After two weeks of attempting a grammar study, I decided to look at College English and examine two articles, one from the 1980s and one from the 2000s, that both looked at writing studies and asked the discipline to re-frame the discussion around “writing differences” in a way that empowered teachers and students to see writing differences not only as deficiencies. The two articles ultimately approached this topic in very different, but important ways.
First, I read Mike Rose’s “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University,” from 1985. Here, he argues that throughout the history of writing program development at the university, the overarching mindset has been “remediation” in which students are often judged to be poor writers with “problems” that can ultimately be “fixed,” with remedial efforts “phased out once the literacy crisis is solved” (341). Rose notes that this type of thinking leads to the belief that many college students with linguistic differences (which he defines as having different upbringings, belonging to different classes, having different language backgrounds, etc.) are inherently “illiterate” (353) and just need to be taught correct grammar, usage, and mechanics (343). Rose notes that such a way of thinking about writing is wrongheaded simply because it puts English studies into the category of a “skill,” rather than a discipline, which he calls a “kiss of death” (347) because, again, it suggests that quick fixes can be implemented and such programs eventually dismantled (351).
Rose instead desires to shift the thinking about student deficits in writing away from the idea that our students with different linguistic backgrounds need remediation or that they are simply illiterate towards thinking of our students as lacking “knowledge of the achievements of a tradition that are not at home with the ways we academics write about them” (353). He acknowledges that, yes, many of our students are “not adequately prepared to take on the demands of university work” but that instead teachers need to orient students into academic discourse communities, inviting students into the academy, moving away from concerns about “error” to those that “encourages the full play of language activity” that we often demand from our graduate students and ourselves (357-358). He finishes by stating that such a change can only occur if educators and programs are open to the idea of removing the word “remediation” from our vocabulary.
I saw a lot of Bartholomae here (whom he does acknowledge) in his suggestion to allow students to throw off the shackles of “remediation” and instead asking teachers to invite them into the academy. While this article does not address ESL writers specifically, through his suggestion that we get rid of remediation even for those students with “different” linguistic backgrounds suggests that this article is written with a perspective towards removing stigmas from the variety of writers including ESL students. This influence can be seen, too, in the movement away from grammar that was noted last week in College English after the 1980s. While the movement towards accepting student writers into the academy wherever they are from is crucial, the lumping together of so many students done not only by Rose but, clearly, by all of the writers over these several decades could ultimately be a deficit. It might be one of the major reasons I am not finding work that reflects on the movement of writers from ESL departments into English ones. If essentially all such difference is being lumped together with the idea that we must remove labels, which is hugely important in giving these students the respect and autonomy they deserve, we might also be doing a disservice to the field, as clearly it means that ESL and composition are now completely separate in a way that does not acknowledge any overlap or potential for overlap or cross-communication or cross-study. I soon hope to start looking into how these fields diverged (or if/when they diverged) to see if articles and ideas such as Rose’s lead to any type of fracture between these groups, or if these fractures always existed.
I followed this article with A. Suresh Canagarajah’s “Toward a Writing Pedagogy of Shuttling Between Languages: Learning from Multilingual Writers” from 2006. Here, he challenges the idea that most writing instructors have about multilingual students, which is that they do not know how to use western writing practices when composing in English (589). Instead, he argues that most writers who speak multiple languages are negotiating between the various discourses they have experience with to “achieve their communicative objectives” (590). He highlights writing samples from the same writer in the same genre for different audiences – one for a local publication in his native language; one for a local publication in English; and one for a foreign publication (591). What Canagarajah discovers is that this writer has made decisions about his writing and what to include even when that means bucking the linguistic traditions of the audience group when it suits his need. For example, the thesis of this author is often implied rather than stated (594) and he reduces or removes the literature review almost entirely from his work (598). Cangarajah argues that this writer might actually be “nudging the reader to shift to his discursive preference, even has he shifts to theirs” (598).
Ultimately, Cangarajah argues that such negotiations in this writer’s work show that there is not only one way to write that is acceptable in English and multilingual writers can display their work in “diverse contexts in order to achieve their interests” (601-602). Pedagogically, he would like to see more teachers not simply dismissing such difference in writing as an error, but instead requests that we teach students how to rhetorically negotiate things such as audience to help them create work that will be favorable in the given contexts in which they write. He also wants to see teachers accept the languages students come into the classroom with and treat these differences as a benefit rather than a problem (602-603).
Like Rose’s article, Canagarajah implores teachers to invite students into the academy without judgment of their past experiences with writing, inviting them in as full members of the community. While Rose fails to acknowledge the types of differences that might be seen in one single English class, Canagarajah smartly narrows down to a sample population of multilingual students. However, Canagarajah’s weakness is that his case study is based upon an expert in the field rather than an undergraduate student. Finding ways to help undergraduates navigating many different language backgrounds, along with helping the variety of other students in their classroom and giving all of them equal autonomy might certainly be easier said than done.
However, what both of the articles this week show is that both decades of writers are allowing for and asking teachers to plan for the types of differences we see between writers in our classrooms. Both acknowledge and position these differences as positions of power and empowerment for students. I believe this is one of the most fundamental shifts in the field of composition, and one that, as I stated earlier, has shifted us farther away from the ESL field, separating entirely how the fields view what their goals for their students are. In many ways it is good for us to empower students in this way, but it also has not seemed to reduce the hand-wringing among our own colleagues and across the discipline about how students “cannot write” when they leave our classes.
What the study of College English has shown, in particular, is that much of what is published around this topic is fundamentally theoretical. We see with Rose and Canagarajah that they provide what we should be doing much more than how we should be doing it. This was true with Barwashi’s piece from several weeks ago as well. He argued in favor of advocating that students challenge the predominant discourses at college and university to situate themselves as players in situations of power. However, he also failed to offer practical advice not only for how to take on these many power-struggles, but how to get the rest of the college on board. For as much as “writing across the curriculum” has taken over, most teachers in other disciplines want students to be able to write in more prescriptive or “western” ways. I think this is where we can and should see nice overlap between ESL and composition, but we simply don’t. It does seem that the fields are massively fractured across both of these decades. I will continue to look into this split in upcoming weeks.
Works Cited
Canagarajah, A. Suresh. “Toward a Writing Pedagogy of Shuttling Between Languages: Learning From Multilingual Writers.” College English, vol. 68, no. 6, 2006, pp. 589-604.
Rose, Mike. “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University. College English, vol. 47, no. 4, 1985, pp. 341-359.