being succinct and direct. Just as these cases point to the laminations that make up our own everyday language use, they raise multiple questions for writing tutors and writing center research:

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Joan Mullin, Carol Peterson Haviland, and Amy Zenger • When is a writer’s understanding of language based on a rule that could be explained, and when does the use of that rule depend on a social, cultural, or generational practice and, therefore, be better explained with approaches different from our current ones (such as the AUB student who noted that French dictates a particular approach and usage while English encourages exploration)? • Conversely, what might multilingual speakers bring to tutors’ knowledge of language use? How might this new knowledge be imported into a repertoire of practices, usage, and worldviews? • While genre theory has moved slowly away from templates-as-genre and much more thoughtfully into discussions of activity systems, how might writing centers rethink practices in terms of individually laminated interpretations instead of relying on “do this, do that”? • How might practices of meshing, in the same way that Canagarajah discusses Smitherman’s use of them, inform how writing centers promote knowledge making with student writers? • How might writing centers play a role in opening up practices that faculty use to correct writing, practices based on expectations about how students need to learn to perform, even when these same expectations might not be applied to themselves and their colleagues in their own disciplines? This question, we believe, pokes at the acts of gatekeeping and entitlement that allow faculty to use editors or others’ ideas in ways that they deny to their students (see Haviland and Mullin; Bergmann).

It is comparatively easy to think about all of this reciprocal brokerage still in terms of importing from others only what fits our frames and of exporting to others so they imitate our views. But if we want to be really good brokers, we have to broker in ways that position us to change also. For example, when a Lebanese nutrition student despaired of acquiring the English she needed and asked for some shortcuts, she politely said that Carol’s suggestion that she regularly read her field’s journals in English would be a pretty slow route to fluency. So Carol asked her what she told her patients who needed to lose weight—quickly. She said, “I tell them that there’s no ‘red juice’ for weight loss. You have to keep at it, and sometimes you make great progress, sometimes you make a bad decision and gain some weight back—but you can learn from even that.” Carol’s point was reinforced with the analogy: language making takes time and involves some errors, but the errors can create learning. However, the analogy itself took on a life of its own that



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carried far more weight for everyone: Carol and the students began to use the phrase “no red juice” when they talked with others—both mono- and multilingual—about situating themselves in different languages and disciplinary discourses. In the AUB writing center, staff and students imported and exported concepts and metaphors that created a richer explanation of their writing environments. This could be extended to U.S. writing centers if, instead of assuming a writing process or giving words for a concept, tutors would collaboratively create linguistic understandings that serve as markers for particular writers and also prove useful with others. Canagarajah, drawing attention to Min-Zhan Lu’s 1994 CCC article “Professing Multiculturalism,” suggests we foster “pedagogical strategies for encouraging multilingual students to bring in their variants of English into the composition classroom” (“Place” 608). His discussion of Lu’s unpacking of “can able to” in a student’s paper is precisely what we see as a useful shift in writing centers. As with “red juice,” Lu’s students discovered their own terms that provided a marker for them throughout the course, a mutually negotiated term for their use and a lesson about language making and culture. Without being willing to import and export reciprocally, we shut down intellectual possibilities, ways of thinking, and potential ways of being in language together. We are grateful for another AUB “import” from a Lebanese dietician who, in her description of research and writing in her field, nutrition, looked at variations of the words “discipline” and “field.” She wrote, “In our meadow, we need to think about clients’ backgrounds when we help them construct diets, considering religious taboos and cultural norms.” It would have been easy to dismiss the use of the word “meadow” as an “error,” but when, as authors, we followed this new metaphor and thought of composition studies as a meadow—rather than as a discipline or field—we saw that it makes us burrow into the meaning of discipline, field, and meadow. Both fields and meadows mark out space, but they are different kinds of spaces. Fields suggest a more disciplined space, a space in which crops are sowed in rows or circles and harvested according to recurring seasons. Meadows are less organized or constrained; if they have owners, their use is not as fully determined as is the use of a field. In meadows, cows don’t graze in straight lines or perfect circles, and sometimes they graze with sheep—and sometimes dogs and birds join them. Sometimes fields are used communally, for multiple users and purposes, and sometimes they are left fallow—to recoup and to mature. Sometimes meadows left untouched become choked with roots, a biological

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hazard if not grazed or thinned by fire. This metaphoric meandering is an excellent example of what is not allowed in a parsimonious, unelaborated Western argument, but we believe that taking a moment to enjoy the beauty of the image might be worth the risk here—perhaps equivalent to a practice in Arabic calligraphy that is meant to draw the reader’s eye and imagination. A final interchange with AUB writing tutors illustrates the richness that multilingual writers can export to often mundane discussions of citation conventions. In a tutor meeting, a Lebanese woman reflected on her response to an Iraqi student writing a dissertation on Margaret Atwood. Her “simple” question was whether, and if so how, the writer should directly quote a passage that contained “the f-word.” The other tutors’ reflection on her question about propriety and citation mechanics took several directions: What were her departmental and advisor constraints? How would her published dissertation travel with her to Iraq? What other word might she substitute—in English or in Arabic? What effect does she intend to convey to her audience? Is the author’s responsibility for the quoted word the same as her responsibility for the text she composes herself? And the tutors’ responses ranged from “Why not use it: I use it in every fourth sentence; it’s just a word” to “I have never and could never say or write that word.” Most important, however, as they grazed in this richer community meadow, they worked hard at the why rather than at the method of citation. This allowed them to concentrate first on why the writer wished to use the quotation and on how it might be received by both Lebanese and Iraqi readers before determining whether and how a citation might be appropriate.

Importing and Exporting in Practice, 3 We have spoken so far of working with multilingual writers in international settings. However, as Mark Roberge, Meryl Siegel, and Linda Harklau have demonstrated, those based in seemingly monolingual areas in the United States also can learn from their multilingual students without leaving their home institutions. For example, the University of Texas at Austin has admitted the top 10 percent who attend the state’s high schools; however, the inequities in school systems become apparent when students from Brownsville (on the border) sit alongside their counterparts from suburban Dallas (an affluent area). In a tutor education class in Texas, one of Joan’s Hispanic students who grew up in a border town wanted desperately to be a tutor, but he had several problems with standard writing conventions and organizational



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expectations. In his literacy narrative he passionately declared his love of language and just as passionately castigated himself for his lack of writing ability, yet at the same time he spoke of his dream of being a tutor. Joan was curious about this last desire, so she met to talk about the contradictions he voiced—in particular about his own lack of confidence in his writing. She began by asking him where he got this love of language, and he eloquently told of growing up in a Mexican-speaking household until he was five, at which time he entered school without knowing English, into a class without a bilingual teacher. For the first time he couldn’t communicate, didn’t understand, and was punished for being “too slow.” He grasped at language as a key to open this new world, loved learning, and eventually succeeded well enough in his border school. Then came the challenge of UT, and he felt like he was back in first grade. Until that conversation about his past, though, he had never seen his difficulties with English as traceable to his first introduction to the language. Instead, fourteen years later, he kept trying to replace his Mexican constructions/identity with English and saw his inability to do so as failure; he believed he was smart, but he had his doubts when his English failed him. Joan and the student began talking about translation and about code-meshing, and he subsequently read Canagarajah’s “The Place of World Englishes in Composition.” In the student’s words: “It was such a relief to change how I thought about myself—not inadequate, but blessed with the challenge of having two languages and ways of thinking to choose from.”3 The anxiety he had always felt when faced with putting words on a page began to dissipate as he reframed his “problem” as an interesting puzzle. He taught everyone in the tutoring class much that year. Although they had already viewed the University of Oregon film Writing Across Borders (Robertson) earlier that semester, after discussing this student’s research, Joan’s class chose to watch it again. Several students admitted that when they had first watched the film, they did feel a bit defensive about U.S. culture and language when Pablo Zampeta from Colombia noted, for example, how rude Americans were when they asked him, “How are you?” but didn’t stop to hear his reply. Students reported that they initially reacted with guilt when they heard multilingual writers recall the difficulty of taking timed tests and of unlearning their cultural ways of politeness to adopt an uncomfortable and expected directness in forming an argument. During their second viewing, these future tutors were articulate about those hidden first reactions, tracing them to fear, defensiveness, and notions of

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monolingualism. Together, the class began to strategize how those reactions to one’s home language can tacitly interfere with a productive exchange that should be the basis of tutoring. They also were able to interrogate how they initially interpreted comments they heard as anti-American attacks and thus were able to rethink their own constructions and the positions of the multilingual writers they had viewed.   By paying attention to importing as well as exporting, the class found themselves asking questions more in line with those suggested by Christiane Donahue in her comparison of U.S. composition responses and questions asked by French teachers of their students (“When Copying” 96). The latter draw attention more readily to power structures and cultural understandings inherent in language, questions that can be easily adapted by writing center directors as tutor education strategies: • What is the relationship between the target language and other available languages? • What power structures are at play and what subject positions do we encourage, enable, or prevent when, as knowledge brokers, we challenge other writers’ ideas with our questions, suggest revisions, or dissuade them from taking particular positions—however subtly? • What points of view and what ways of treating other’s voices might we identify that challenge our own dominant views as knowledge brokers if we listen more carefully and expect to learn as well as teach? • How do the ways we understand ourselves as brokers set a ratio between exporting and importing—with student writers, with tutors, and with faculty colleagues? • How might writing center and WAC/WID work more fully incorporate reciprocal importing and exporting? • How would concern for importing and exporting alter assessment instruments?

Such questions might encourage us and in turn our tutors to engage in what Alastair Pennycook and others have explored as a transcultural flow of knowledge making, a more realistic response to the technologies of learning on multiple levels, with multiple languages, emerging from enmeshed cultures. With tutors able to move with those flows, create metaphors that serve each literate activity, and use interchanges as fertile ground, U.S.-based



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writing centers could join their counterparts that truly are centers for writing in their institutions. The infusion into writing centers of this way of being, when combined with research on and experience with multilingual/ nonstandard U.S. speakers of English, can promote a shift in identity for a meadow: rather than operating on margins, playing tricks on the environment, or separating themselves as unique habitats, writing centers might find this historical moment one in which they can openly advocate not for merely maintaining the status quo but for widening access to the growth of communicative possibilities. Notes 1. Joan Mullin, personal interviews with anonymous students and tutors, University of the Arts, London College of Fashion, June 2004 and July 2005. 2. Responses to survey, anonymous students, English 300 course, American University of Beirut, May 2010. 3. Quotes are from a conference with the student, fall 2006.

11.

THE ARKANSAS DELTA ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Youth Culture, Literacy, and Critical Pedagogy “in Place” David A. Jolliffe AMERICAN LITERACY EDUCATION embodies a paradox: one of the tenets of the new literacy studies is that literacy is “always embedded in social practices, such as those of a particular job market or a particular educational context, and the effects of learning that particular literacy will be dependent on those particular contexts” (Street 78), yet literacy education does its darnedest to become generic. The standardized test movement— think the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whatever assessment might emerge from the incipient Common Core State Standards movement—inherently says that every student in every location ought to be reading and writing about the same things and learning to read and write in exactly the same way. Particularly given the growth of international testing for literacy skills, such pre-college programs as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate, not to mention concurrent enrollment schemes, articulation and transfer agreements, and online instructional programs—all these entities essentially argue that it doesn’t matter where or when you study reading and writing, the “skills” are all the same, and these school-based skills allegedly “transfer” to other arenas: jobs, citizenship forums, personal contexts, anyplace in the world. Whether and how literacy “skills” transfer from one context to another— for example, from “general skills” reading and writing courses to reading- and writing-intensive courses in particular fields or disciplines—is a sticky issue, one that many educators tend to oversimplify (see Salomon and Perkins.) It’s not the brief of this chapter, however, to argue that literacy education needs to eliminate “general-skills” reading and writing instruction (see Petraglia) or to speculate whether literacy education could ever hope to prepare students 166



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for all the contexts within which they might find themselves that call for extensive reading and writing. It is the brief of this chapter to argue that students, particularly secondary and postsecondary, ought to have at least some opportunity to learn about literacy-in-use-in-context—that is, to learn about reading and writing by engaging in a sustained, focused project in which their literacy education is both influenced by and in turn affects the social, political, economic, and cultural structures of a specific milieu. Realizing this goal reworks “English” by expanding it beyond the boundaries of institutional walls and refocusing it so that it makes up more than a didactic—a frequently hegemonic—teaching of texts and rules. (For similar perspectives, see the chapters by Nordquist and Mao in this volume.) As Rachel Jackson in her chapter demonstrates, and as this chapter argues further, educators have rarely realized the potential for a group of students in a particular location to take up a literacy project that can both capitalize on the educational abilities of the students, at their particular stage of life, and transform the cultural landscape of that location. That’s precisely what the Arkansas Delta Oral History Project aims to do. This project, abbreviated ADOHP throughout this chapter, is a literacy-rich high school/college articulation program, initiated in 2006 by the Brown Chair in English Literacy at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. In the ADOHP, University of Arkansas undergraduate (and occasionally graduate) students who are studying the history, literature, and politics of the Arkansas delta serve as online and face-to-face writing coaches and mentors to students who attend primarily small, poor, rural high schools in the delta, a region of eastern Arkansas. All the participating students—U of A mentors and delta high school student mentees—engage in the same process. They identify a topic relevant to the culture of the delta; they do background research on their topic; they identify someone to interview who has either experience with or an informed opinion about their topic; they plan, practice, conduct, and transcribe their interviews verbatim. Then—and here is where the project achieves its leading edge—they get “literacy happy feet”: they write about their project in whatever genre they choose—an academic essay; a piece of historical fiction; a poem or series of poems; a play, either for stage or screen; a brochure; a web page. Finally, they “perform” their final project for their colleagues and peers from throughout the state. Many aspects of the project’s pedagogy are noteworthy. As a collaborative learning enterprise, the ADOHP has all the benefits that Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford note in “Let Them Write—Together”: the project provides

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students with a concrete audience for their work; it generates student interest, since young writers are curious to know what their peers think; it converts the teacher to the role of a helper, rather than of solely a judge; and it encourages revision, where writing-to-learn grows most productively (123). As a highly structured enterprise, the ADOHP fosters the development of self-efficacy and self-monitoring strategies in young writers: they come to “see themselves as agents of their own behavior, they believe learning is a proactive process, they are self-motivated, and they use strategies to enable them to achieve desired academic results” (Montalvo and Torres 4). These aspects of the ADOHP, though, are shared by many other programs at the secondary and postsecondary level that emphasize community outreach and structured collaboration, either within or across school boundaries. (For a review of such projects, see Deans.) What makes the ADOHP distinctive is the locally targeted focus of its curriculum. The project is ideally positioned to lead University of Arkansas and delta high school students to consider themselves not only as writers, historians, and artists but also as agents of change in a region of Arkansas that struggles to redefine and revitalize itself. It represents an exemplary combination of the study of youth culture with a critical pedagogy of place. As a result, the ADOHP casts all its participants—instructors and students from the university and their counterparts in the participating high schools—in a productive, educational tension between, on the one hand, nostalgia for the history of the region and, on the other hand, a determination to confront critically its challenging economic circumstances.

The Genesis, Context, and Logistics of the Project The idea for the ADOHP emerged during the fall of 2005. I had just moved from DePaul University in Chicago to become the initial occupant of the Brown Chair in English Literacy at the University of Arkansas and had taken the advice of several of my new colleagues and planned a trip across the state to the delta. My colleagues urged the excursion in these terms: there are many regions of the state where issues of literacy, culture, and economics intersect, but nowhere is this intersection as dramatic as it is in the delta, a region comprising fifteen counties that either have a Mississippi River shoreline or sit between the river and an odd geological feature, Crowley’s Ridge. This crescent-moon-shaped bump, the geological origins of which are disputed, stretches from just south of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to Helena, Arkansas,



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and is the only high ground in the otherwise flat alluvial plane of the region. Once the economic breadbasket of the state, the delta has experienced decades of decline and is as ripe for revitalization as it is rich in history. The most influential geological feature of the delta is not so much the flat plane as it is the rivers: the Arkansas, the White, the Cache, the St. Francis, and, of course, the Mississippi. These rivers flood regularly, and receding floodwaters always produce a superabundance of rich soil, so the delta economy has always been agricultural. Cotton has consistently been a strong crop in the delta, even though only two counties, Phillips and Chicot, had anything resembling the big plantation culture that one associates with the antebellum South. Especially after the Civil War, when profit-minded lumber concerns deforested the region significantly, the newly cleared lands proved a fertile home for rice, soybean, and sorghum grain (or milo) crops. An old saying seems true about the delta: the soil is so rich that you can toss out a pound of nails and harvest a bucket of crowbars. There is nothing resembling a big city in the delta. One might claim that Jonesboro, with a population of 60,489, represents something like a population center in the north end of the region, while Helena/West Helena, two municipalities merged as a single city in 2000, anchors the southern end with a combined population of 12,949. Most of the rest of the burgs are small farming, river, or railroad towns. There was a time, according to Arkansas historian Willard Gatewood, when many of these towns were bustling: they had main streets—often two of them, one for whites and one for blacks. They had shops and businesses. They had restaurants, movie theaters, even opera houses. But a true triple whammy hit the delta—three forces that largely superseded local control of the region. First, as in many other sites in rural America, the interstate came in the 1960s and whizzed past the small towns, moving commerce either to larger cities or to malls on the bypass outside of town. Second, the agricultural economy that dominated the region was victimized by the twin forces of mechanization and globalization. The cotton plantation that used to take a hundred people to operate now employed three or four people. The delta cotton that once upon a time was sold directly to the textile mills in the Carolinas now had to compete with cotton grown in South America and Asia. Third, the economy essentially converted from family agriculture to big agribusiness. In part as a result of these three sets of forces, despite some rare bright spots in the delta economy, the region is clearly troubled: businesses go under,

