Category Archives: Ideology

Back to the start – messages of empowerment

For my very last research post, I wanted to come back to where it began – the ELT Journal and College English. Though my intentions to read solely these two journals was, I think, a reasonable one, for practical purposes, it didn’t work out. However, I thought they deserved the last word in my research, whether that related directly to the overlaps I set out to find this semester or not. What I did find in this week’s two journal articles from the 2000s, which, as you will see has “social turn” at the forefront of these messages, is overlaps in how we should respect our students as important creators of language and meaning, and how in particular this applies for students who do not speak English as a first language. This overlap shows, I think, that even when our disciplines lack some of the types of overlaps and conversations I wish we were having, that one thing does remain a great equalizer, which is finding ways to appreciate the diverse language backgrounds that American colleges encounter each day.

First, in Ramin Akbari’s “Transforming Lives: Introducing Critical Pedagogy into ELT Classrooms,” he argues that the way we often think of teaching English as simply “teaching a new system of communication [that] does not have much political/critical significance” is not a good way to think about it because all language is “infused with ideological, historical, and political symbols and relations” (277). He argues that one way to deal with this often-seen disconnect is to introduce critical pedagogy (CP) into the ESL classroom. CP acknowledges that educational systems themselves mirror our cultural and social systems, which therefore reproduce systems of discrimination based upon race, class, and gender (276). He sees this reproduced in applied linguistics specifically because it must acknowledge and deal with the “socio-political implications of language teaching” (277).

What Akbari would like to see is that in the classroom, learners are able to talk about their cultures and cultural identities, which includes acknowledging the power in the students’ L1 for language learning instead of acting as if it is a deficit in the language classroom (279). Likewise, CP must also seek to acknowledge and deal with the needs of the learners in their various local contexts; for example, what a student is taught might be very different in a rural context than in an urban one. Additionally, taking up conversations on students’ home cultures, which may include traumatic or difficult ordeals is necessary to acknowledge their experiences and transform their understanding of the world in ways that go well beyond the basic, generic conversations that play out in their textbooks (280-281). Akbari concludes by noting that CP is a “pedagogy of hope and understanding” in an effort to empower students and teachers alike, and push them towards meaningful learning experiences (282).

In College English, there were some similar overlaps in the way the idea of language and language teaching as an entry point into discriminatory practice against our students was discussed. In Bruce Horner’s “’Students’ Right,’ English Only, and Re-Imagining the Politics of Language,” he argues that despite the revolutionary nature of Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL), at its core, the policy is still one that pervasively pushes the idea of “English Only” in composition that “continues to cripple both public debate on English Only and compositionists’ approaches to matters of ‘error’” (743). For example, he notes that while SRTOL wants to encourage “respect and tolerance for racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity,” it also assumes that English speakers have “static communities of language uses and users” which, while one is not superior to another, still assumes that users can move from one to another and back again. What he means is the idea of language communities and language situations having a simple, fixed dialectical need that only need to be translated to be understood is simply preposterous (743-744). Along with this assumption, Horner says that SRTOL pushes it even farther, asking one group or another to change their language practices, and suggests that teachers can, in fact, teach students to communicate in Edited American English (744).

Horner then transitions into a definition of two views of ESL literacy practices: ethicists, who believe that the mother tongue is part on one’s identity and tied to their ethnicity, so the use of English by ESL users is a “betrayal of that identity,” and universalists, who assume English is a “neutral medium” that anyone can use to overcome barriers to entry into another community. Horner argues that both of these views are in some ways part of the SRTOL document because it attempts to champion linguistic diversity but also allow EAE to remain central without “degradation” (745).

Just as SRTOL advocate for both of these views of language, arguments for English only policies do as well, not only from a legislative perspective in which others must learn and assimilate to American culture, but also in the idea of English as a world language (746-747). Ultimately, both views “ignore the role of power relations in determining language practice” and therefore push the status quo. The idea, he says, of everyone both speaking the “king’s English” as well as their own language is simply a fantasy that does not exist (748).