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industries shut down, populations dwindle, schools suffer. As Gatewood puts it, one clearly notices “the deterioration of the human condition in the delta. Virtually all the usual indices, from per capita income, unemployment, and housing to health, teenage pregnancies, and school dropouts, provide a statistical portrait of a people in distress” (23). A cursory look at the 2010 census data confirms Gatewood’s view: between 2000 and 2010, the population of Arkansas grew by 9.1 percent, but the fifteen counties in the delta collectively lost 6.2 percent of their population during that decade. In 2010, 18.5 percent of all persons in Arkansas were living under the federal poverty level; in the fifteen delta counties, 25.6 percent of the population lived in poverty. In 2010, 81.3 percent of adults over twenty-five in Arkansas held a high school diploma; in the fifteen delta counties, only 74 percent of adults had graduated from high school.1 And yet the delta keeps on trying. Communities institute civic improvement projects; school systems bring in new curricular programs; economic development commissions try to entice new businesses and industries to locate there. The delta residents, and those who care about them, realize that here is a region with a storied past. They know the delta as home to a rich ethnic mix of populations, both those who came to the region willingly to make a home and those who were brought there in servitude. They know the delta as a place where the religious roots of southern American culture, particularly the Protestant ones, run deep and wide. They know the delta as a region where the family traditions of cooking, putting up vegetables, sewing, hunting, and fishing get passed on from generation to generation. They know the delta as the locale where, as Gatewood puts it, “people are likely to emphasize manners and exhibit ‘the small courtesies’” (25). It was this very cultural richness of the region that led me, on my initial excursion in 2005, to propose the development of the ADOHP. Young people in delta high schools would have the opportunity to learn about the legend and lore of their home region; ideally, by discovering something about its past, they would come to see themselves as vital to its current efforts to revitalize and its potential future viability. Students at the University of Arkansas, many of whom are natives of the state but relatively few of whom have lived in the delta, would have the opportunity to extend the mission of the university—“to serve Arkansas and the world,” a slogan coined by a former chancellor to emphasize the opening of the university’s World Trade Center in prosperous northwest Arkansas—by mentoring students, helping them develop literacies that could lead to success in school and beyond, and



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collaborating with them on projects that could valorize their region, its past, and its culture. The logistics of the ADOHP are relatively simple and straightforward. The ADOHP operates by invitation, but the project has never been hyper-selective. If a teacher or principal at a public high school in the Arkansas delta wants the school to participate, ADOHP leaders are happy to extend an invitation. Each participating high school agrees that in one class, the teacher will use oral history as a teaching method. The teacher need not alter what he or she was planning to teach for a semester. That is, no matter what the content of the course, the students • identify a topic that in some way involves local history, legend, or lore; • do some background research on the topic; • identify someone with a unique perspective on the topic whom they can interview; • plan, practice, conduct, and transcribe the interview verbatim; and then • write a final project of their own design—an essay, a story, a series of poems, a play or video script, a brochure, and so on—that grows out of the interview.

The steps in the first four bullet points are, of course, standard operating procedure in oral history projects. (For overviews of these procedures, see Whitman; Dean, Daspit, and Munro.) The final step converts the oral history enterprise into a full-fledged literacy experience, one that pulls together all the students’ reading, interviewing, drafting, collaborating, and rewriting experiences in a substantial final project. Many oral historians simply produce transcripts. The ADOHP calls for the transcripts plus the students’ work growing out of them. At the same time that the high school students have embarked on their oral history projects, the English and history departments at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville offer a cross-listed undergraduate colloquium in which students do three things: • They read, write, and learn about the history of the Arkansas delta. • They plan and complete oral history projects of their own on some aspect of delta life. • They act as mentors and role models to the high school students participating in the project.

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Early in the semester during which ADOHP operates, the project begins with a day-long meeting in Helena/West Helena involving all the University of Arkansas students and all the high school students participating in the project, along with the instructors from their various institutions. At this meeting, four hour-long workshops introduce the participants to the defining characteristics of an oral history project, to best practices of planning and conducting an oral history interview, to options for converting an interview transcript into a creative final project, and to the logistics of participating in online discussions about one’s ongoing project. At this initial meeting, all the participating students are organized into four- or five-person writing/working groups. Chairing each group is a University of Arkansas student; the other members are students from the different participating high schools. Each group is given an agenda for the project, detailing when members should have selected a topic, finished their background research, selected an interviewee, drafted interview questions, practiced the interview, conducted it, transcribed it, and started working on their final projects. At the end of the initial meeting the students go back to their respective institutions—the University of Arkansas students to Fayetteville and the high school students to their home schools—with the agreement that each student will, at least once a week, log on to the University of Arkansas’s electronic discussion platform and share drafts, ask questions, or participate in discussions—in general, work together on the project. To motivate these discussions, the directors provide a list of starter prompts that urge the writing groups to talk about the various stages of the project. After about six weeks of this kind of group activity on the project— everyone in his or her home school, ideally following the project agenda, logging on to the discussion forum regularly, and sharing ideas and drafts— everyone participating in the project comes to Fayetteville for a weekend of face-to-face group work, campus activities, and fun. The visiting students from the high schools tour campus facilities and meet with university admissions and academic officers. The writing groups convene to work on the emerging project. A local playwright, Bob Ford, runs an afternoon-long workshop called “From Page to Stage,” which involves the students in various activities designed to help them find the dramatic moment in their interview transcripts, no matter what they’re intending to produce for their final projects. With the hope of encouraging the students to “stretch” their



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projects from simple narratives to pieces with a critical and creative edge, the directors take the whole group to a performance highlighting some aspect of literary/literacy culture. In the first year, the students saw a superb university theater production of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf; in the second year, they participated in a slam poetry and dance workshop; in the third year, they attended a theatrical showcase of the “greatest hits” of African American theater; in the fourth year, they saw a production of Underneath the Lintel by TheatreSquared, a professional theater company based in Fayetteville; in the fifth year, they attended an open rehearsal for a university production of Othello, with the director and actors pausing regularly to explain their methods and field questions. At the end of this weekend, everyone returns to his or her home school invigorated and ready to bring the project to a stunning conclusion. Working in their online writing groups again, the students move from interview transcripts to creative stories, essays, poems, plays, and so on, and in late April, the whole group reassembles in Helena/West Helena for a day of celebration and performance of the final projects. The projects over the first five years have been rich and varied. Here, for example, are five of the topics that have captured students’ attention. First of all, in a state where race and schooling gained national attention with the Little Rock Central incidents in 1957 but where many school districts did not integrate until the early 1970s, invariably many students want to examine desegregation. The ADOHP has generated plays, historical fiction, and poems about racial tensions stemming from schooling in the 1960s and 1970s in several delta towns. Second, many students have focused on issues involving the land and its natural resources: projects have looked at the Great Flood of 1927, rituals of hunting and fishing, and both the pleasures and the travails of family farming. Third, food has been a major focus for student work: projects have focused on the traditions of barbecue, soul food, and a strange delta creation, the Italian-influenced tamale. Fourth, the rich musical heritage of the delta has been amply plumbed: projects have included a staged “bio-play” about the great blues singer Louis Jordan and a newspaper feature story about the early years of the country rocker Levon Helm. Finally, many students have studied the influence of religion in delta towns, digging into the history of African American churches and investigating interracial relations in different denominations.

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A Study of Youth Culture in a Critical Pedagogy of Place While ADOHP students are guided by faculty members at the U of A and their home institutions, it is vital to note that both sets of students, ranging in age from fifteen or so at the high school level to rarely above twenty-two among the university mentors, have an extremely wide choice of topics to write about and genres in which to embody their final project. In short, while adults are not completely out of the picture, the ADOHP involves two sets of young people, collaboratively designing and carrying out intellectual work with one another. The articulation between the two groups—the University of Arkansas mentors and the delta high school students—is complicated, occasionally tense, but ultimately productive. The U of A students, many of whom are enrolled in their college’s honors program, are very much “down with” the twenty-first-century university experience: generally, they are enthusiastic about the experiential, interdisciplinary nature of the ADOHP course; they are comfortable with classes that require online discussions and collaboration; they love the latitude they have to design and develop their own projects; and they thoroughly embrace the opportunity to experiment with electronic, graphic, and visual modes in their final presentations. The high school students, by contrast, while as bright and academically promising as any group one finds in small-town, rural America, are generally still in the midst of traditional secondary schooling: they have not had much, if any, experience with interdisciplinary or experiential education; while they are adept at texting and e-mail, they usually have not experienced academic work that involves online collaboration; they have had relatively few opportunities to design and develop their own projects; and their academic “performances” are still predominantly tests and essays. In particular, their school-based literacy experiences—their instruction in reading and writing— have focused almost exclusively on reading fiction, poetry, and drama and on writing compositions that reproduce, rather than construct, knowledge from these texts; seldom do they have the opportunity to engage in the kinds of critical examination and production of public discourse that prevail in the best college composition programs and that the U of A students have assimilated as the status quo for university work. The U of A students mentor their delta counterparts, therefore, not only in how to carry out their oral history projects but also in how to understand and become adept with new literacies embedded in a twenty-first-century college education.



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The ADOHP is explicitly characterized to participating students as a reclamation project—a chance to help revitalize a troubled part of the state. Three factors support this characterization. First of all, there is a strong recurring discourse in Arkansas about the decline of the delta. The aforementioned 2010 census data have been broadly discussed in the media, perhaps most vividly in a 2008 production by the Arkansas Educational Television Network called Delta Dreams, which focused on the economic and quality-of-life changes in Helena/West Helena. The Arkansas Historic Preservation Program trumpets that the delta’s historic downtowns are “in decline.”2 Even the Delta Made organization, devoted to marketing products made in the area, describes the delta as “a region in a cycle of decline.” Second, the readings assigned to students in the University of Arkansas ADOHP course regularly emphasize the glories of the delta’s past, in contrast to the relatively dim prospects for its future. Essay titles such as “The River’s Gifts and Curses” (Foti) and “Delta Towns: Their Rise and Decline” (Moneyhon) offer a historical perspective on the downturn of the region. Finally, the high school students themselves need no spur to recognize the problems their hometowns face because of the delta’s declining population and economic base. They see factories close and relocate; they see their schools languish as physical plants go unattended and many bright, young teachers leave for better-paying jobs in larger schools; they sense the inevitable brain drain as the best and brightest who go off to college often swear they want nothing more than to see their hometowns in a rearview mirror. As these forces converge—youth collaborating with other youth, a mentor group and a mentee group working out the intricacies of how they interact, both groups focusing on a region in decline—the ADOHP becomes an object lesson in the intersection of two vital movements in American education, youth culture studies and a critical pedagogy of place. As its principal investigator, Elizabeth Birr Moje, defines the former, “youth culture studies focus on the resources (including literacy practices and textual resources), contexts and spaces to which youth have access as they live their everyday school and social lives” (4); the enterprise “focuses on how youth use literacy to navigate, synthesize, and hybridize multiple spaces” and examines “how literate practice gets complicated and changed by the social and political practices demanded in a globalized, technologized, and hybridized world” (4). A key theorist in youth culture studies, the linguist James Paul Gee, argues that youths who thrive in this complicated sociopolitical space do so because they become “shape-shifting portfolio people,”

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David A. Jolliffe people who see themselves in entrepreneurial terms. That is, they see themselves as free agents in charge of their own selves as if those selves were projects or businesses. They believe they must manage their own risky trajectories through the building up of skills, experiences, and achievements in terms of which they can define themselves as successful now and worthy of success later. Their set of skills, experiences, and achievements, at any one time, constitutes their portfolio. However, they must also stand ready and able to rearrange these skills, experiences, and achievements creatively (that is, to shape-shift into different identities) in order to define themselves anew (as competent and worthy) for changed circumstances. (105)

As the ADOHP projects evolve over the spring semester, the mentoring tacitly takes on the feel of instruction. What on the surface seems a simple process—high school students write and submit their work to college students for formative commentary—can become quite complex: high school students, often from traditional educational backgrounds, work with their mentors, many of whom are in the midst of heady, late-adolescent intellectual ferment, and learn by doing so what literacies they will need to engage in order to position themselves as successful, now and in the future. Moje puts it this way: “As youths engage in these texts, practices, and experiences, they read, write, and speak themselves into the texts, and they construct new texts of experience for themselves” (8). One of the delta high school teachers, Yogi Denton from McGehee, without referencing youth culture studies, saw the articulation process similarly at the end of her school’s two-year stint in ADOHP. The collaborative experience “is more than just a working relationship,” Denton wrote. It allowed students to share more than their writing and research. It gave them the opportunity to share ideas and culture with people they might never have known otherwise. The Fayetteville students, usually a much more culturally diverse group than my high school students, have been a constant reminder that there is a world outside of the Delta. The Fayetteville students’ interest in the stories and culture of the Delta has made my students realize that there is a rich heritage in their hometowns that must not go untold.3

Denton’s comments go to the heart of the central tension embodied in the ADOHP. On one hand, the high school students are being urged to see



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their experiences—educational, social, economic—through the more global, metropolitan perspectives that the U of A mentors bring to the project. On the other hand, the high school students are being urged to reclaim the “rich heritage” of their region, presumably in order to build on that heritage as part of a mission to revitalize the delta. This tension links the ADOHP to a movement its adherents label a critical pedagogy of place. The chief proponent of “place-based pedagogies,” David A. Gruenewald, argues that place-based projects “are needed so that the education of citizens might have some direct bearing on the well-being of the social and ecological places people actually inhabit” (3). Sounding the same theme that opened this chapter, Gruenewald explains further: Current educational discourses seek to standardize the experiences of students from diverse geographical and cultural places so that they may compete in the global economy. Such a goal essentially dismisses the idea of place as a primary experiential or educational context, displaces it with traditional disciplinary content and technological skills, and abandons places to the workings of the global market. Place-based educators do not dismiss the importance of content and skills, but argue that the study of places can help increase student engagement and understanding through multidisciplinary, experiential, and intergenerational learning that is not only relevant but potentially contributes to the well-being of community life. (7)

Rather than reverting constantly to generic curriculum and pedagogy—in literacy instruction, the general-skills reading and writing approach—students and teachers, according to Gruenewald, should “actually experience and interrogate the places outside of school—as part of the school curriculum—that are the local context of shared politics” (9). Two key objectives embodied in Gruenewald’s conception of place-based pedagogy seem particularly germane to the work of the ADOHP: decolonization and reinhabitation. Though it might seem intuitive to consider these two phenomena in this order, Gruenewald explains them as complementary, back-and-forth processes. Citing the work of “bioregionalist pioneers [Peter] Berg and [Raymond] Dasmann,” Gruenewald defines reinhabitation as “learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation” (9). Almost as if he were peering into the forces that have led to the economic decline of the delta, Gruenewald explains how two processes work in tandem:

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David A. Jolliffe If reinhabitation involves learning to live well socially and ecologically in places that have been disrupted and injured, decolonization involves learning to recognize disruption and injury and to address their causes. From an educational perspective, it means unlearning much of what dominant culture and school teaches, and learning more socially just and ecologically sustainable ways of being in the world. (9)

A substantial portion in the ADOHP course taught at the University of Arkansas examines the political and economic forces that have shaped the delta and tries to ferret out the causes of the “disruption and injury” the region has experienced. A major emphasis in the conversations, both online and face-to-face, between the U of A mentors and the delta high school students is consistently on how both the students and their communities can take steps toward revitalization and sustainability. Gruenewald concurs with the position underlying the ADOHP, namely that recovering and revering the past can support reinhabitation in the present and future: Decolonization as an act of resistance must not be limited to rejecting and transforming dominant ideas; it also depends on recovering and renewing traditional, non-commodified cultural patterns such as mentoring and intergenerational relationships. In other words, reinhabitation and decolonization depend on each other. A critical pedagogy of place aims to (a) identify, recover, and create material spaces and places that teach us how to live well in our total environments (reinhabitation); and (b) identify and change ways of thinking that injure and exploit other people and places (decolonization). (9)

The give-and-take between decolonization and reinhabitation is the glue that has bonded the U of A mentors and the delta high school students over the first five years of the project. “Let’s recover the places and legends that have made the delta worth saving,” all parties say. “Let’s scrutinize the forces that have led to the changes in the delta,” all parties ultimately say, after some discomfort. “Let’s promote what we see as future sustainability and viability for a region we admire,” all parties concur. The teachable moments abound. Notes 1. On the web, see the U.S. Census Bureau, “Arkansas Quick Facts from the U.S. Census Bureau,” 3 June 2011 (accessed 6 Sept. 2011). 2. See the program’s website at www.arkansaspreservation.com. 3. Personal communication, 8 May 2006.

12.

RETHINKING MARKEDNESS Grammaticality Judgments of Korean ESL Students’ Writing Junghyun Hwag and Joel Hardman “JUNGHYUN, I THINK I understand what you try to say but still some of your sentences sound strange, because we, native English speakers, never say it like that.” “Then what should I do with this?” One of the authors of this paper comes from Korea. When she asks her native English-speaking friends to proofread her papers, she often wonders about her friends’ remarks, such as those above. This study attempts to place these types of remarks in a larger context in which various groups of English users are involved. We were interested in the “strange-looking” sentences written by nonnative English speakers, and the primary purpose of our investigation has been to look into native English speakers’ perceptions of the writing of nonnative speakers of English from Korea studying in an academic setting. We had three questions driving the first part of our research: • Were the “marked” sentences produced by the Korean writers perceived as ungrammatical by native speakers of English? • Were the “marked” sentences understood by native speakers of English? • Was there a difference in the perception of the sentences written by the Korean writers and of the control sentences produced by expert writers of English?

Following the gathering of data through a survey to answer these questions, we developed one more: how would the Korean writers respond to the judgments of the native speakers who responded to the survey? To make the current study meaningful, we will begin with an overview of the situation of English in the world today. 179

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The Situation of English Today The global situation of English is rapidly changing. At the same time that its influence is growing around the world, there is (contrarily) growing diversity of forms and use. As Min-Zhan Lu claims, “Even as English is becoming a language of international commerce, media, and politics, it is breaking into multiple and increasingly differentiated englishes marked by accents, national origins, and cultural and professional or technical affiliations” (“Essay” 21). That is, the dominance of “center English” (U.S. and U.K. English) is simultaneously growing and shrinking. Again, according to Lu, “English is best defined as an unstable process kept alive by the intense intra- and international struggle between and across English and diverse languages” (24). At the same time that there has been a new understanding of hybrid Englishes, there is also an awareness that even the English of native speakers has “translingual” elements (Horner et al., “Language Difference”), as “all discourses are ultimately hybrid or mixed” (Matsuda, “Alternative” 192). However, despite the increasing acceptance of diversity and hybridity in speech, there isn’t a similar move toward the acceptance in writing.

Perceptions of Markedness In the context of this project, we have not been focused on the exact causes of markedness but on the perceptions of markedness and perceptions of its causes. As Suresh Canagarajah asks, “How do teachers and researchers of English writing orient to linguistic and cultural difference in the essays they read?” Canagarajah proposes the “inference” model, which describes the way such readers tend to ascribe causal properties to the writers’ L1 or “native” culture for marked elements in second-language writing in tone, style, organization, and discourse (“Toward” 589). Furthermore, we have been interested in comparing native-speaker perceptions of markedness in both NNSE (nonnative speakers of English) and NSE (native speakers of English) writing. We suspected that certain NSE texts could be perceived as marked if their origins weren’t known or if they were understood to be NNSE texts. Paul Kei Matsuda remarks that “the key difference between mainstream and alternative discourses is that the hybridity of the former is unmarked in the eyes of the audience whereas that of the latter is marked, thus inviting the labels such as hybrid, mixed, and alternative” (“Alternative” 192). We see that unmarked hybridity, or perhaps



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even invisible markedness, as a kind of native-speaker privilege. That is, we were interested in looking at how markedness is not simply in the text but is partly created in the mind of the reader, similar to how transactional reading theory describes meaning generally as not lying within the text but as created by the interaction of reader and text. Finally, we have been interested in what a “positive” orientation to markedness would look like as a form of language enrichment. Matsuda remarks that “the goal of writing instruction has been construed as helping students to create texts that are unmarked in the eyes of the native speakers of certain varieties of English.” Such a perspective is based in a negative assumption about the nature of markedness: that it is always linked with error and, as Matsuda goes on to say, that “the context of academic discourse practices is static and unchanging” (“Alternative” 193). We would like to entertain the possibility that the new translingual diversity of forms in academic writing changes academic discourse for the better.

Method and Procedures This study employed two major procedures: a survey to investigate reactions of native English speakers to Korean ESL students’ writing and a post-interview with Korean writers to collect their opinions on the survey results. Survey Korean student writers’ sentences were collected from their first-year composition essays, and we chose seven sentences that showed “markedness” in the presentation of intended meaning but did not present overt grammatical errors.1 At the same time, we included three control sentences written by expert native English writers, without indication of the authors, which were slightly modified for length (and one, from Mark Twain, was slightly updated to not be overtly marked as “old-fashioned”). Therefore, ten sentences were provided in the survey, and if applicable, their linguistic contexts were also presented. Each sentence was followed by a set of questions: respondents were asked which of two choices would be closer to the meaning of the “marked” sentence, and then a question regarding intelligibility and grammaticality followed, using 4-point Likert scales. A question at the beginning of the survey asked whether the respondent was a native English speaker or not, and we used data only from respondents who identified themselves as native English speakers.

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Post-interview After acquiring results from the survey, we conducted e-mail interviews with the three Korean writers who provided the original sentences. We showed them the native English speakers’ reactions to their own sentences and asked in both Korean and English the following questions: • How do you feel about the survey results? • Where does the “markedness” in your sentences come from? • Why do you or do you not want to rephrase the sentences? • What is your overall reflection on writing in English?

Also, we invited “code-meshing” (Young, “‘Nah’” 60) by allowing responses in English and/or Korean in order to obtain more accurate and vivid data. At the same time, we asked student writers not to worry about grammar or the tone of writing. There was one e-mail interview that was translated from Korean into English by one of the researchers.

Findings Survey We received responses from 104 native English speakers and tabulated the results, as seen in tables 12.1 and 12.2. The sentences written by Korean writers and the control sentences written by native English speakers were well understood (92.5 percent and 93.4 percent), while the sentences of the native speakers were less likely (69 percent to 80 percent) to be perceived as intelligible. Also, the respondents were generally split on their perception of the NSE control sentences as ungrammatical (45 percent grammatical, 55 percent ungrammatical), due in part to the very low perception of the one control sentence by Mark Twain (“no, nothing that is . . .”), which contains an obvious double-negative (a deploying of southern dialectal features).2 If that sentence is removed, the percentages change a bit.3 Meanwhile, sentences written by the Korean writers were perceived as slightly more grammatical than the control sentences (62 percent to 45 percent). The sentence written by Wallace4 (“when it can suddenly . . .”) may be seen as awkwardly long, certainly as making demands on the attention of the reader. The Bloor and Bloor5 sentence presents a couple of awkward structures (“difference to how we talk” and a complex nominal clause structure) that are perhaps more familiar to a British ear. As noted, Twain’s double-negative

Table 12.1. Intelligibility Correct answer (%)

Intelligible (%)

Not/less intelligible (%)

No.

Sentence/phrase

1

. . . in our world, schools have to be gunfree zones.

77.0

88.8

11.2

2

. . . I had a dream about becoming a professional soccer player.

91.8

94.1

5.9

3

. . . when it can suddenly and for no reason occur to you that you’ve been getting out of bed every morning without the slightest doubt that the floor would support you.

94.9

82.5

17.5

4

. . . I could learn that some painters used the camera obscura.

94.8

75.9

24.1

5

“Do you like Korea or the US?”

98.7

89.7

10.3

6

. . . some students like to study for a short time to better focus from distractions and to prevent themselves from getting bored.

94.8

77.6

22.4

7

The context makes a big difference to how we talk and how far we think in advance what we are going to say.

98.7

78.0

22.0

8

Study habits are different in individuals and vary in different results.

91.9

53.9

46.1

9

. . . younger people must conduct themselves accordingly.

98.7

80.6

19.4

10

. . . no, nothing that is proper to approaching matrimony.

86.7

46.8

53.2

92.8 93.4 92.5

76.8 69.1 80.1

23.2 30.9 19.9

Overall NSE texts only Korean students’ texts only

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is clearly marked. However, in context and with full knowledge that these writers are expert speakers of English, such markedness would go largely unnoticed or simply be treated as an example of the writer’s “style,” which we argue below is an aspect of native-speaker privilege. Table 12.2. Grammaticality No.

Sentence/phrase

Correct (%)

Incorrect (%)

1

. . . in our world, schools have to be gun-free zones.

87.6

12.4

2

. . . I had a dream about becoming a professional soccer player.

90.5

9.5

3

. . . when it can suddenly and for no reason occur to you that you’ve been getting out of bed every morning without the slightest doubt that the floor would support you.

70.8

29.2

4

. . . I could learn that some painters used the camera obscura.

28.9

71.1

5

“Do you like Korea or the US?”

75.7

24.3

6

. . . some students like to study for a short time to better focus from distractions and to prevent themselves from getting bored.

52.0

48.0

7

The context makes a big difference to how we talk and how far we think in advance what we are going to say.

44.2

55.8

8

Study habits are different in individuals and vary in different results.

25.0

75.0

9

. . . younger people must conduct themselves accordingly.

76.7

23.3

10

. . . no, nothing that is proper to approaching matrimony.

20.2

79.8

57.2 45.1 62.3

42.8 54.9 37.7

Overall NSE texts only Korean students’ texts only



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Post-interview The reactions of Korean writers to the survey results can be categorized as follows: • Positive attitudes toward their own writing (their sense of the clarity of their sentences, importance of comprehensibility): “I think my sentences are fine because I can still understand what I meant”; and “As long as the sentences are understandable to me and to others, I would not change it.” • Attitudes toward the obligations of native English-speaking readers: “There would be no problem with understanding my sentences if the native speakers read my sentences with their minds open and little more carefully”; and “I do not care they didn’t like it or not as long as they understood my sentence.” • Frustration with the task of sounding unmarked (critique of the writing center, the challenge of translation): “If I was wrong, where does the grammar that the native English speaking professor and writing center staffs use come from?”; and “The words in Korean are not always directly related to or have the same meaning in English.” • Translingual intentionality: “However, I wanted to show my identity—the third person, or a foreigner (but still concerned) by using the word ‘world’”; “My sentences in the way it is could also be just my opinion and thoughts”; and “Those sentences were written by me to express my opinions.” • Critique of the “centeredness” of native speakers: “I found that even native English speaking students make a lot of grammar mistakes, and that really comforts me”; and “It is funny that although some respondents said my sentence was hard to understand or impossible, most of them respond they understood the meaning of the sentence.” • Hybridity of all language: “I think there is not a perfect or right way to express your feeling because all of the people in the United States can’t describe their feeling in one certain way.”

Discussion of Findings Our investigation into the reaction of the ESL writers to the judgment of native speakers showed that the markedness in Korean ESL students’ texts tends to be perceived negatively, being associated with grammar errors. These

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negative grammaticality judgments are distinct from the actual comprehensibility of the sentences, which as noted earlier was quite high. That is, there is a mismatch between actual and perceived intelligibility. Interestingly, when the readers were not provided with information on the authors, the responses to the expert native speakers’ texts didn’t exhibit any significant differences from those to Korean ESL students’ texts, with respect to either intelligibility or grammaticality. The findings support divergent attitudes toward writing—“approaching the writings of ‘beginners’ or ‘outsiders’ in a manner different from the approach we take to the writings of ‘experts’” (Lu, “Professing” 443). Lu explains “the criteria used by ‘educated america’ when dealing with an idiosyncratic style. These criteria are (a) the writer’s ‘knowledge of English,’ which is seen as somehow dependent on whether she is a native speaker, and (b) the writer’s ‘experience in writing,’ which is seen as related to whether she has been [im]‍perfectly educated” (444). In other words, the criteria are based on extra-linguistic factors, which often trigger a certain attitudinal and psychological state. Meanwhile, the interviews with the Korean ESL student writers provide valuable sources of exploring the process of translingual writing while indicating the writers’ awareness of their own agency. We can see that they purposefully used markedness as part of their rhetorical strategies and claimed their right to produce idiosyncratic styles. Also, some of their remarks question the legitimacy of “correct” usage, which has been considered native speakers’ exclusive property, and suggest the idea that, eventually, one’s language is hybrid—the mixture of different discourses, repertories, and languages. Considering both these remarks and the survey results, it could be proposed that, to some extent, “markedness” is created in the mind of readers— even native English speakers’ texts can be marked, but often in invisible ways. Much of what we are arguing here regarding “markedness” in writing has nearly a half-century lineage, going back at least to Wallace Lambert’s matched-guise research in 1967, which demonstrated how listener judgments toward people were shaped by speakers’ accents, rather than by other aspects of an utterance. More pointedly, a study by Donald Rubin suggests that listeners “stereotypically attributed accent differences—differences that did not exist in truth—to the [nonnative English-speaking] instructors’ speech” (519). So, we are seeing in readers a similar perception of markedness where none may exist. More important, the Korean writers showed how they try hard to communicate to achieve jiao, which Lu interprets as “showing the necessity and possibility of responsive and responsible uses of language . . . in a world



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rife with and riven by systems and relations of injustice” (“Essay” 18). The writers also demanded a critical reflection on readers’ attitudes by saying, “There would be no problem with understanding my sentences if the native speakers read my sentences with their minds open and little more carefully.” The student’s voice can be better heard, respected, and resonant when we redefine language fluency in a translingual frame. Bruce Horner and his colleagues ask us to direct our efforts toward fluency in translingual communication in order to improve “processes of making and conveying meaning—processes that, particularly when they belong to less powerful communities, sometimes appear opaque to individual readers and listeners” (“Language Difference” 307). The dialogue between NSE reactions and Korean students’ reactions to the NSE reactions challenges the notion of native speaker proficiency in writing and proposes a need for a change among readers; they “need to learn to read more broadly, with a more cosmopolitan and less parochial eye” (Leki 133). If the ESL writers are considered “beginners/outsiders,” the insiders/hosts should welcome them with additional efforts, such as “patience, tolerance, and humility to negotiate the differences” (Canagarajah, “Place” 593). In doing so, the ESL student writers would feel less “tongue-tied” (Lu, “Living-English” 46) and would add their unique potential to the dynamicity of the English language itself and to relevant discourse communities. Also, when readers/insiders have open minds and try to “listen to” what the outsiders/beginners try to say, they may be able to appreciate or even enjoy the translingual diversity embedded in those “strange-looking” sentences.

Conclusions The markedness of the writing of NNSEs can be viewed as rendering that form inferior to native speakers’ writing due to the visible “accent,” or one can look at how that accent enriches the text, bringing a distinct voice and point of view. John Flowerdew notes some of the positive attributes of the writing of NNSEs, including language awareness and cross-cultural pragmatics (127). Matsuda and Christine Tardy have investigated the connection between markedness and voice in readers’ judgments of multilingual discourse (246). Reimagining “accent” as “voice” goes a long way toward helping readers see what multilingual writers bring to texts. As Canagarajah argues, “[Multilingual writers] are not linguistically or culturally conditioned to write only in one particular way; rather, they can

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be rhetorically creative” (“Toward” 601–2). If one acknowledges agency in the textual decisions of multilingual writers (as Lu does, in “Professing”), a realm opens up for reimagining how these writers “carve out a space for themselves within conflicting discourses” (Canagarajah, “Toward” 601). Such a view does involve the risk of misinterpreting error for agency, but one should not view that as a greater problem than misinterpreting agency for error. The attention of multilingual writers and writing instructors needs to shift from strategies for avoiding difference/markedness toward “strategies for negotiating differences in discourse practices” (Matsuda, “Alternative” 196). It should be further explored how those “strategies for negotiating” are actualized in practice. According to Matsuda and his colleagues, Lu’s pioneering study on negotiating multilingualism in her writing class (“Professing”) is considered to pose a critical question regarding “whether we shouldn’t go to the extent of accommodating creative uses of language in our practice of multilingualism in education” (“Changing” 158). Matsuda and Michelle Cox discuss “a broader definition of what counts as ‘good writing’” (8), which suggests a possibility of incorporating “accented English” as part of its spectrum. They also propose an active use of the “unexpected” that is found in ESL students’ writing as a way to reflect on what has been already “expected.” In a similar vein, Hwag and Hardman also argue for a closer examination of elements that traditionally constitute “good writing” and imagine a writing teacher’s role as an empathetic supporter rather than a gatekeeper. Those discussions, as well as the current research findings, call for reevaluation of approaches to teaching second language writing that pays more attention to appropriate proficiency in English writing (McKay and Bokhorst-Heng), a proficiency that allows writers to communicate effectively yet still be “accented.” David Graddol argues for a view of accent being put into practice with writing (English Next). Accented writing, as we have discussed in this paper, can be understood perfectly well and adhere to the genre expectations that mark a piece of writing as appropriate to a given community of practice, yet still also mark the writer as a nonnative speaker, mark his or her voice. Along with an understanding of how translingual writing is itself enriched by the multilingual background of the writer, it can also be noted that the entire community of practice that the multilingual writer seeks to participate in benefits. As Matsuda argues, “Learning from other rhetorical practices can enrich U.S. academic discourse by expanding the socially



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available repertoire for scholarly communication” (“Alternative” 194). Such change won’t come easily. Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry describe the challenges for multilingual writers trying to enter scholarly communities of practice, focusing on the mediational role of “literacy brokers” (“Professional” 12) and the ongoing privileging of center English. Change in the available repertoire for a community of practice may not benefit all in that community (certainly the power of some in the community is contingent on the repertoire never changing), but a more diverse set of discourse possibilities would benefit all whose writing is marked/hybrid/accented, which includes almost all writers, not just second language writers. This tension between the power of the status quo and change can be understood within Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of habitus, which “produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation” (Outline 78). That is, habitus prompts practices that are typical (regular) for a given community but can adapt and change in response to changes in the community, such as when multilingual writers enter the community of practice of academia. According to Bourdieu, we need a balance between constructs of agency and social determinism. Both are necessary for understanding how social action is partly determined by structuring structures but is also in part a potential rebellion against those structures. So, the status quo for expectations of practice within a community “structures” action but is also subject to emergent processes driven by changing membership of the community. Last, it must be acknowledged that the type of change in attitudes being advocated here cannot occur in a vacuum. Changes in the workings of the community of academic discourses cannot be accomplished by second-language writers and writing instructors alone. Attention also needs to be directed to the general audience/reader, particularly to native speaker audience/reader judgments, to understand how those judgments can change. There has been increasing interest in how native speaker accommodation/cooperation is an important (often missing) element in native speaker / nonnative speaker communication (House, “Developing”; Roberts and Canagarajah), and the focus there should help generate an understanding of what is needed to prompt native-speaking participants in a community of practice to be more generous in their attitudes toward the translingual texts in their midst.

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Notes 1. See appendix for the entire survey. 2. The sentence was taken from Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869), The Electric Text Center, ed. Alan Eliasen, University of Virginia Library, n.d., web, 10 July 2009. 3. We calculated the percentage when the Twain was removed, and the results are the following: NNSE and NSE sentences were well understood (92.5 percent and 96.8 percent); they were perceived less intelligible (80 percent and 80.2 percent) than their actual intelligibility; the perception of grammaticality of the NSE control sentences was 57.5 percent grammatical and 42.5 percent ungrammatical; and the perception of grammaticality of the NNSE and NSE sentences was 62.2 percent and 57.5 percent each. 4. From David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2004), print. 5. From Thomas Bloor and Meriel Bloor, The Functional Analysis of English (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), print.

13.