Despite our desire to be “liberal” as teachers, Horner says, we usually still push such ideas through our attempt to train speakers to speak the way we do. This is particularly true for developmental students who we continue to send off into spaces like the writing center or in one-on-one conferences, justifying our “fixing” of the language in economic terms or in “’academic’ social identity” (749-750). While he says that changing our thinking about student language does not require us to abandon EAE, we also shouldn’t denigrate language practices, and instead should be “questioning and challenging power in every language interaction to consider “what conditions, when uttered by whom, to whom, and listened to how” (753-754). He suggests instead of simply teaching EAE to students that teachers ask them to consider examples of various, diverse language practices and who accepts them and who does not (754). Finally, he wants students to engage in the “question of and struggle over recognition of anyone’s use of language” to help them to understand their place in language and to respond to the “material social conditions” that surround language in our world (755).

Though both of these pieces were written for different audiences, since clearly there is a stark divide between ESL and composition teaching and pedagogy, they both seem to come to the same conclusion – that students deserve more than a right to their own language, with the tacit assumption that that language is English – but they instead also deserve the respect inherent in being both multilingual and speakers of English shifting from various contexts over the course of their lifetimes. What really stuck out to me was the idea that we should help language users not to specifically gain purely academic language skills, but to make them think through the power situations that make their English “less than” or nonstandard. Though Akbari and Horner acknowledge that we may not be able to change the cultural systems in which these languages were created and became status quo, by helping our students acknowledge the power dynamics that created these systems, and perhaps even challenge them, we will give them the self-respect and autonomy that they deserve.

I had never considered SRTOL to be particularly lacking in the ways that Horner describes, but he is ultimately correct – the document does define English as the standard-bearer despite the fact that English is not the national language in the U.S. Even if we do allow students to move in and around language communities while respecting their use of English dialects (though he points out that this is often championed ideologically more than practically), this does not, as Akbari would point out, acknowledge the many diverse language backgrounds and take into consideration the languages they come into our classrooms with that might actually help them improve their English or at a minimum help them learn the importance of their life experiences to their place in the world which transcends language in many ways.

I think that these articles have enough overlaps that they might be an awfully good place for ESL and composition to start making connections with each other – with an empowered message of wresting power from EAE not only from the perspective of English learning and mastery but also from a perspective of English being the standard default at all. How this looks in our courses certainly needs to become a bit more practical – certainly Akbari starts thinking through the practical nature of this dilemma – but more connections between scaffolding this from ESL to composition would be a wonderful way to begin building bridges between these communities and well beyond them.

Works Cited

Akbari, Ramin. “Transforming Lives: Introducing Critical Pedagogy into ELT Classrooms.” ELT Journal, vol. 62, no. 3, 2008, pp. 276-283.

Horner, Bruce. “’Students’ Right,’ English Only, and Re-Imagining the Politics of Language.” College English, vol. 63, no. 6, 2001, pp. 741-758.

L2 Ideology in the Specialized Journal

This week I wanted to start to look at the Journal of Second Language Writing specifically because in the early weeks of this study, I struggled to find the types of literature I needed in College English and the ELT Journal. Since then, my investigation has shown me that this is likely because of the deep fractures between these two departments and perhaps both journals are relegating most of the issues I hoped to discover as something out of their purview. This week (and likely next), I intend to look at a specialized journal to see what types of articles I can find that might deal with the overlaps in the fields. While I hoped to keep up with the work of my original project by looking at one article from the 1980s, this journal began in 1992. Therefore, I began by looking at the early years of this journal hoping to get a sense of how they define Second Language Writing and L2 Composition and what their ultimate goals and aims as a publication are. I ended up finding so much in just the first few editions that this week I decided to look at just a few of those articles where I feel the journal is beginning to define itself and how it differs from other work in ESL and composition.

I started with the “From the Editors” note in the first issue. The editors state that the goal of the journal is to reflect an “explosion of interest in research on composing in a second language.” It also specifies that the journal will cover “a wide range of areas of interest for L2 writing professionals” (n.p.). With the vagueness of this definition, my next question was how an L2 writing professional is being defined. Is it someone who teaches composition, ESL, or both?