RELOCALIZED LISTENING Responding to All Student Texts from a Translingual Starting Point Vanessa Kraemer Sohan AT PRESENT, RHETORIC and composition scholars are asking how we can respond appropriately to code-meshed texts in the classroom. In their recent opinion piece, Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur propose one possible answer: a translingual approach to composition that “sees difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening” (303). Although somewhat new to rhetoric and composition, the translingual approach to language difference is not a wholly unprecedented phenomenon either inside or outside of the discipline: monolingual, multilingual, and native speaker norms have been redefined and challenged in the fields of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and education. Scholars have employed a number of terms—transculturalism (Gilyard), plurilingualism (Council of Europe), interculturalité (Blanchet and Coste), diversalité and creolité (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant), translanguaging (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing,” “Multilingual Strategies,” “Translanguaging”), translingualism itself (Horner et al., “Language Difference”; Matsuda, “Translingual”)—to describe the move away from monolingualist ideologies toward new conceptions of what users of language “do” (Horner, “(Re)Writing English”). While language scholars may focus on different terms and different aspects of these terms, collectively the movement away from a monolingual framework requires more than emphasizing the importance of glossodiversity (diversity of languages); such a move means stressing the importance of semiodiversity (diversity in language meaning) so as to promote better cross-, trans-, inter-, and plurilingual/cultural understandings (Kramsch, “Traffic”; Pennycook, Language). 191

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With the rising interest in these multiple new theoretical approaches to language difference comes an attendant call for more pedagogical examples of how teacher-scholars and their students can work English(es) from a translingual perspective in their writing classrooms on a daily basis (Canagarajah, “English,” “Multilingual Strategies,” “Translanguaging”; Young, “‘Nah’”; Young and Martinez). While discussions of code-meshing, code-switching, and alternative discourses commonly cite and analyze examples from more privileged readers and writers—including published academics (for example, Victor Villanueva [see Patricia Bizzell, “Hybrid”]; Geneva Smitherman [see Canagarajah, “Place”]), published authors (Gloria Anzaldúa [see Lunsford and Ouzgane]), and graduate students (Buthainah [see Canagarajah, “Multilingual Strategies”])—few attend to the code-meshing and code-switching at work in the writing of undergraduate student writers, especially those labeled monolingual. Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner work against this trend, both by re-visioning how we can conceive of the “White Shoes” student essay cited by David Bartholomae in “Inventing the University” and in their proposal that analyses of code-switching and code-meshing “reinforce the very assumptions about languages as static tools with fixed meanings” and “locate agency spatially, in specific textual forms removed from history and practices of reading and writing, leading to a fetishizing of those forms as themselves exhibiting agency or not” (“Translingual Literacy, Language Difference” 600). Instead, as Lu and Horner argue, “difference is an inevitable product of all language acts” (585). Moreover, as Christine Tardy recently pointed out in “Enacting and Transforming Local Language Policies,” while “arguments for the recognition of language diversity in the college writing classroom are theoretically persuasive, . . . they tend to leave unexplored the perspectives of writing teachers and students” (637). Tardy reports that even though teachers see the value of implementing a multilingual norm at the classroom level, they seem to find “the specific strategies offered by Canagarajah to be too challenging to implement in their own classrooms, which include both monolingual and multilingual students” (637–38).1 In this chapter, I demonstrate that the translingual approach offered by Canagarajah, Horner, Lu, and others is not “too challenging to implement” for monolingual or multilingual students. Rather, my analysis of a text written by a “mainstream” student in response to an “alternative” text (Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”) demonstrates the possibilities (and challenges) of working from a translingual starting point when responding to all student texts, including texts written by so-called monolingual as



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well as by multilingual students in the classroom. The active negotiation strategies—the “negotiated literacies”—that Canagarajah identifies at work in the writing of multilingual graduate student Buthainah (see “English,” “Multilingual Strategies,” “Translanguaging”) can also be found and applied to a reading of a student text that might not immediately be identified as multilingual or as employing code-meshing but, as I will show, requires the same kind of listening on the part of the writer/producer and reader/receiver that Canagarajah applies to Buthainah’s text.2 This chapter, therefore, addresses the question of how to respond to all texts—including those that contain immediately identifiable difference (code-switching or code-meshing) and those that might not employ immediately identifiable difference—by proposing a form of reading and response that I call “relocalized listening.” I define relocalized listening as ways of reading-writing-thinking that highlight the need of language users to relocalize established conventions in light of users’ spatiotemporal contexts.3 The goals of relocalized listening include (1) avoiding the tendency to oversimplify and objectify the concepts of “language,” “discourse,” and “practice,” especially as they relate to our definitions of “conventions,” “standards,” and “traditions”; (2) understanding difference as the standard or the norm, rather than as the alternative, the exceptional, or the abnormal; (3) viewing repetition as a site for difference and meaning-making in language4; and (4) adopting an approach to agency that acknowledges the individual writer’s ability to produce and change language in his or her everyday local practice. Relocalized listening comes out of the intersection of work in the field of rhetoric and composition by Krista Ratcliffe, Min-Zhan Lu, and Jacqueline Jones Royster on how to listen responsibly across asymmetrical lines of power and of work in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics by Alastair Pennycook, Claire Kramsch, Jan Blommaert, and others arguing for the need to understand and work with the perspectives of delegitimized language users. Thus, relocalized listening asks teachers to think of reading, writing, and revision differently—as alinear, dynamic, interconnected processes that attend to the movement of meanings within and beyond texts and contexts. This approach aligns with a translingual pedagogy, since working to understand the ways individual readers and writers relocalize their reading and writing practices emphasizes the agency of readers/writers as the producers/transformers of the language conventions they repeat in the process of listening: relocalized listening treats language not as preformed but as actively shaped and reshaped in both form and meaning every time a writer

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relocalizes it (employs it in contexts for which it has not been traditionally used).5 Relocalized listening, therefore, enables students to become agents over their own language practices throughout (and after) their academic careers as they write across a variety of contexts and disciplines. Additionally, relocalized listening asks that we as teachers revise our pedagogy so that it more actively and dialogically responds to and engages with the multiple, competing, conflicting cultural influences on our students’ relocalization of conventions (including form and meaning) in their writing. My reading of a mainstream student text bridges the gap between the theory and practice of the translingual approach that Tardy found in her research and that others have suggested impedes them from teaching from a translingual starting point. In my analysis, I make three points about what rhetoric and composition can gain from a reconsideration of difference through relocalized listening. First, relocalized listening reiterates the idea—first posed by those interested in promoting code-meshing—that we must reject prescriptive approaches to teaching English and instead engage with more descriptive and democratic approaches that acknowledge the ideological nature of Standard Written English (Young, Martinez, and Naviaux xx–xxi). I argue that moving toward a more descriptive approach requires that we make room for the meshing already at work in our everyday languaging practices. Second, relocalized listening demonstrates the importance of the concept of “meshing” to so-called mainstream and monolingual users of English as well as to those who are more immediately identified as multilingual; however, rather than defining the difference and repetition-as-difference at work in mainstream student texts as “code-meshing,” relocalized listening asks that we listen to the ways all language users mesh discourse—defined as language in use—in diverse ways, including in terms of form (glossodiversity) and meaning (semiodiversity). Third, such a shift turns our attention to the features of texts as starting rather than ending points: as Blommaert and Pennycook (Language) argue, English takes on new meanings based on its spatiotemporal contexts. Individual acts of reading and writing represent relocalizations that—when understood in light of the space, time, and place of their creation—can change how we understand the writing of delegitimized (and more privileged) language users. If we move beyond the categorizations we have traditionally used to identify languaging, we can hear the ways meaning is relocalized in each instance of difference from and repetition of the standard (repetition-as-difference) employed in discourses that have, to this point, been labeled as alternative or traditional,



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monolingual or multilingual. My analysis, therefore, provides one answer to the question of how we as teacher-scholars might apply the translingual approach to our everyday teaching practices.

“How to Tame a Wild Tongue” The student text I am analyzing came from an English 101 course I taught using the eighth edition of David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky’s Ways of Reading anthology.6 A white female student whom I will refer to as “Kathy” wrote her essay in the first half of the semester during a sequence of assignments in which I asked students to focus on questions of how and why readers encounter “difficulties” with texts and how and why those difficulties and moments of unfamiliarity and discomfort are related to the multiple identities and positionalities they as readers occupy. During one particular class period, I was interested in tying our discussion of difficulty to a text students might readily identity as alternative or different and therefore difficult, Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.”7 I asked students to read Anzaldúa’s essay, marking the text as they read. Following the pedagogical approaches adopted by Mariolina Salvatori in “Toward a Hermeneutics of Difficulty” and Lu and Horner in their textbook Writing Conventions, I had students look back over the text and find something in it—a word, phrase, idea, activity, or moment—that seemed unfamiliar or disturbing to them. This might be something that they marked on their first reading, or it might be something that they initially skipped over. I then asked my students to write a two-page response unpacking that unfamiliar or disturbing moment. I prompted them to try to locate how their reaction to this particular moment related to the perspectives they brought to the text and the subject positions they occupied as readers-writers-thinkers. Why was this particular aspect of the text disturbing to them? For whom might this aspect of the text not be disturbing and why? In reading over the students’ homework responses, I chose Kathy’s text for us to consider together in our discussion of the essay (we used student responses whenever we considered outside texts together as a class). When I began the discussion that day, I was careful to explain that I had chosen Kathy’s text so that we could consider what her approach to the text might reveal to us about how our locations—the space, time, and place of our reading—influence our ways of listening to (reading and writing about) a text that we consider alternative or different. As I will discuss, if we listen carefully to

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her essay, we see the multiple ways she relocalizes established conventions in her essay: Kathy’s writing reveals multiple attempts to relocalize herself in relation to Anzaldúa in the manner called for by relocalized listening. These attempts show how meshing (of form and meaning) can and does regularly occur in student writing that might initially appear to repeat or adhere to the standard, as Kathy’s seems to do. If we see the repetition-as-difference at work in the ways Kathy relocalizes conventions in her writing, then we can better acknowledge her agency as a reader-writer-listener-speaker of English(es).

Who Am I to Be Confused?

“How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua is the kind of text that I had to read and re-read several times. Each time through it was very apparent that Anzaldua has un-swayable feelings about her language and how it makes up who she is. I marked several places in the text where I was confused by her bilingual sentences, but I also realized that she has a right to feel the way she does. Who am I to be confused by someone expressing themselves by simply using their own language? Yes, I may not understand what exactly is being said, but sometimes we think we cant understand something because it isn’t in English when however the emotion and tone used conveys so much more meaning than the actual translation itself. (Kathy)

In this paragraph, Kathy chooses to juxtapose Anzaldúa’s “un-swayable feelings about her language and how it makes up who she is” with her own confusion due to Anzaldúa’s bilingual code-switching. However, Kathy seems to reject this confused position, qualifying her initial declaration with the phrase, “but I also realized that she has a right to feel the way she does. Who am I to be confused by someone expressing themselves by simply using their own language?” Kathy’s “Who am I” construction highlights the complicated nature of her position as a listener to Anzaldúa’s text: in this sentence, Kathy seems to struggle to understand her own location as a reader and writer in relation to Anzaldúa and her text, a location made more difficult by Anzaldúa’s foregrounding of asymmetrical relations of power in “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” As a reader, Kathy encounters a roadblock when trying to relocalize herself in relation to an author and text that are almost completely foreign to her—in terms of the ways the text relocalizes established conventions in light of Anzaldúa’s spatiotemporal context and position. Kathy tries to respond to Anzaldúa responsibly but finds herself unable to do so.



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Kathy’s attempt to approach the difference in Anzaldúa’s text with respect and openness suggests that she feels that even if she can’t understand the workings of the language itself, she can ultimately understand the emotion and tone the writer is trying to convey—that human emotion and experience transcend all other lines of race, class, and power. And yet, if we listen closely to Kathy’s “Who am I” question, we can see how her text might also be arguing that the reader’s relationship to the text is not that simple. Kathy’s question reveals an attempt to understand how Anzaldúa’s choices in the text affect her as a reader and how those choices might be understood as more than the conveyance of emotion. As Salvatori notes, teaching students to engage with their difficulties interpreting a text and to reflect critically on reading as a practice can help to undermine the previous training they have received that posits an exclusionary view of students as “outsiders” to the text who have no basis or power from which to interpret a text critically. In order to combat this training, teachers need to develop a dialogic pedagogy in which they can learn from students and help students to position themselves as “experienced readers [who] see in a difficulty the ‘beginning’ of a critical reading of a text” (83). In asking, “Who am I to be confused?” Kathy seems to be posing a rhetorical question that accepts responsibility for and highlights her inability to understand Anzaldúa’s bilingual sentences; at the same time, the question could be interpreted as glossing over her own difficulties with the text—a position that “tames” Anzaldúa’s text in a way Kathy’s response wants to work against—or even highlighting those difficulties.8 My goal is not to pose a singular, definitive reading of this phrase but to demonstrate how Kathy’s language points to the ways she is struggling to re-vision her initial response to and reading of Anzaldúa by balancing her desire to accept Anzaldúa at face value with an exploration of some of the more difficult and challenging aspects of the text. In admitting doubt as to her right to be confused, Kathy relocalizes the conventional position of reader-writer and expresses a desire to meet Anzaldúa halfway (a desire Anzaldúa cites as necessary when reading her work) (Borderlands 20). In asking, “Who am I?” Kathy could also be asking a real question, “What kind of reader am I and how does that influence my reading? How am I being defined in relation to this text?” One could also argue that Kathy is attempting to acknowledge a respect for Anzaldúa’s text that rhetoric and composition scholars such as Lu and Royster have called for in their work. Just as Lu re-visions her initial reading of Royster’s work so as to “learn to listen more ‘respectfully and

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responsibly’ to the experiences and voices Royster invokes” (“Redefining” 178), Kathy might be attempting to listen respectfully to Anzaldúa’s project. And yet, in Lu’s and Royster’s projects, this respect is accompanied by an acceptance of responsibility to work through their own confusion to better understand how that confusion can be put to work; this means seeing oneself as a reader with agency and power over the text at hand, a position with which Kathy’s “Who am I” question suggests she might be unfamiliar and uncomfortable. When we listen closely to the meshing of meanings at work in Kathy’s potential rejection of a position of confusion and her assertion that she can understand Anzaldúa’s text on an emotional level, we hear the ways these assertions bump up against the meshing of form (the stylistic and textual evidence) in Kathy’s writing—some of which point to the difficulties Kathy encountered when trying to position herself in relation to Anzaldúa’s text. Even based on my fairly limited reading of Kathy’s paragraph, we can see that she defines Anzaldúa’s “emotion and tone” in different and conflicting ways—ways that reveal that it is more difficult to understand the emotion and tone used than she lets on. Redefining listening means attending to the diversity of meanings within texts so as to work against simple binaries (such as “speaker/audience, male/ female, active/passive”) and instead “speak as listeners, a coupling that prefigures the hermaphrodite, that allows for a dual/duel form of difference, and that takes the risk of (mis)understanding” (Ballif 59). A dialogic pedagogy pushes students to take the risk of (mis)understanding and—as Salvatori urges—to see “their difficulties [as] the appropriate beginning for their critical investigation to focus on” and to reclaim “their own beginnings from ‘intransivity’ . . . [so as] to understand and to practice the complex, ‘institutional’ and ‘cultural’ ways in which experienced readers negotiate their interpretations” (Salvatori 82–83). By doing so, we can also teach them to listen carefully and responsibly to the ways they relocalize established conventions in their own texts.

“Natives Who Are Not from This Country” Through this text I developed a sense of respect for Gloria Anzaldua not only as a person, but also as a writer. She believes that her language should be able to be spoken and not discriminated against. “Los Chicanos, how patient we seem, how very patient. There is the quiet of the Indian about us. We know how to survive. When other races have given up their tongue we’re kept our. We know what it is



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to live under the hammer blow of the dominant Norte Americano culture.” . . . This passage teaches a lot more than the differences between peoples languages. It shows the strength of the natives who are not from this country who have to conform to our language, yet they manage to keep theirs as well. We are our language. It defines us as individuals and groups. Anzaldua presents the idea that no one should give up or change their native language. If we do so then we’re changing ourselves as a people and allowing others to have an influence our entire being. (Kathy)

The complicated nature of Kathy’s position as a reader-writer-thinker becomes even more apparent in her final paragraph, reproduced above, where we can see in her language evidence of the difficulty she has working through her positioning in relation to Anzaldúa and “translat‍[ing] listening into language and action, into the creation of an appropriate response” (Royster 38). In particular, I find three features of Kathy’s final paragraph to be interesting: her use of pronouns, her use of the quotation from Anzaldúa, and her discussion of “natives who are not from this country.” These three elements might not immediately present themselves as evidence of code-meshing— after all, the text is written by a “mainstream” student whose command of English, although not perfect, doesn’t seem to demonstrate or require the kind of language mixing we normally talk about in terms of code-meshing. Nonetheless, these features of the text can serve as starting points for the kind of relocalized listening practice that I am advocating and that I argue we can apply to all student texts (whether they are immediately identifiable as mono- or multilingual texts) that employ meshing, not just of codes, but of discourse, genre, convention, or style. Continuing with the theme of respect echoed in the earlier excerpt, here Kathy explains why and how she developed that respect for Anzaldúa. Kathy includes a quotation from Anzaldúa in which Anzaldúa explains the position of “Los Chicanos,” including references to their collective survival, their attempts to preserve “their tongue,” and their oppression at the hands of “the dominant Norte Americano culture.” Arguing that the quotation itself “teaches a lot more than the differences between peoples languages,” Kathy comes up with a phrase for the collective—“natives who are not from this country”—that, at first glance, appears to be a contradiction in terms (how can one be native to and also not from this country?). One reading suggests that Kathy’s phrasing highlights in a very particular way Anzaldúa’s

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acknowledgment of the paradoxical position of Los Chicanos who are both native (in terms of existing prior to) and, at the same time, not considered native by so-called native white Americans because Los Chicanos and their language(s) are considered to be foreign; Kathy redeploys and repeats Anzaldúa’s language in and through the standard and in so doing meshes the meanings at work in the passage and relocalizes the standard with the concepts Anzaldúa puts forth. Kathy relocalizes her own discourse so as to acknowledge the ways Anzaldúa relocalizes her discourse in light of her spatiotemporal context and position. Instead of quoting Anzaldúa to illustrate her own ignorance or strengthen her own authority, Kathy could be read as using this quote to subvert the hierarchy of native/nonnative English speakers—using quotation and paraphrase to highlight the rich meanings that monolingual ideology predisposes readers like herself to dismiss. And so, in this possible reading, her earlier discussion questioning “Who am I” to judge makes more sense when considered as a relocalization that subverts her own authority as a “native speaker” (not a Native American but a member of the English-speaking country called America); Kathy’s phrase might be read as demonstrating her desire to align herself alongside Anzaldúa’s project. However, Kathy’s phrase could also be read differently, as a more pejorative reference to “natives” whom she views as having no purchase in this country and as not being “from this country” at all. This alternative reading suggests two more possible outcomes: that Kathy’s relocalization of the meaning at work in Anzaldúa’s text through this particular phrase intentionally rejects, rather than affirms, Anzaldúa’s critical project; or that Kathy’s relocalization of meaning in this phrase unintentionally rejects Anzaldúa’s project. My purpose is not to pick a “correct” reading but to suggest that both possibilities reflect the complex, contradictory nature of Kathy’s positioning in relation to Anzaldúa (a positioning that might fluctuate throughout her text). The complexity of Kathy’s phrase “natives who are not from this country” is echoed in her seemingly contradictory use of subjective personal pronouns throughout this passage. Kathy explains that “natives who are not from this country . . . have to conform to our language, yet they manage to keep theirs as well. We are our language. It defines us as individuals and groups” (emphasis added). In the first half of this section, the antecedent seems to be clear: “our language” refers to the language of “the dominant Norte Americano culture” that Kathy seems to position against “their” language (the language of “natives who are not from this country”). At the same time, when considered in the context of the “we” employed by Anzaldúa,



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the antecedents become less clear and, in fact, even murkier when placed in the context of Kathy’s statement “We are our language. It defines us as individuals and groups” (who is the “we” here?) and her concluding argument that “no one should give up or change their native language. If we do so then we’re changing ourselves as a people and allowing others to have an influence our entire being” (emphasis added). Kathy might be seen as attempting to align herself beside Anzaldúa—by including herself in Anzaldúa’s “we” and describing what language rights mean to a “people” and their “being.” In her writing, Kathy could be attempting to make the connection between Anzaldúa’s idea of ethnic and linguistic identity as a “twin skin” in a way that allows her to try on that identity through her use of pronouns. While she might not immediately be considered as “part” of Anzaldúa’s project, her language might suggest that she is including herself in the project through her use of inclusive pronouns and her acknowledgment that there is more to language rights than “differences between peoples languages”—“no one should give up or change their native language.” Kathy’s pronoun usage could be interpreted as a way for her to position herself as an accepted part of Anzaldúa’s intended audience—a way of agreeing with and forwarding Anzaldúa’s project. However, one could also argue that by choosing to ignore the signals Anzaldúa sends, Kathy might not be the intended reader of her text (and of the multiple forms of Spanish she employs throughout) and has failed to fully grasp Anzaldúa’s audience(s) and purpose(s), and so her inclusive pronoun usage glosses over one of the most important messages of Anzaldúa’s text—that the language of “natives who are not from this country” will never be accepted as “our” language. Either way, if we look at this phrase “natives who are not from this country” as a starting point rather than as an ending point and in the context of Kathy’s position as a student writing in a particular spatiotemporal context, we can see the multiple, complex, and even contradictory meanings at work in Kathy’s own language. Here, Kathy relocalizes form, through her use of pronouns, in a way that interrogates the asymmetrical relations of power at work in Anzaldúa’s text. The meshing of form and meaning at work in these paragraphs brings to light the interesting juxtapositions between the ways Kathy uses inclusive and exclusive language, the ways Anzaldúa uses inclusive and exclusive language, and the ways Kathy relocalizes herself in relation to Anzaldúa’s language and argument. At first glance, there is nothing that appears different about what Kathy is arguing or about the language or approach she uses to make that argument. However, as we have seen in this discussion, both Anzaldúa

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and Kathy are meshing together what is familiar and unfamiliar in ways that demonstrate their ability to actively shape and reshape form and meaning through relocalization in their writing: while Anzaldúa’s meshing appears to be immediately identifiable as “more” different, with its use of multiple variants of Spanish and English, Kathy’s paper reacts to that meshing by challenging the standard in her relocalization of convention through her redeployment of meaning and form. Kathy’s discussion of “natives who are not from this country” and her use of personal pronouns lead her to relocalize her language and, in the process, question her own positionality and location in relation to Anzaldúa (and lead the listening reader to question his or her own positionality in relation to both texts). Neither Kathy’s nor Anzaldúa’s languaging practices here can be reduced or codified in such a way that it is clear “which” language they are using (alternative or standard, Spanish or English). In fact, as Horner points out in “(Re)Writing English,” this question of “which” language should be read, written, or taught, is the wrong question altogether. Instead, the complexity at work in the repetition-as-difference in Kathy’s writing can be found by considering the where, when, and how of her own text—a move that points to the semiodiversity of Kathy’s text in relation to the semiodiversity in Anzaldúa’s. Seemingly monolingual texts like Kathy’s deserve to be listened to in the ways I am suggesting; if we begin to listen more carefully to all of our students’ texts, then we can begin to recognize the constantly dynamic and shifting nature of the Englishes our students use in our classrooms. This will allow us to work with our students to identify the ideological nature of Standard English and to acknowledge the ways their everyday writing practices already challenge the dominance of the so-called standard. It is important for us as teachers to learn to explore diverse ways of making sense of our students’ words and then to explore with our students which of these potential interpretations they are invested in, which they are not, and why (and how that investment changes relative to the time, place, and space of their writing and why). Through such a dialogic pedagogy, we can (1) identify pedagogical devices/strategies that help students map motives and purposes that may be undercut by the traditional classroom scenario but are nevertheless important to their writing, (2) help students decide how/why they want to mobilize these purposes in their revisions, and (3) help students decide how to rhetorically cue their readers in to the relocalizations of form and meaning in their writing—relocalizations that might ordinarily be glossed over or dismissed by readers as mistakes or errors.



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Theoretical and Practical Implications The goal of relocalized listening is not to identify certain features of a text as either standard or alternative but instead to highlight the need of language users to relocalize established conventions in light of their spatiotemporal contexts and positions. As I have shown in my analysis of Kathy’s response to Anzaldúa, scholars and teachers of rhetoric and composition can think differently about how we define code-meshing and where we look for it; repetition-as-difference can be seen in monolingual as well as multilingual student texts. In the classroom, we shouldn’t focus on code but instead on how students relocalize language by mobilizing linguistic resources—including difference and repetition—in their texts and on what that move reveals about how they understand their contexts and positions in relation to the contexts and positions of the authors we ask them to read-write-think about. Student writing reveals a struggle to wrestle with the difficulty, complexity, and multiplicity of meanings at work in the reading and writing prompts we give them, and so their texts should be treated with the same careful approach with which we treat more privileged, published texts. Finally, occupying moments of confusion and misunderstanding with our students can be fruitful. This is possible through relocalized listening—by considering the time, place, and space of the reader and writer in the ways that Kathy is struggling to do. While some may view as problematic my suggestion that we occupy a space of unknowing and (mis)understanding with our students, I would argue that relocalized listening allows for the kind of traffic of meaning and translingual activism aimed at the linguistic movement of meanings for which Blommaert, Pennycook, and Kramsch call. Relocalized listening means acknowledging that it is not enough to give students writing skills with which they can easily translate the texts they are reading or writing into the appropriate standard form of English (viewed as a monolingual, static, and distinct entity); neither is it appropriate to take the opposite tack and ask students to code-mesh on demand in the confines of the classroom without considering, as a class, the code-meshing already at work in students’ attempts to write in and through their seemingly “standard” texts and in the seemingly “standard” texts they are asked to read on a daily basis in all of their classes. Instead of viewing and judging our monolingual students according to a false norm of monolinguality, or a false sense of who and what makes up a

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native speaker, we need to recognize the multiple communities of influence upon students and their language practice (the spatiotemporal locations of their writing) and recognize that they can develop “an intercultural competence” that allows them to operate as “intercultural speakers” and hearers—“able to offer a ‘rereading’ of habitual signs, a new perception of the familiar and the unfamiliar” that we as teachers might fail to recognize (Kramsch, “Privilege” 30). Importantly, a translingual pedagogy means giving up both the myth of monolinguality as well as the myth of the authenticity of the standard. This entails letting go of our expectations and creating a classroom space where misunderstandings, unfamiliarity, and unpredictability are the norm (see Ballif; Guerra). The act of letting go allows us to challenge the myth of monolinguality with our students and instead to see how we are all meshing on a daily basis. Such a pedagogy develops the kind of competence and adaptability that will be most transferable to multiple academic and nonacademic environments. As I have shown, by reconsidering how relocalized listening can be applied to all student texts, including texts written by so-called monolingual students, we can make sense of the difference and repetition-as-difference that occur in specific texts produced by individual students in the classroom and better understand how to make revision plans based on those texts. There are many possible alternative dispositions we can take toward any piece of writing. As long as we recognize each act of reading and writing as a form of relocalization, we can listen to the multiple meanings and possibilities within texts and focus on their semiodiversity—the ways language users have relocalized established conventions—and so move beyond a consideration of how we can teach code-meshing to our students toward a recognition of the ways all of our students already mesh meaning as agents over their everyday languaging practices. Notes 1. When Tardy refers to Canagarajah’s strategies, she refers to the “pluralistic practices of writing instruction that integrate the meshing of students’ linguistic codes, not just in personal writing but also in academic texts” that he promotes in “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued” (Tardy 637). 2. In his more recent work, Canagarajah has continued to develop and identify the “pluralistic practices” students employ, identifying two specific strategies at work in graduate student Buthainah’s text, including



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“recontextualization strategies . . . [which] change the dominant orientations to textual reception in western educational institutions, so that readers will adopt the orientation of what Buthainah calls . . . a ‘negotiated essay’” (“Translanguaging” 13), and “interactional strategies [that] are calculated to engage the reader into co-constructing meaning” (15). Canagarajah identifies more specific strategies in “Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging.” 3. In the tradition of Jacqueline Jones Royster, who in “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own” posits listening as a metaphor for an alternative way of making meaning, relocalized listening attends to the ways users make meaning against the grain of standardized, dominant hearing systems. 4. In Language as a Local Practice, Pennycook argues that diversity is not located within language but within the social acts that produce language. In the process of languaging, individual writers can create different meanings out of practices that, on the surface, seem to be instances of similarity and repetition. Repetition and repetitive discourse become “a central meaning-making resource” and acts of repetition—when relocalized in time, space, and place—produce difference (40). Difference, creativity, and flow become the norm and repetition becomes “the key to understanding difference” (10). Language scholars, Pennycook argues, should therefore take a second look at repetition as a site of meaning making and difference. In defining translingual literacy, Lu and Horner draw upon Pennycook’s arguments regarding repetition in/as difference, arguing that the translingual approach “treat‍[s] all such strategies [code-switching and code-meshing] as temporally as well as spatially located, [and] draws attention to the production of semio-diversity even in utterances that appear simply to reiterate ‘the same’” (“Translingual Literacy and Matters”). Throughout this essay, I use the term “repetition-as-difference” to refer to the translingual approach to repetition in/as difference. 5. Relocalized listening works against two traditional understandings of “context”: as a “mere” backdrop, and as understood in terms of just the spatial, rather than of the spatial and the temporal. Thus, relocalized listening suggests that contexts are actively shaped: users don’t write in a context, they write in response to a context while also shaping that same context. 6. The student text has been reproduced with her written permission. 7. The widespread anthologization of Anzaldúa’s text makes an analysis of one particular response to it that much more useful for rhetoric and composition teachers and scholars interested in issues of translanguaging in the composition classroom.

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8. Salvatori argues:

When inexperienced readers read complex texts, their “difficulties” consistently identify actual and venerable interpretive cruxes. This, I believe, is a fact worth reflecting on. . . . But whereas experienced readers tame a textual difficulty by constructing an interpretation that accommodates it or by naming it a “textual flaw” or an “intended” difficulty, less experienced readers hastily assign authority to the text or to the author by either accepting the responsibility for the flaw (“He/she must be saying something I just cannot understand”) or with an iconoclastic gesture that may well be their only way of claiming autonomy by refusing to deal with it (“He/she/it does not make sense”). Whereas experienced readers see in a difficulty the “beginning” of a critical reading of a text, inexperienced readers see in it a form of entrapment. (82–83)

Cf. Flynn; Bartholomae, “Wanderings”; Berthoff.

AFTERWORD On the Politics of Not Paying Attention (and the Resistance of Resistance) Karen Kopelson What is requisite first of all is for rhetors to be heard, for attention to be paid. —Sharon Crowley

An Odd Way In LIKE MOST SPORTS fans, I spend a lot of time yelling at the TV when I am watching games. The other night I was having a particularly violent fit when a sportscaster said that such-and-such a team had been the other team’s “nemis” (nĕmʹĭs), by which I suppose he meant “nemesis,” minus the middle syllable and the first “s.” That was just a onetime occurrence, though—so far—so I got over it. Much more difficult for me, because it occurs game after game across all sports, is hearing the word “impactful”: “That was an impactful play.” “He has been a really impactful addition to this team.” I still recoil at “impact” as a verb (though most dictionaries trace its use as a verb to 1601); I am hardly ready for this adjectival disaster of a neologism. And yet I imagine that it’s only a matter of time until “impactful” becomes standardized. As Alastair Pennycook might explain this process, in addition to “intentional changes” we make to language, there are “also small, unintentional slippages, changes to the ways we do and say things, and these too may start to be repeated and become sedimented practices” (Language 49). “Impactful” will slip off the lips of sportscasters (and others), slide into wider use, and sediment its way into the dictionary one day, perhaps attended by 207

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usage notes and warnings, such as those that now (sometimes) attend “impact” in both its transitive and intransitive verb forms, and then those notes and warnings, too, will disappear. If I am no longer here when this happens, I suppose I will “roll over in my grave.” If I am still here, I imagine I will go on much as before, still yelling at TVs but not really “impacted” much at all. I use this odd way in to acknowledge from the start that I provide an odd way out of this volume. To use my favorite multilingual phrase from one of the chapters in Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition, there is more than a “soupçon of irony” (Mao) in my having some form of this collection’s “last word.” My “allegiance to SWE usages” and to “Standard Academic Discourse” (SAD) is not “uneasy and conflictual” (Lu, “Metaphors” 287)—it is easy, entrenched, and heartfelt—and I came to this coediting project, as everything I’ve said to this point might suggest, as very much an outsider. I was not particularly convinced or unconvinced by the emerging calls for more “translingual approaches” to composition; I had not been particularly invested in the last decade’s burgeoning conversations about multilingualism, World Englishes, English Only, or politics and issues of “language difference” more generally. In truth, I just wasn’t paying that much attention, and I don’t know when I would have begun paying attention had so many of these conversations not started going on with regularity and force in my own department during various Thomas R. Watson symposia, conferences, and other guest speaker events sponsored by my colleagues Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu. Clearly, there are many “perils of not paying attention” (to borrow a phrase from Cindy Selfe). As Jonathan Hall’s contribution to this volume makes clear, the multilingual “future is now,” and in this future/present “other languages will come into our classrooms. They will not stay outside, at ‘home,’ in the ‘street,’ not even outside in the hallways of our universities. Nor will students turn off their languages the way they are supposed to turn off their cell phones when class begins. No: the languages will be part of the class. In fact, they already are.” Moreover, this description of already multilingual U.S. university classrooms is certainly, and increasingly, a description of U.S. culture at large. Not paying attention to the discussions in our field about multi-/pluri-/translingualism, transcultural literacies, and language pedagogy and politics is perilous indeed. Yet rather than explore the consequences or products of that inattention, I’d like to spend the first portion of this afterword lingering at the site(s) of its production. In so doing, I hope to highlight the importance of location, lived experience, and affective



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response to the process—and possibility—of paying attention to the kinds of issues raised by this volume. Put differently, I’d like to back up to a place we might understand as prior to persuasion, to clarify not how calls for more translingual approaches to composition might miss rhetorical opportunities to be convincing (though I take this up later) but how they might miss certain members of the field—or, alternatively, how we might miss the calls—altogether. I have two primary goals—or, rather, hopes—for what I reveal here about this process of mis‍(sed)‍recognition. One, I hope perhaps to spark further discussions among those advocating for more translingual approaches to composition, or among those engaged in discussions about transcultural literacies and language differences, as to how they might engage even more of us. I reemphasize that the hope is “to spark further discussions”; I endeavor to be suggestive rather than prescriptive. But two, and perhaps more significant, I hope to motivate others like me to hold their own inattention up to critical scrutiny and self-reflexive interrogation. In the second portion of the afterword, then, I turn my attention from inattention to more overt forms of resistance to the calls for translingual approaches to composition, again in the hope of sparking continued discussions about how such resistance might be—and is being—rhetorically negotiated by advocates, and again in the hope that others like me will critically examine their own resistances.