From here, I moved onto the first article in the first issue to see if I could discover more. “Ideology in Composition” by Terry Santos provided a fascinating look at some of the pedagogical fractures between ESL and composition, though interestingly only hinted at any overlap between the two disciplines. He argues that although ESL writing has “borrowed theories from its L1 counterpart” ultimately composition has focused more on process where ESL still emphasizes more on product (1). This emphasis on product has more to do with the pedagogical values in training teachers, as ESL comes from a background of applied linguistics, while composition has a strong sociopolitical and ideological view of writing, which is completely overlooked in ESL writing (2).

Santos argues that the ideology that is emphasized in composition includes writing as a social act as well as a social construct that pedagogical methods such as collaborative learning can seek to correct (3-5). This is likely because of the historical nature of composition as a department, which was originally aligned with literature, while, again, ESL was simply focused on applied linguistics and a more scientific method, which “remained aloof from ideology” (8). Likewise, prominent practitioners in the ESL field suggested that it simply wasn’t their place to try and teach “sociopolitical consciousness” (9). While he does not come out and state it clearly, Santos also suggests some distain for CCCCs “Students Rights to Their Own Language,” stating that composition is becoming “more ambivalent about the relationship between academic discourse and students’’ native dialects or language,” seeming to imply that ESL writing still focuses on the goals of “correct” writing (11). While Santos does not yet know what the future holds for ESL writing, he suggests that if ESL writing goes towards composition as a field, it could be similarly influenced by the ideological desires of the composition field (12-13).

I found this piece absolutely fascinating because although it does not yet help me to answer my question about ways in which the two fields overlap, and in fact talks about them in very distinct terms, what it does do is help fill in a significant gap related to my dissertation project. One of my major impetuses for taking on this project is because I have noticed that ESL writing courses simply do not emphasize the same types of thinking and writing skills that composition does. What Santos calls ideology I believe many in the composition field would refer to as “critical thinking” in that it is not so much the pushing of an ideological agenda, but more in asking students to do more than learn to summarize and regurgitate grammatical forms, but to also apply and analyze various concepts and ways of thinking. While I get the sense that Santos distains these types of emphases as a bad thing to teach (and appears to want ESL to avoid the trap), without some overlaps between these goals, students cannot scaffold very well from one course to another, and they are simply not being taught to think in ways that teachers well beyond composition will expect them to think. This is something I am noticing is still a fundamental “flaw” of the differences between ESL and composition. It is interesting to me that Santos seems to feel that such ideological boundaries should remain.

I next looked at Sandra Lee McKay’s “Examining L2 Composition Ideology: A Look at Literacy Education” because I wanted more background on the ideological concept or divide between L1 and L2 writing. One thing that was initially disappointing about this reading is that one of the sub-sections is titled “What is L2 Composition?” from which I was hoping for her to answer this in a way that made distinct if this was something of a cross between ESL and composition teaching, but she did not. Instead, the best definition I could come up with based on this article is that she is simply referring to the teaching of writing to nonnative speakers of English. While this could be in theory in a composition classroom, the pedagogy she advocates would seem to be more aimed at classrooms full of ESL students.

Though McKay’s argument and definition of ideology was somewhat different from Santos’s, she also departed radically from Santos’s dismissal of the usefulness of ideology as a concept to bring to nonnative speaking students. Unlike Santos, when McKay refers to ideology, she assumes it is imbued in everything that we do as teachers and cannot be extracted from the job (66). She then begins to define some of the ideological traditions that encompass writing studies, including “the use of literacy as a social act,” (68), as well as dismantling the larger social structures of power in the classroom (a Freirian view), and addressing the idea that there is only one correct or right way to speak or write (70-71).

At this point, her argument begins to shift towards the idea that students from different cultures may write in different ways, based upon their L1 training. She brings forth the problems with expecting L2 writers to produce the same types of language that Western writers favor (72-74). She challenges current social practices that value Western types of writing, as such practice “serves as a gatekeeping function because those who do not demonstrate their ability to use such discourse can be denied entry into an academic institution or to a higher level course” (75). She suggests instead that it is the job of both the teacher and the writer to meet somewhere in the middle and adjust their expectations, as well as learn about “these alternate traditions” to empower both groups (76-77). Finally, she states, writing courses do not offer the final solution to this problem, as all disciplines in the academic community must be made aware of them and accept the “value of such traditions” (78).

Though McKay does not define L2 in ways that would be more useful for me, I think it’s clear she is talking about either an ESL class, or a section of composition that is made up of ESL writers, as she emphasizes specifically a pedagogy that asks for an understanding of and teaching students, essentially, what Santos dismisses: that students have a right to their own language. In that sense, these pieces seemed almost diametrically opposed with Santos, fighting against what he sees as an oppressive ideological emphasis in the college, while McKay sees the necessity of such understanding.

While I see many overlaps here to modern composition scholarship, particularly the work that came out of CCCCs “Students Rights,” I also thought about ways that it differed, particularly from other groundbreaking work of this era, such as Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University.” In this seminal piece, Bartholomae argues that students need to be invited into the academy by allowing them to play with and be invited and even initiated into academic discourse by their professors. While much of that also sounds like McKay’s argument, she adds that we also need to reduce our emphasis on the importance of Western academic discourse entirely, allowing students to do some of the “invention” of their own, for which we should try to meet them. In that sense, maybe this piece has its own niche place in the sense that it brings together traditions of not only ideology formed from composition, but also from ESL.

Finally, I read a survey study of colleges and universities from 1995 called “ESL Composition Program Administration in the United States” by Jessica Williams. In it, she surveys 78 colleges and universities to find out more about how they administrate composition classes to both native and nonnative speaking English students. Some of the things she discovers include: the “vast majority of institutions” have separate ESL composition courses regardless of total ESL population size, ranging from very small to very large (158); in most cases (77 percent), this course was required for students before they took required native speaking composition courses (159); half of all surveyed institutions have separate administration and staff training for native and nonnative courses; (160); in most cases, students did not receive any further ESL instruction after leaving the sheltered courses, and a big complaint of native speaking composition courses were the number of students who couldn’t “write” based upon their grammar and syntax (162); instruction in nonnative classes is provided by teachers with degrees ranging from TESOL, composition, literature, and linguistics, with few instructors having backgrounds in both composition and ESL (167); and finally, staff turnover for nonnative composition is very high, with some reporting staff turnover of up to 75 percent every two years (170). Williams suggests that the “programmatic separation” of these two populations must be questioned and suggests that students might learn best together; at a bare minimum, teachers working with the native speaking students must also be prepared programmatically to have nonnative speakers in their classes (174-175).

I thought this piece was really interesting because it again shows both the divide and even the discord between these two groups of teachers. The fact that teachers in native composition are not being taught to work with nonnative speakers, and worse, that they are pointing fingers that students are not coming into their classrooms prepared for the work seems highly problematic and is one of my major goals and interests in working on my dissertation topic. Likewise, the lack of consistent training in the nonnative composition programs – that some come in with TESOL backgrounds and other linguistics – suggests a disconnect between what will be valued in that teacher’s classrooms. All of these problems disadvantage our students who are, as this survey points out, nearly always required to move from nonnative composition into native composition. While this survey is now more than 20 years old, one of my goals for an upcoming week might be to see if the journal has updated this at any point in our current decade, and if not, if this is something that I might undertake as part of my dissertation or personal publication work.

Works Cited

“From the Editors.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 1, no. 1, 1992, n.p.

McKay, Sandra Lee. “Examining L2 Composition Ideology: A Look at Literacy Education.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 2, no. 1, 1993, pp. 65-81.

Santos, Terry. “Ideology in Composition: L1 and ESL.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 1, no. 1, 1992, pp. 1-15.

Willimas, Jessica. “ESL Composition Program Administration in the United States.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 4, no. 2, 1995, pp. 157-179.