The Privilege of Insularity First, and most obviously, many teacher-scholars in rhetoric and composition (and beyond) may feel we can still afford not to pay attention to increasing language heterogeneity in our classrooms (and beyond) because our classrooms are not yet remotely like those described by Hall or Patricia Bizzell in this volume. Rather, the majority of our “mainstream” students are still more like the student Vanessa Kraemer Sohan’s study details: identified, by self and others, as English-speaking monolingual and native-born. For example, at the time of this writing, I am teaching an undergraduate class in LGBTQ literature, which enrolls thirty-five students and happens to be among the most racially “diverse” classes I have taught at my university. We had a serendipitous opportunity the other day to talk and do a little self-reporting about our language literacies when the instructor using the room prior to my class had left a whole bunch of words and sentences written in another language (which none of us could identify with certainty) on the chalkboard. In the discussion that ensued about what language(s) might be

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on the board and what languages my students know or are taking at school, I learned that not one of my thirty-five students identifies as “fluent” in any language other than English and that no one identifies as having a “first” or “native” language other than English. (One student who had been in the military felt that he had been fluent in Arabic at one time, but was no longer.) I realize it’s entirely possible that there were students present who did not feel comfortable self-reporting orally having a “native” language different from English, especially among such an English monolingual–seeming crowd, but my point is about the crowd. Further, those of us who teach in such classrooms (and others of us as well) are likely to live in surrounding communities where what Horner has called the “archipelago model of language diversity”—“discrete groups speak‍[ing] discrete languages in discrete locations”—is not only a theoretical model but a lived reality (Horner, NeCamp, and Donahue 278; see also Horner, “‘Students’ Right’”). Linguistic (and ethnic and racial) enclaves are very much a reality in my own midsized, southern/midwestern city, for example: the single time in the last decade that I can recall experiencing a nonnegotiable language barrier with someone I was trying to communicate with was within the last year, when Spanish-speaking workers were replacing the roof on my apartment building and I very urgently wanted to know when they would be finished and thus when the terrible banging noise would stop. I got as far as “cuando” (because that is as far as two years of college Spanish nearly thirty years ago could get me) before I was rescued from my incompetence by another worker who was fluent in English. While this scenario clearly points to my need to expand my own language abilities, my primary intention is to point to the isolatedness of the incident. If the multilingual future is here and the future is now, as Hall rightly argues, it is nonetheless much slower arriving and further away for some of us than for others. The exigency that propels the calls for more translingual approaches to teaching, thinking, and living is simply not yet experienced by many of us as a felt need, psychically or socially, due to our work-life locations. Inattention, then, is produced in no small part by insularity (or perceived insularity), which produces the further luxury of nonrecognition and/or skepticism. Judith Butler helps clarify this phenomenon for me, and she highlights as well the pivotal role played by experience and felt-need in paying attention and being responsive to the types of shifts in our thinking that translingual theory and pedagogy call for. In her preface to the tenth anniversary edition of Gender Trouble, Butler recalls that she had intended



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the original text to “open up the field of possibility for gender” (viii). “One might wonder what use ‘opening up possibilities’ finally is,” Butler writes, but notes forcefully that “no one who has understood what it is to live in the social world as what is ‘impossible,’ illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose that question” (viii). Similarly, and perhaps obviously for most readers of this afterword, no one whose language is deemed unrealizable, illegible, or illegitimate is likely to question the value of opening up possibilities of/in English. In the terms of this collection, no one who has been “overworked by English” (Milson-Whyte), or worked over by English, or unworked—as in undone—by English is likely to question the use-value of reworking English. But many of us have not been so undone. In fact, many of us have instead and only been “done right” by SWE and SAD. We have worked them (comparatively) effortlessly and well, and precisely because of these experiences—perhaps because SWE/SAD has been our “home language” (see Lu, “From Silence”), and/or because of the legitimization and classed, raced, regional, national privileges such language uses have afforded and reinforced for us—these Englishes and our attachment to them are (like gender, like other systems of domination and exclusion and our attachments thereto) fully naturalized. The fact that I need some form of analogy via Butler’s theorization of gender oppression to make fully resonant for me the urgent need for confronting English monolingualist assumptions is a disturbing, and no doubt unflattering, self-revelation but is exactly my point: identification across lines of difference is hardly automatic, even for those of us occupying other positions of “difference” from other standards and norms. To use another generative insight from queer theory and, before that, from socialist feminist and black feminist theory, oppressions are interrelated but are “distinctive,” incongruent, and “differently structured,” which makes fully possible that one may be enabled or privileged “by the same positioning” that is disabling or marginalizing in other contexts (Sedgwick 33; emphasis in original). One can be washed violently to the shores of one mainstream while swimming along quite comfortably in another. I am in and of the English monolingual “mainstream”—even if it does not exist—and I confess to (come out as?) being comfortable here. Comfort, of course, bleeds easily into its obverse—discomfort—once contact is made and the insularity that is produced and sustained by comfort is pierced. Joan Mullin, Carol Peterson Haviland, and Amy Zenger describe this process beautifully in this volume’s “Import/Export Work?” Here,

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Mullin tells the story of her tutor education class members (in Texas) who reacted with discomfort, in the form of defensiveness and guilt, when they first “heard multilingual writers recall the difficulty of taking timed tests and of unlearning their cultural ways of politeness” in order to write with the expected directness of U.S. academic argument. Through class discussions, those student-tutors were eventually able to trace their initial reactions to “fear, defensiveness” and their own monolingualist and nationalist assumptions and come to understand that “reactions to one’s home language can tacitly interfere with a productive exchange that should be the basis of tutoring.” In my view, Mullin, Haviland, and Zenger offer a crucial insight here, too often forgotten, and it is one we can apply to ourselves in addition to our beginning students or writing center tutors: while it is regularly acknowledged that language users who speak/write in denigrated or peripheralized varieties of English, or who use languages other than English, have passionate attachments to those “home languages”—recall Gloria Anzaldúa’s oft-cited quotation “If you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language” (qtd. in Milson-Whyte, this volume)—it is less frequently acknowledged that users of “dominant” or “standard” languages or codes, as I begin to note above and as the Mullin, Haviland, and Zenger anecdote brings to the fore, have equally fierce attachments to their “home languages.” Calls for translingual approaches to composition—or sometimes mere acknowledgments of a multilingual reality—can be perceived and experienced as threats and so remain unheard. Lu and Horner have written that “a translingual perspective requires that we treat writers’ expertise and attachment to any language, dominant or peripheralized, as emergent rather than fixed” so that they/we may better understand language as changeable and negotiable (“Translingual Literacy, Language Difference” 600). Yet regardless of how we choose to “treat” attachments to language, it is necessary to remember that they often are experienced as fixed, and this affective attachment is affixed further still by powerful ideological supports. What Pennycook calls the “statist” and “modernist narratives” that convince us of languages’ origins, fixity, and discreteness—and thus of the inherent appropriateness or “rightness” of specific (“standard”) forms of English—may well be inadequate to convey the “contemporary worldliness of English” (Language 71, 81), but they remain wholly adequate to validate beliefs in the monolithic nature, stability, centrality, and dominance of English/“the standard.” Those of us constituted in and by these narratives (and it is difficult to conceive of subjects who are fully



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outside the reach of statist and modernist narratives) have much unthinking and unlearning work yet to do, and yet many forces conspire against us if and as we attempt to do it. As Horner, Samantha NeCamp, and Christiane Donahue have observed, “The ideology of English monolingualism is not simply a belief to be shucked off, however difficult psychically, by individuals” (though it is this, too) “but rather a practice ingrained institutionally and historically that produces linguistic limitations . . . that in turn restrict the horizon of what is understood to be possible or realistic, and thus all the more challenging to resist” (276). While Horner, NeCamp, and Donahue are referring specifically in this passage to limitations that the ideology of English monolingualism imposes upon our approaches to scholarship, their larger point, in my reading, is that “to be effective, challenges to the grip of English monolingual ideology must work at the level of dispositions . . . rather than purely at the conceptual level” (291). In my terms, they must work at the level of affect, located/lived experience, and habituated attachments and response. Marilyn Cooper, in her opening chapter to this collection, reinforces these suggestions when she writes that “what has to change in order for [the actions of U.S. English monolinguals] to change are their experiences”—via “exposure to traditions of tolerance and code-meshing, perhaps,” rather than through exposure to arguments about code-meshing or “about language varieties as resources for meaning.” I am not sure I go as far as Cooper, who seems, ironically, almost to be giving up on rhetoric, but there is no doubt that lived experiences and the ideological traditions that produce and preclude affective attachments to languages radically constrain rhetorical opportunities and thus necessitate more inventive interventions. So, while I am not giving up on rhetoric or on change, I am reiterating a point made by Brice Nordquist in this volume when he concedes that refusing, and/or working to dispel, English monolingualism’s “myth of linguistic fixity and purity” will be “no easy task” and will be especially difficult given that, as his astute reading shows, “the language politics and pedagogies of American societies past and present” work to ensure that “deviations” from the “standard” continue to be invoked as such in order to be purged. In sum, the concluding sentiment of Junghyun Hwag and Joel Hardman’s contribution to this volume is an urgent, confounding question: “What is needed to prompt native-speaking participants [or English monolinguals] in a community of practice to be more generous in their attitudes toward the translingual texts”—and perhaps also to multilingual others—“in their midst”? Hwag and Hardman aver that increasing interest in and focus on “native speaker accommodation/

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cooperation” should help answer this question and will be an important area for future research. Surely this is true, but those of us who identify as English monolinguals might help facilitate and speed our accommodation and cooperation. And we might begin that facilitation process by asking ourselves discomfiting questions about our own comforts and discomfort, by making some difficult admissions and telling some hard, unflattering truths. The hard truth I have been trying to tell is that inattention to the kinds of issues raised by Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition is a mark and manifestation of privilege. Relatedly but worse, it is often the mark and manifestation of what Cooper, citing Harold Schiffman’s work on covert language policies, describes as “unsavoury attitudes” such as “xenophobia, racism,” and intolerance of all things “un-American” that those of us who fancy ourselves committed to social justice and progressive scholarship and pedagogy generally don’t like to own, or at least disclose.

The Resistance of Resistance Let me pause for a moment to clarify (what will probably become even clearer in this section) that I am no zealous convert; I am not advocating that each of us needs to stop what we are doing and undertake research on “language difference” or join those who are most vocally advancing the calls for more translingual approaches to composition. I am saying only that we need to listen—to pay attention—so that we are better prepared to face and meet the challenges of the multilingual present/future in our classrooms and well beyond their walls. But, to reinvoke my epigraph from Sharon Crowley, if “what is requisite first of all is for rhetors to be heard, for attention to be paid” (197), and if “affect focuses attention,” as I have been arguing (83), what happens when this requisite is met, when the calls for more translingual approaches to composition do get heard, when attention is (finally) paid? What, then, is hard to hear or particularly provocative of resistance? Obviously, inattention and resistance are correlated and implicated in one another, so I have already gestured toward some sites and formations of resistance above—perhaps especially in my discussion of the Mullin, Haviland, and Zenger chapter and of fierce (and nationalistic) attachments to home languages. Now, however, I want to discuss more specific resistant responses to specific aspects of calls for translingual approaches to composition. As in this afterword’s first section on inattention, my hopes are twofold and similar to those articulated there. One, I hope that what I say here about resistance to translingual approaches



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will be suggestive in such a way that it helps rhetors to better negotiate or even mitigate it, and I hope that what I reveal here will inspire others like me, who experience resistant responses to calls for translingual approaches, to scrutinize those responses. I will again start with the obvious, the “e-word”: “error.” Despite four decades now of scholarship within composition studies and without proving the logic and potential intentionality of (what is commonly conceived as) “error,” translingualism’s mandate that “the possibility of writer error [be] reserved as an [instructor’s/reader’s] interpretation of last resort” (Horner et al., “Language Difference” 304) will always remain provocative and hard to hear (and harder to implement) for those instructors Bizzell identifies in this volume as “most passionately attached to the defense of rigid standards” (of which I suppose I am one). These same instructors will likely always fear—or at least we will likely always have the recourse of claiming to fear—that the recasting of “error” as either systematic and legitimated deviations from or as agentic “multilingual appropriations” of “the standard” (Canagarajah, “Multilingual Strategies” 43) risks disempowering students. In other words, we will likely continue to make “the common argument that students must learn ‘the standards’ to meet the demands of the dominant,” to which the translingual approach counters that “to survive and thrive as active writers, students must understand how such demands are contingent and negotiable” (Horner et al., “Language Difference” 305). And we will continue to make that common argument, which also dates back four decades, because of our certainty that there are too many contexts in which the “standards” remain immutable in practice. To invoke another precept from queer theory, the “revelation” that certain sedimented systems are “constructs” “does not in any way relieve the effects of that construction” to the point where we can manipulate (or “negotiate”) those systems at will (Halberstam 119). The insistence or even suggestion that the demands of the dominant are contingent and negotiable does not, in the view of teacher-scholars like me, “match the facts on the ground” (to reappropriate a very common phrase and argument within discussions of language differences). There are times and contexts wherein terms like “standards” and “the dominant” do not need to and in fact should not be attended by their ever-present scare quotes because they are literal, true, real, and utterly imposing. So we will fear, those of us passionately attached to standards (or we will claim to fear), that the “risk of misinterpreting error for agency” is just too great and is indeed a far “greater problem than misinterpreting agency for error” (contra Hwag and

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Hardman), and we will continue to fear that reconceiving what we long ago used to think of as “deficit” as legitimated and productive difference risks departing from material reality in a way that further marginalizes already socially and academically marginalized students. Of course, resistance to the translingual approach that arises from views about errors and standards is entirely predictable and has been anticipated by its advocates and countered with a good amount of patience (or at least persistence). Also anticipated by advocates of translingual approaches to composition is the related but slightly more precise, and I like to think slightly more noble, resistance that arises from fears about remarginalizing students. Lu and Horner, for example, address this as one of the most “vocal concerns” expressed in response to calls for taking a translingual approach (the other they identify is the concern over relevance of translingual approaches to “mainstream” English monolinguals) (“Translingual Literacy and Matters” 28–29). Again I emphasize that my purpose here is not to be prescriptive about how advocates might better negotiate or mitigate such resistance but to be suggestive by letting it stand revealed and, perhaps more specifically, by illumining the incredible resistance of these particular resistances to change. Resistance to translingual approaches based in/surrounding “error,” “standards,” and concerns about marginalization arises from entrenched ideological and political commitments—some of them unconscious, of course, and perhaps some even products of “false consciousness,” but others of them fully conscious and deeply theorized. (In fact, I have wondered if the error/ standards/marginalization issue constitutes an impasse—a statement perhaps too important to be made parenthetically, as I am doing here, because it portends much about composition’s (in)‍attentions, resistances, and potential negotiations thereof in the future.) Other formations of resistance perhaps less anticipated, and thus perhaps less well theorized or countered by translingualism’s advocates—and thus those I would like to focus on henceforth—are those that arise in response to what I would call a fetishizing of difference or deviation and concomitant demonizing, or at least radical devaluing, of the “conventional,” the “norm,” or “the dominant,” whether those refer to SWE, SAD, or even English itself. Though not using such strong terminology (that is, “fetishizing” and “demonizing”), Lu and Horner have begun both to recognize and to offer a powerful corrective to something that seems akin to this tendency and the resistance it produces. In their College English essay “Translingual Literacy, Language Difference, and Matters of Agency,” they express concern that



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all too often, a focus on the recognizable difference in writing has had the consequence that “the labor of writers ‘unmarked’—that is, those identified as ‘mainstream’—itself goes unremarked” (583–84). They then go on to argue that, and to demonstrate some ways in which, “agency is manifested not only in those acts of writing that we are disposed to recognize as ‘different’ from a ‘norm’ but also in those acts of writing that are ordinarily recognized as producing simply ‘more of the same’: conventional, unoriginal, ordinary, conformist” (584–85). In my view, several contributors to Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition extend the corrective to what I am framing as a tendency to fetishize the different and demonize the dominant within scholarship on translingualism, and they do so precisely by foregrounding location in a way that has been central to the task of this collection as a whole and is integral to any effort to consider and accurately understand language- or “literacy-in-use-in-context” (Jolliffe, this volume). Vivette Milson-Whyte, for instance, argues that the valorization and celebration of difference, hybridity, inventiveness, and play we hear from proponents of (deliberate) “code-meshing” “risk ignoring critical aspects of the lived realities” and the “historical, social, and linguistic contexts” of many groups of writers/learners who “could benefit most from it.” Fully aware that “codification risks establishing boundaries and promoting fixity,” which is fully “inconsistent with recent discussions about language difference and change” (these are demonized processes and terms), Milson-Whyte nonetheless argues—or, rather, she reminds us—that codification is the first step toward legitimizing denigrated language varieties and practices, which is in turn “a first step to acknowledging the legitimacy of certain minoritized groups.” Similarly, Weiguo Qu refuses to uncritically demonize the “dominant”— or allow us to do so—when he argues that “instead of indiscriminately accusing English as the perpetrator of linguistic or cultural colonialism,” we may think about its critical and “liberatory potential” as a foreign language in other cultural contexts. He then goes on to demonstrate convincingly how teaching argumentation in English in China can become an “assault on . . . unthinking,” a way to “defamiliarize and de-automatize the habituated cognitive activities of a student’s own culture.” As Horner notes in his introduction to this volume, this is a powerful rewriting of the narrative that English is “always and everywhere” imperialistic, a rewriting that becomes all the more powerful for calling attention to—and calling out—the potentially colonizing and homogenizing motives/effects of critics who advance

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this narrative. “In critics’ eagerness to protect the voices of minorities, or the so-called powerless in postcolonial communities,” Qu observes, we forget the power and language relations specific to those communities and cultures, which will always complicate, and particularize, what is “dominant”/ the “norm” and what is resistant or deviant (see also Mao, this volume; Bou Ayash, this volume). Critiques such as Milson-Whyte’s and Qu’s, therefore, call on us to remember the enduring problem of speaking for “marginalized” others across boundaries even as they—or because they do—“call on us to reconsider boundaries that separate dominance and resistance, . . . permanence and process, self and other, and inside and outside” (Mao, this volume). Speaking (only) for myself, I will say that these types of nuanced arguments—which contend with the politics of location, the locatedness of politics and pedagogy, and the contextual, variable, but nonetheless constraining reality of power and language relations—compel my rapt attention. I look forward to listening to more and different views on reworking English, and to persevering in my struggle to rework my own attitudes about English, as the multilingual future continues to arrive.

APPENDIX WORKS CITED CONTRIBUTORS INDEX

APPENDIX: SURVEY We are conducting a survey to investigate reactions to nonnative English speaking students’ English writing. We expect it will take approximately 10 minutes to complete the survey. This survey will support research that would improve English writing teaching to foreign students. There are no foreseeable risks involved. While there are no direct benefits to the participant resulting from this research, it may benefit the profession of English teaching in the future. Your responses to this survey will be kept anonymous and results will be reported in aggregate. By completing this survey, you are giving your voluntary consent to participate. If you have any questions about this survey, please contact Dr. Joel Hardman, Professor, Department of English.

Section I. Your first language Are you a native English speaker? (Is English your first language?) a. Yes b. No If your first language is other than English, please specify __________________________________  

Section II (1–10) Please select what each underlined sentence or phrase means (choose between a and b), and answer the following questions. 221

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1. I strongly believe that in our world, schools have to be gun-free zones. a. Schools in our community should be gun-free zones. b. Every school everywhere in the world should be a gun-free zone. 1-1  Is the underlined sentence grammatically correct? 1. Perfectly correct 2. Mostly correct 4. Extremely incorrect 3. Seems incorrect 1-2  How was it to understand the meaning of the underlined sentence? 2. Not so difficult 1. Very easy 4. Impossible 3. Hard to understand

2. When I was young, I had a dream about becoming a professional soccer player. One day, I told my parents that I wanted to move to another middle school to join a soccer team there. a. When I was young, I wanted to become a professional soccer player. b. When I was young, I had a recurring dream about a professional soccer player. 2-1  Is the underlined sentence grammatically correct? 1. Perfectly correct 2. Mostly correct 3. Seems incorrect 4. Extremely incorrect 2-2  How was it to understand the meaning of the underlined sentence? 1. Very easy 2. Not so difficult 4. Impossible 3. Hard to understand



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3. Abstract thinking tends most often to strike during moments of quiet repose. As in for example the early morning . . . when it can suddenly and for no reason occur to you that you’ve been getting out of bed every morning without the slightest doubt that the floor would support you. a. People are usually too busy to worry about their safety. b. People can unexpectedly start to think about things that they never cared about before. 3-1  Is the underlined sentence grammatically correct? 1. Perfectly correct 2. Mostly correct 4. Extremely incorrect 3. Seems incorrect 3-2  How was it to understand the meaning of the underlined sentence? 1. Very easy 2. Not so difficult 3. Hard to understand 4. Impossible

4. I watched the movie “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” After watching the movie, I could learn that some painters used the camera obscura. Using the camera obscura, they get some ideas for painting. a. If I could learn that some painters used the camera obscura, I would watch the movie. b. The movie provided me with knowledge of some painters’ use of the camera obscura. 4-1  Is the underlined sentence grammatically correct? 1. Perfectly correct 2. Mostly correct 3. Seems incorrect 4. Extremely incorrect 4-2  How was it to understand the meaning of the underlined sentence? 1. Very easy 2. Not so difficult 3. Hard to understand 4. Impossible

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5. I am from Korea. Often, American people ask me questions that make me to compare the two countries. For example, people ask questions such as, “Do you have this in Korea?” “Is it the same with Korean people?” and “Do you like Korea or the US?” a. Do you like either Korea or the US? b. Which country do you like better, Korea or the US? 5-1  Is the underlined sentence grammatically correct? 1. Perfectly correct 2. Mostly correct 4. Extremely incorrect 3. Seems incorrect 2-2  How was it to understand the meaning of the underlined sentence? 1. Very easy 2. Not so difficult 4. Impossible 3. Hard to understand 6. Some students like to study deliberately for a long time, even all day long. On the contrary, some students like to study for a short time to better focus from distractions and to prevent themselves from getting bored. a. Some students spend less time studying because they are busy with other things, which hinder them in focusing on their study. b. Some students like to study for a relatively short time— approximately one or two hours at a time—in order to better focus without distractions that can arise from the boredom of the long study periods. 6-1  Is the underlined sentence grammatically correct? 1. Perfectly correct 2. Mostly correct 3. Seems incorrect 4. Extremely incorrect 6-2  How was it to understand the meaning of the underlined sentence? 1. Very easy 2. Not so difficult 3. Hard to understand 4. Impossible



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7. Spoken language too is sometimes carefully planned and sometimes totally spontaneous. The context makes a big difference to how we talk and how far we think in advance what we are going to say. a. The context depends on the way people talk. b. People talk differently according to the context. 7-1  Is the underlined sentence grammatically correct? 2. Mostly correct 1. Perfectly correct 3. Seems incorrect 4. Extremely incorrect 7-2  How was it to understand the meaning of the underlined sentence? 2. Not so difficult 1. Very easy 3. Hard to understand 4. Impossible 8. Study habits are different in individuals and vary in different results. a. An individual may use different study habits to achieve various results. b. Each person has a unique way of studying, and the outcome of study also varies. 8-1  Is the underlined sentence grammatically correct? 1. Perfectly correct 2. Mostly correct 3. Seems incorrect 4. Extremely incorrect 8-2  How was it to understand the meaning of the underlined sentence? 1. Very easy 2. Not so difficult 3. Hard to understand 4. Impossible

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9. In Korean society, older people are respected for their knowledge and experiences, and younger people must conduct themselves accordingly. a. In the presence of older people, younger people should behave in particular ways, which are commonly expected in Korean culture. b. Older people are responsible for teaching younger people good manners. 9-1  Is the underlined sentence grammatically correct? 1. Perfectly correct 2. Mostly correct 4. Extremely incorrect 3. Seems incorrect 9-2  How was it to understand the meaning of the underlined sentence? 1. Perfectly correct 2. Mostly correct 4. Extremely incorrect 3. Seems incorrect

10. Here, marriage is contracted by the parents of the parties to it. There are no valentines, no sleepless nights, no dessert with the ring hidden inside—no, nothing that is proper to approaching matrimony. a. The parties in a marriage don’t have to make any efforts to find their spouses. b. People don’t behave properly leading up to marriage. 10-1  Is the underlined phrase grammatically correct? 1. Perfectly correct 2. Mostly correct 3. Seems incorrect 4. Extremely incorrect 10-2  How was it to understand the meaning of the underlined phrase? 1. Very easy 2. Not so difficult 3. Hard to understand 4. Impossible

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CONTRIBUTORS Patricia Bizzell is Distinguished Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches first-year composition, American literature, and rhetorical theory. Among her publications is The Rhetorical Tradition, coedited with Bruce Herzberg, which won the NCTE Outstanding Book Award. Bizzell has also won the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s lifetime achievement Exemplar Award. Nancy Bou Ayash is an assistant professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research focuses on the theories and ideologies of language in college writing pedagogy and on the problematics and possibilities of cross-language and cross-national relations in writing instruction and research. She has coedited Economies of Writing, a special issue of JAC. Her most recent work appears in the collection Literacy as Translingual Practice, edited by A. Suresh Canagarajah. Marilyn M. Cooper is an emerita professor of humanities at Michigan Technological University. She has been publishing essays on the natural­cultural turn in writing theory and is now finishing a book manuscript titled “The Animal Who Writes.” She is a past editor of College Composition and Communication and the recipient (with Dennis Lynch and Diana George) of the 1998 Braddock Award. Jonathan Hall is an assistant professor of English at York College, City University of New York, where he serves as coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum. His essays applying interdisciplinary approaches to issues of language difference, writing pedagogy, and writing program administration have appeared in Across the Disciplines and the WAC Journal. Joel Hardman earned his PhD in educational linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He has recently edited a book on English teacher education (with Seran Dogancay-Aktuna) titled Global English Teaching and Teacher Education: Praxis and Possibility. He is currently a professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

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Contributors

Carol Peterson Haviland is a professor emerita of English at California State University, San Bernardino, where she taught and directed the university’s writing center. She is coeditor of Who Owns This Text? Plagiarism, Authorship, and Disciplinary Cultures, and she continues to work at the intersections of translingualism, authorship, and institutional labeling and to rethink language acquisition from the perspective of a volunteer at her grandson’s preschool. Bruce Horner holds the Endowed Chair in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville, where he teaches courses in composition, composition theory and pedagogy, and literacy studies. His books include Terms of Work for Composition, winner of the 2001 W. Ross Winterowd Award for the Most Outstanding Book in Composition Theory, and Cross-Language Relations in Composition, coedited with Min-Zhan Lu and Paul Kei Matsuda and winner of the 2012 CCCC Outstanding Book Award. Junghyun Hwag is a PhD student in language and literacy education at the University of British Columbia, where she works as a teaching assistant. She teaches academic writing at UBC–Ritsumeikan Academic Exchange Programs. She received her MA in teaching English as a second language and postbaccalaureate in the teaching of writing from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Rachel C. Jackson is the community project developer for the University of Oklahoma Writing Center, where she coordinates the Oklahoma Community Literacy Project. She is also a doctoral fellow in the composition, rhetoric, and literacy program and a graduate research fellow for the Center for Social Justice at the University of Oklahoma. David A. Jolliffe is a professor of English and curriculum and instruction at the University of Arkansas, where he holds the Brown Chair in English Literacy. His recent research and outreach activities involve the “reading transition” from high school to college and connections between the arts and literacy in rural communities. Karen Kopelson is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisville. She has published articles in such journals as College English, College Composition and Communication, JAC, Postmodern Culture, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly and is the recipient of both the Braddock Award (2004) and the Kinneavy Award (2005). LuMing Mao is the chair and a professor in the department of English at Miami University. His teaching and research interests are centered on comparative rhetoric, Asian and Asian American rhetoric, histories of



Contributors

249

rhetoric, and writing in translingual spaces. One of his current projects is the Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing, coedited with Jody Enders, Robert Hariman, Susan Jarratt, Andrea Lunsford, Thomas Miller, and Jacqueline Jones Royster. Vivette Milson-Whyte is a lecturer (assistant professor) on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, where she serves as one of the coordinators of academic writing courses. Her essays have appeared in Caribbean Journal of Education, JAC, and various edited collections. Joan Mullin, a professor of English at Illinois State University, coedited Who Owns This Text? Plagiarism, Authorship, and Disciplinary Cultures, a study that reflects her research interests in the intersections of the visual and written, in the transfer of writing center practices to classrooms, and in the effects of World Englishes in shaping U.S. theories of writing. She establishes and has directed writing centers and WAC programs, served as consultant-evaluator for the Council of Writing Program Administrators, edited the Writing Center Journal, developed the online, open-access Research Exchange Index, and continues to publish and participate in national and international publications and initiatives. Brice Nordquist is an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University. His work appears in the collection Economies of Writing and JAC. He is also an assistant editor of the Working Papers Series on Negotiating Differences in Language and Literacy: Practices and Pedagogies. Weiguo Qu is a professor of English at Fudan University, China. His research interests cover discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, rhetoric, and stylistics. Apart from publishing in Chinese, his publications in English include articles that have appeared in College Composition and Communication, Changing English, English Today, and Language and Intercultural Communication and the books Introducing Argumentation, Discourse Stylistics, and Introducing Critical Thinking and Argumentation. Vanessa Kraemer Sohan is an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Florida International University in Miami. Her research and teaching focus on translingual approaches to writing, “alternative” writing and rhetorics, and material/cultural writing and rhetorics (especially quilt making). Amy Zenger is an associate professor at the American University of Beirut, where she directs the writing center. Her most recent book, coedited with Bronwyn Williams, is New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture across Borders.

INDEX Page numbers in italics denote the figure and tables. Aaron, Jane E., 60–61 academia, monolingualist research culture of, 32 academic English, writing, and genres, 151–53 academic knowledge market, monolingualism in, 122 academic writing conventions, 140 accented English, 16–17, 188 action theory, 22–23 additive multilingualism, 116, 126, 132 ADOHP. See Arkansas Delta Oral History Project (ADOHP) Adventure of English, The (Bragg), 134–35 African Americans, 91, 95, 106–7 agency, 25–26, 159, 188–89, 215–16 American Sign Language (ASL), 139 American University of Beirut (AUB), 157–62 analytic vs. dialectic reasoning, 71 Anglo-American hegemony, dominance of, 131 animal language vs. human language, 13–14 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 106, 195–96, 212 Arabic, 119, 158 Arabic-French-English trilingualism, in Lebanon, 120 argumentation, 70–74, 158

Arkansas delta, 168–71, 178 Arkansas Delta Oral History Project (ADOHP): articulation between U of A and delta high school students, 174; development of, 170–71; final project topics, 173; genesis, context, and logistics of, 168–73; mentoring in, 176–77; pedagogical aspects, 167–68; as reclamation project, 175; U of A students’ participation in, 171–72, 174; workshops, activities, and events, 172–73 ASL (American Sign Language), 139 AUB (American University of Beirut), 157–62 audience, imagined, 39 Ayash, Nancy Bou, 92–93 Baca, Damián, 98–99 Baron, Dennis, 53, 138–39 basilectal-acrolectal language continuum, 112 Beacon Handbook (Perrin), 59–60 BEV (Black English Vernacular), 105 Bhabha, Homi K., 66, 73 “bi,” epistemology of the, 57–58 bilingual speakers, 34, 37–38 Birkenstein, Cathy, 144 Black English Vernacular (BEV), 105

251

252

Index

Bragg, Melvin, 134–35 Burke, Kenneth, 13–14 Butler, Judith, 210–11 Caddo Confederacy, 99–100 Calvet, Louis-Jean, 15–18, 19, 24–25 “can able to” story, 161 Canagarajah, Suresh: on code-meshing, 103, 105, 107; lack of codemeshing in scholarly texts by, 134; on languages in individual’s repertoire as part of continuum, 112; on localized rhetoric in Sivatamby’s articles, 20–21; on multilingual strategies, 26; on multilingual writers, 187–88; on orienting to linguistic and cultural differences in writing, 180; on pedagogical strategies for multilingual students, 161; “The Place of World Englishes in Composition,” 163; on pluralistic practices employed by students, 204–5n2; on prevalent language myth, 53; on Smitherman’s work, 157; term “plurilingual” proposed by, 41 “Carrothers College” story, 32–35 Castillo, Manuel, 16–17 center English (U.S. and U.K. English), 180, 189 China: argumentation practices, traditional, 71–72; capitalist globalization in, 87; Confucian ideology, in, 82; Confucian ideology, reconstituted, 79, 85–86; Cultural Revolution and rhetoric of cultural nationalism, 79; debut of Western individualism ideology, 80; English argumentation class in, 72–73; English in, 217–18; “final” form of culture, 69; new discursive alignments in, 81–82; “Putting People First” principle,

84–86, 88; reasoning mode in, 71; rhetoric of cultural nationalism in, 86–87; tension between English use and promotion of mother tongue, 77–78; types of dialects in, 69. See also rhetoric of cultural nationalism China English (Chinglish), 77, 87, 88n1 Chinese Marxism, 80 Chinese postcolonialism, 80 chronotopic laminations, writing as, 152–53 classrooms. See composition classrooms code-meshing: code-switching vs., 107, 133–34; cognitive fluency and, 108; components of, in placement essay, 32–33; defining, 203; by Hispanic student, 163; implications of, for denigrated language varieties, 107–14; legitimizing previously denigrated languages, 110; as pedagogical strategy, 103– 4, 111–12, 115; potential value of, 104–7; resistance to, 139; unrecognized “natural,” in monocodal discourses, 115; unrecognized “natural” vs. explicit/deliberate, 108–9; in writing of undergraduate student writers, 192 code-mixing, 77 code-switching/shifting, 62–63, 103–4, 109–11, 113–14, 192 cognitive fluency, code-meshing and, 106, 108 cognizing a culture, 69 Colomb, Gregory G., 144 Common English, 134–36, 144, 148–49 complexity theory, 16, 22–23 composition classrooms: customized curriculum and individual writing instruction, 46; engaging multiple Englishes in, 45–46; globalization impact on, 91; lack



Index

of local texts in, 97–99; leveraging multicompetent experience in, 43–46; local rhetorics absent from, 97–98; multilingualfriendly, 41–46; multilinguality in, 41; negotiating language boundaries and differences in, 107, 115; plurilinguistic, 42; reimagining as translingual space, 117; transcultural rhetorics in, 96; writing centers’ advantages over, 156 composition courses, cross-cultural, 135–39 composition pedagogy, 35, 39–42, 44, 127. See also pedagogy and pedagogies composition scholarship, 60–63 Confucian ideology, reconstituted, 79, 82–83, 85–87 copyeditors, 15–16 corporate multiculturalism, 146 “correct” usage, questioned, 186 Cox, Michelle, 40–41 critical applied linguistics, 70 critical discourse analysis, defined, 66 critical literacy, 64–65, 70, 73–74 critical pedagogy of place, 167–68, 174–78 critical theory, 68, 70 cross-blood understanding, 96 cross-cultural composition courses, 135–39 cross-language relations, in Lebanon vs. Singapore, 124–25 Crystal, David, 138 cultural and linguistic diversity in United States, 131 cultural differences, 67–70 cultural ecology of literacy model, 64, 73–74 culture, final form conception of, 68 Davidson, Donald, 14–15

253

Deaf culture, 139 decolonization, and place-based pedagogy, 177–78 Denton, Yogi, 176–77 deracination, learning English and potential of, 142 dialectic vs. analytic reasoning, 71 dialogic pedagogy, 197 “discipline/field/meadow” story, 161–62 displacement of local texts and indigenous peoples, 97–99 Durst, Russell, 144 dyslexia, in counter-identities of student-writers, 153–54 Education and Language Background Survey: preliminary findings, 36; sample questions with results, 38; survey questions, 221–26; in “The Linguistic Diversity Project,” 35 Elbow, Peter, 61, 106 Elements of Style (Strunk/White), 58 Elsasser, Nan, 108 emic vs. etic, prioritization of, 127 English: accented, 16–17, 188; Black Vernacular (BEV), 105; center (U.S. and U.K.), 189; change from Old English to present form, 68; in China, 77, 86–87, 217–18; Common, 134–36, 144, 148–49; contemporary worldliness of, 212; critical literacy and writing in, 64–74; defining proficiency in, 147; expanding and refocusing in teaching of, 167; foreign influences in, 69; global situation of, 180; growth of, as international lingua franca, 47–48; hybridization of, 68; learning, and potential of racination, 142; in Lebanon, 119–20; as linguistic imperialistic power, 66–67; monolingualist ideology, 213; as

254

Index

English (continued) parsimonious, 158; reactions to writing in, by nonnative students, 221–26; in Singaporean society, 120; Standard, myth of, 17–18; subversion of hegemonic role, 105; temporal location of, 3; as tool vs. power, 74; in United States, 50–58 Englishes: Canagarajah on place of, in composition, 163; deployed by students, 1–2; plurality and variability of, 3, 45–46; SWE vs. varieties of, in composition scholarship, 60–63 English-language standards, 58–63 “English Only” (composition unit), 138 English-only pedagogies, 131–32, 138 “English Plus” (composition unit), 139 “English Plus Alternative,” EPIC and, 56–57 English Plus Information Clearinghouse (EPIC), 55–57 errors, risk of misinterpreting agency for, 215–16 error/standards/marginalization issue, 216 ethnic and linguistic identities, 106 Eurasians, language challenges of, 121 European Americans, in Oklahoma, 91, 95 Ford, Bob, 172–73 foreign languages, and critical thinking, 65 French, 119–20, 158 “From Page to Stage” workshop, 172–73 Gatewood, Willard, 169–70 Gee, James Paul, 175–76 genre theory, 160 geopolitical relations, and conflicting language ideologies, 124

“Global Englishes” (composition unit), 138 globalization, 82–83, 87, 90–91, 169–70 global/local, as term, 90–91 global vs. local rhetorics, 101 Gonzales, Alecia Keahbone, 99, 102n5 “good writing,” 148–49, 188 Goombi, Jay, 99, 100 Graff, Gerald, 144 grammar, 6, 29, 53, 61, 111, 140 Great Divide, 21–23 Grimm, Nancy Maloney, 151–52 Gruenewald, David A., 177–78 Guthrie, Woody, 90–91 habitus framework, 189 Haraway, Donna, 21–22 Hasinai: A Traditional History of the Caddo Confederacy (Meredith and Newkumet), 99–100 Hayakawa, S. I., 53, 54–55 Helena/West Helena, Arkansas, 169 Hesse, Douglas, 49 Hispanic students at U of T, 162–63 Holy Cross College: admissions and graduation requirements, 135; attitudes toward plurilingual environment, 145–46; composition course student profiles, 136–37; composition syllabus, 137; “English Only” unit, 138; “English Plus” unit, 139; expository writing course goals, 143–44; foreign language requirement, 146–47; “Global Englishes” unit, 138; “Which English?” unit, 138–39 home languages: attachments to, as emergent, 212; in China, 77–78; eradication of, 52; grammar comparison between SWE and, 61, 111; inclusion in primary school curricula, 114; in Lebanon, 154; of Native Americans, 27–28, 30n9, 101; purging of, 62; reactions to,



Index

in tutoring, 162–64, 212; significance of, 106; in Singapore, 120–21; SWE/SAD, 211 homogeneity, in intracultural context, 67 Horner, Bruce, 133 “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (Anzaldúa), 195–202 Huddleston, Walter, 53–54 Hu Jintao, 84–86, 88 identification across lines of difference, 211 identity: language and, 105–6, 127, 141, 143, 153–54; local, loss of, 97 idiosyncratic style, basis for criteria, 186 “impactful,” use of term, 207–8 import/export model for teaching, 151–52 importing and exporting in practice: at AUB, 157–62; in Lebanon, 154–57; in monolingual areas in the United States, 162–65 inattention, 208–11, 214 Indian Territories, settlement by European Americans, 96–97 indigenous peoples, 91, 97–99 indigenous rhetoric, and rhetoric of cultural nationalism, 82 individualism, Western ideology debut in China, 80 Indonesia, state interventions in language practice, 19 insularity, privilege of, 209–14 intelligibility, actual vs. perceived, 186 intercultural speakers, 72, 133 interdependence-in-difference, and rhetoric of cultural nationalism, 78, 81, 83, 87, 88 JAC (Journal of Composition Theory), 144 Jamaican code-meshing, 107–14

255

JC (Jamaican Creole), 107–8, 110–11 Jiang Zemin, 84–85 “John at Carrothers College” story, 32–35 Jolliffe, David A., 93, 101 Jordan, June, 139 Journal of Composition Theory (JAC), 144 Kiowa Humanities Course, 99 Klamath Settlement Group, 27–28 Korean ESL students, 179–90 Kramsch, Claire, 72, 132–33 language acquisition in real life, 158 language and languages: agents of evolution in, 25–26; animal vs. human, 13–14; assumed causal relationship between public immorality and decay of, 53; Calvet’s hypothesis of, 15; equating with biological species, 23–25; evolution of, as macroecological process, 27; identity and, 105–6, 127, 141, 143, 153–54; interactions of, 122; obsolete view of, 131–32; origins of expectations and attitudes toward, 17–18; sound and rhythm in, 158–59; spatial conceptualization of, 2 “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach” (Horner et al.), 133 language differences, 107, 115, 121–23, 125, 133, 191 language diversity, 19–20, 26–27, 48. See also code-meshing; multilingualism; plurilingualism; translingualism language ecology, 21, 22 language fluency, 186–87 language ideologies, economic considerations and negotiations of conflicts among, 124

256

Index

language learning, gap between language use and, 127 language practices: emergent quality of, 29–30; local, study of, 21; meta-knowledge about, 155; natural selection in, 25; new, 134; Pennycook on, 19–20, 28–29; people’s interactions and, 14–16, 23, 26; social interactions and representation of, 18; state vs. covert policies regarding, 18–19; systems of, compared to ecologies, 22 language proficiency, 147 language relations, in Lebanon and Singapore, 118–23 Languages Across the Curriculum movement, 39 Latin language instruction, Strunk’s aversion to, 59 Latour, Bruno, 22–23 Lebanon, 117–20, 125–27, 154–55 legitimizing denigrated language varieties and practices, 217 linguistic and ethnic identities, 106 linguistic chauvinism, 105 linguistic colonialism/imperialism, 64–65, 66–67, 105 linguistic conflict, physical violence linked to, 55 linguistic differentiation and purgation, 52, 58–63 linguistic distinction and fortification process, 52 linguistic diversity and heterogeneity of students, 1, 35–38, 43, 53–55 “Linguistic Diversity Project, The,” 35–39, 36 linguistic enclaves, reality of, 210 linguistic equality, teaching of, 111 linguistic inventiveness, 112–13 “Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. English” (Trimbur), 50–51 linguistic misbehaviors, 28–29 linguistics of subcommunities, 57

listening, redefining, 198 literacy, critical. See critical literacy literacy education in the United States, 49, 63, 93, 166 literacy-in-use-in-context, 101, 167, 217 literacy skills, transferability issue, 166 Little, Brown Handbook (Aaron), 60–61 local identity, loss of, 97 local rhetorics, 93, 97–98, 101 local texts, lack of, 97–99 local transrhetorical literacy, defined, 91–92 Lu, Min-Zhan, 9, 133, 161, 180 lunshuowen (argumentation), 71 Lyons, Scott Richard, 94, 97, 100–101, 112 Mandarin dialect, 69 Mao, LuMing, 16–17, 28 marginalized others, problem of speaking for, 218 markedness, 180–81, 186 markedness investigation: conclusions, 187–89; discussion of findings, 185–87; findings, 182–85; grammaticality, 184; intelligibility, 183; method and procedures, 181–82; reactions of Korean writers to survey results, 185 Matsuda, Paul Kei, 39–40, 48n3, 59, 116, 180–81 Matsuura, Kochiro, 47–48 McAlpin, K. C., 54–55 memorial surrogation concept, 51 Meredith, Howard, 99–100 Mestiz@Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (Baca), 98–99 meta-knowledge about language practices, 155 metaphoric meandering in import/ export method, 161–62 Mignolo, Walter, 82–83



Index

Milburn, George, 94–96 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 49, 52 minoritized languages, 105–6, 112, 114 Moje, Elizabeth Birr, 175–76 monolingualism: in academic knowl­edge market, 122; applying multi­­lingual criteria to, 34; dissemination of, 127; ideological assumptions in, 31–32, 124, 213; in Jamaican public schools, 108; movement away from, 191; in re­search culture of academia, 32; as status quo in United States, 39; unidirectional, perpetuation of, 59–60 mother tongues, 77–78, 106, 120–21. See also home languages Mufwene, Salikoko S., 25, 27 multidialectalism, and code-meshing, 110 multilingual-friendly classrooms, 41, 42–46 multilingualism: additive, 116, 126, 132; interrelated dimensions of difference in languages of, 125; in Lebanon, 117, 127; as mainstream, 31, 47, 116; negative effects of erasure, 153–54; as resource vs. deficit, 32, 38–39; student-tutors and, 212 multilingual speakers, 29, 114 multilingual students: integrated system of languages, 103; pedagogical strategies for, 161; reflections on using English as transnational language, 157–58; resistance to collaboration and peer tutoring, 150–51 multilingual writers: agency in textual decisions of, 188; Canagarajah on, 187–88; challenges in entering scholarly communities of practices, 189; instructional methods for use of texts by, 155 “My People” (Guthrie), 90

257

Native American languages, 27–28, 30n9, 101 Native American studies scholars, 96 native/nonnative speaker communication, 189 native/nonnative speaker dichotomy, 132 native speakers of English (NSE), 180 “Natives Who Are Not from This Country” (student essay), 198–202 natureculture, origins and use of term, 30n1 nature/culture divide, 21–22 New England dialect, 51 Newkumet, Vynola Beaver, 99–100, 102n6 “New Technologies of the Word” (Baron), 138–39 NNSE. See nonnative speakers of English (NNSE) “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You, and the Future Life of Willie Jordan” (Jordan), 139 nondirective tutoring, 151 nonnative speakers of English (NNSE): from Korea, 179–90; perceptions of markedness in writing of, 180; positive attributes of writing of, 187; resistance to collaboration and peer tutoring, 150–51 Nordquist, Brice, 140 NSE (native speakers of English), 180 Nunberg, Geoffrey, 138 official language debate in United States, 53–55 Ojibwe classrooms, lack of local texts in, 97 Oklahoma: Caddo Confederacy, 99–100; cultural exchange of rhetorics, 92; diverse culture of, 93–94; European Americans, 91, 95; home languages of Native

258

Index

Oklahoma (continued) Americans, 101; indigenous peoples, 91; Kiowa Humanities Course, 99; lack of local texts in classrooms, 97–99; land runs and settlement of, 96–97; meaning of “Sooners,” 96–97; ranching culture, 95; Socialist Party, at statehood, 93; transcultural rhetorics in composition classrooms, 96; triracial frictions and transracial class solidarity in, 94; white settlers, 98–99 “Oklahoma” (Milburn), 94–96 oppressions, as interrelated but distinctive, 211 pedagogy and pedagogies: based on interdisciplinary research, 45; code-meshing as strategy, 103–4, 111–12, 115; composition and research, 39–42, 44, 127; dialogic, 197; English-only, 131–32, 138; ideological expectations of composition courses, 35; imagined audience, 39; performances of linguistic differentiation and purgation, 58–63; place-based, 177–78; plurilingual, 145–46; rethinking in writing centers, 152–53, 156–57; strategies for multilingual students, 161; translingual, meaning of, 204 Pennycook, Alastair: on changes to language, 207–8; on contemporary worldliness of English, 212; on critical applied linguistics, 70; on diversity in languages, 19–20; on diversity within social acts that produce language, 205n4; and epistemology of the “bi,” 57–58; on equating language with biological species, 23–24, 26–27; on evolution of Common

English, 134; on language ecology, 21, 22; on language practices, 19–20, 28–29 Pentecost, as metaphor for linguistic diversity, 53 People’s Daily (newspaper), 84 Perrin, Robert, 59–60 place-based pedagogy, 177–78 placement essays, in story of “John at Carrothers College,” 32–33 “Place of World Englishes in Composition, The” (Canagarajah), 163 plurilingualism, 41–42, 132–33, 143, 145–46. See also Holy Cross College Pratt, Mary Louise, 56–57 pre-college programs, 166 Prior, Paul, 152–53 privilege vs. marginalization, contexts of, 211 “Putting People First” principle, China, 84–86, 88 Qu, Weiguo, 77, 217–18 Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial (Olson and Worsham), 68–69 racial frictions and transracial class solidarity, 94 racial identities, performance through language, 105 racination, learning English and potential of, 142 racist ideologies, and pedagogies of code-switching/shifting, 62–63 reality perception, 72–73 reciprocal brokerage in import/export method, 160–61 “red juice” story, 160–61 “Reimagining America” (Nunberg), 138 reinhabitation, in place-based pedagogy, 177–78 relocalized listening: analysis of



Index

student text, 196–202; application to all student texts, 204; benefits of, 194–95; context and, 205n5; definition and goals, 193; origins and approach, 193–94; theoretical and practical implications, 203–4 repetition-as-difference, 194, 196–97, 202–3, 204, 205n4 research needs, 159–60 resistance of resistance, 214–18 rhetorical sovereignty concept, 100–101 rhetoric of cultural nationalism: context for, 78–84; distancing from Chinese Marxism, 80–81; as hybrid rhetoric, 81, 87; indigenous rhetoric and, 82; interdependence-in-difference and, 78, 81, 83, 87, 88; rise of, in China, 86–87; uncoupling process, 82–83; as work in progress, 83–84 Riggs, Lynn, 94–96 Roach, Joseph, 50–52 Robertson, Wayne, 163 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 133 SAD (Standard Academic Discourse), 208, 211 Salvatori, Mariolina, 197, 198, 205n5 Schiffman, Harold, 18–19 scholarly communities of practice, 189 second language writing, teaching approaches, 188 semiodiversity, 191 SGEM (Speak Good English Movement), Singapore, 122–23 Shipka, Jody, 152–53 Simon & Schuster Handbook for Writers (Troyka and Hesse), 49 Singapore, 120–23, 126 Singlish, 120, 123 Sivatamby (professor), 21 SJE (Standard Jamaican English), 107 Smitherman, Geneva, 156–57

259

sociolinguistic landscape and language policy, 118–21 Songhay people, Niger, 18 “Sooners,” meaning of name, 96–97 sound and rhythm in languages, 158–59 “soupçon of irony,” 208 Speak Good English Movement (SGEM), Singapore, 122–23 speech accommodation theory, 53 Standard Academic Discourse (SAD), 208, 211 Standard English myth, 17–18 Standard English Only, 131–32 standardized test movement, 166 Standard Jamaican English (SJE), 107 Standard Written English (SWE): allegiance to, 208; grammar comparison between home languages and, 61, 111; as home language, 211; oppositional construction of, 49–50; presentation of difference as division, 91; varieties of English vs., in composition scholarship, 60–63; White and, 59 stereotyping, as cognizing a culture, 69 Strunk, William, 58–59 Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (Williams and Colomb), 144 surrogate doubling, 50–58 SWE. See Standard Written English (SWE) Tardy, Christine, 155, 192 text interpretation, 197 They Say / I Say (Graff et al.), 144 Thomas R. Watson Conference (2010), 9, 10n5 thought experiment, 32–35 “Three Represents” policy of Jiang Zemin, 84–85 Tong, Goh Chok, 122–23 totalization, in cognizing a culture, 69

260

Index

transcultural flow of knowledge making, 164–65 transcultural rhetorics, 96 translation, students’ engagement in, 155–56 translingual and transcultural competence, 148 translingual approaches, 63, 191–93, 214–17 translingual fluency, defined, 147 translingualism: institutionalization of, 125, 127; in Lebanon, 125–26; model for, 116–17; place of, 121–22; in United States, 117, 123–27; use value of, vs. exchange value of Standard English, 124 translingual literacy conceptualizations, 57–58 translingual pedagogy, meaning of, 204 Trimbur, John, 50–51, 133 Troyka, Lynn Quitman, 49 tutoring: import/export model for, 152, 155–57; reactions to home languages in, 162–64, 212; resistance to, by multilingual and NNES, 150–51 United States (U.S.): cultural and linguistic diversity in, 131; importing and exporting in practice in, 162–65; literacy education, 49, 63, 93, 166; monolingualism as status quo in, 39; official language debate in, 53–55; surrogate doubling and politics, 50–58; translingualism in, 117, 123–27; writing programs, 126–27 universal design, multilingualism and, 41

University of Arkansas (U of A) at Fayetteville, 170. See also Arkansas Delta Oral History Project (ADOHP) University of Oregon (U of O), 163 University of Texas (U of T) at Austin, 162–63 uptakes, defined, 137 Wallraff, Barbara, 138 Walton, Douglas, 70–71 “What Global Language?” (Wallraff), 138 “Which English?” (composition unit), 138–39 White, E. B., 58–59 “Why a Global Language?” (Crystal), 138 Williams, Joseph M., 144 Worsham, Lynn, 68–69 writerly moves, 155 Writing Across Borders (Robertson, film dir.), 163 Writing Across the Curriculum movement, 39, 148 writing centers: advantage over classrooms, 156; as change agents in university, 151; changing practices of, 153–54; nondirective interaction, peer tutoring, and collaboration, 150–51; rethinking pedagogies, 156–57; role of, 152; theoretical reciprocal processes vs. actual pedagogies, 152–53 You, Xiaoye, 71–72 Young, Vershawn Ashanti, 62, 103–4, 109, 134 youth culture, in critical pedagogy of place, 174–78