Getting Clearer

As one reads more and more into WWW the message and construct of the book becomes clearer. Chapters 7 to the end actually deal with the different ways of learning. I found the comparison between the ways townspeople and Trackton and Roadville inhabitants learn. One thing, I think, that runs right through this research is that the way people learn is highly dependent on their upbringing. I am also happy that Shirley Heath highlights that and also shows how, given this knowledge, researchers and teachers are constantly faced with the task of learning the different ways of learning of different sets of people. The discussion of Black English and Standard English also proved quite interesting. However, the big question is how do we get ethnographers and teachers to accept their opacity and position themselves to learn about peoples' different forms of learning?

Strange Ethnography

This week's reading is coming from just one book, Ways with Words, by Shirley B Heath. In these first six chapters she is examining the socio-historical development of Roadville and Trackton. What I find particularly disturbing is that her ethnographic study of these two communities actually read like narratives or stories in which different characters in these towns play a part. we are given a kind historical transformation from the days of slavery in the South, when inhabitants in these towns were engaged with textile production in mills, unto the days of education and refinement. Maybe, more reading will reveal the larger framework of her engagement with these two communities.

Ethnography Galore

This week's readings provide concrete examples of ethnographic method of research as exemplified in the articles of Canagarajah, Kathy Mills, Athanases and Heath, and a critical theoretical approach to the method of ethnography itself in the article of Hammersley. The issues raised in Hammersley's article are useful in interrogating some of the ethnographic research practices of some analysts. I am particularly drawn to the ethnographic research conducted by Canagarajah in Sri Lanka with some college students to determine issues of domination and resistance among students. He uses the American Kernel Lessons (AKL) intermediate pre-packaged materials to see whether students would be receptive or reactive to that material. It turned out that most students resisted the AKL materials because they didn't fulfill their expected desire of learning "standard" grammar to pass standardized test. This is to say that the ESOL course did not meet the student's ESP expectations. Furthermore, most students aspired towards "Standard English" acquisition for various socio-political reasons. One question that comes to mind at this point is which context - local or global - determines the literacy choices of these students in Sri Lanka? Although most of these students found the textual situations in the AKL difficult to interpret because of cultural difference, they nevertheless aspire towards global citizenship through a monolingual approach to language.

A Move from Monolingualism, Multilingualism to Translingualism Ha!

If we were ever wondering how to implement some of the concepts we have read in regards World English in a multilingual classroom, the articles this week by Horner et al, Tardy, and Luna et al have to a very large extent solve that problem for me. Tardy really engages the issue from multiple dimensions - that is, from the point of view of national and institutional policies, teacher ideology and classroom practice. Luna and Canagarajah, in fact, offer practical six steps pedagogical approaches in effecting code meshing or code switching in our multilingual classrooms such as multilingual text selection, activation of knowledge from inside and outside the text, valuing multilingual code meshing, modeling oral code meshing, modeling written code meshing, and strategic scaffolding of text negotiation. In recognition of the fact that some teachers are not as multilingual to make this possible, they suggest that inter-departmental cooperation can be sought to help out. It doesn't always have to be with teachers from the English department. I find Horner et al's concept of translingualism also very interesting. their argument that monolingualism rejects differences, and multilingualism  recognizes cultural differences but hierarchizes them is very convincing. I am not just quite sure how translingualism solves all of that. All in all, the readings for this week were very interesting.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

This week's readings are dense, intense, and insightful. I find the search for an appropriate name to reflect shifting trends in Applied Linguistics, methodological trajectory, and current practices quite interesting. The history of Contrastive Linguistics from Kaplan to more current theorists like Connor and Kubota shows the amount of research work that has gone into the way that linguists imagine similarities and differences of language performances across cultures. I am particularly impressed by Kubota's analysis of the ideological motivation that underpin the desire to to differentiate cultures in order to hierarchize them. In this age of cross-cultural flows and globalization, one wonders how authentic cultures are to even warrant an analysis of differences. One thing that is noticeable in all the approaches and methodologies of Contrastive Rhetoric is the assumption that native speakers of standard varieties of English don't make the same mistakes that non-native speakers make. If native speakers of standard varieties of English in college classrooms struggle with similar issues like paragraph coherence, punctuation, spelling, and appropriate word choice, why is Contrastive Rhetoric only focusing on ESL students? A more meaningful approach, in trying to understand why language users (both native and non-native) perform differently in language acquisition, will be to study not only on how cultures enables language acquisition, but also how language performance is idiosyncratic. That is, the fact that someone is a native speaker of a standard variety of English does mean he or she has a high level of acquisition of that language. Another point worth noting is that there are some mistakes made by ESL students which are driven by the inherent contradictions of certain English Language usages and nothing to do with one's native language or culture. For instance, why do we play soccer in a field, sleep in a bed, but don't put food in a table when all of them are surfaces? The cultural logic that sometimes guide these constructions are sometimes lost to ESL students. Thus faced with this kind of false logic that sometimes characterize certain English usages, I will be tempted as an ESL student to say "put the food in the table." But this has nothing to do with my culture or native language.

Contrastive Rhetoric: How Native is our "Native" Languages

This week's readings introduce us to the concept of contrastive rhetoric, that is, the analysis of the writing of second language writers from the perspective of L1 interference. In other words traditional contrastive rhetoric worked on the assumption that the mistakes made by second language learners happens because of L1 interference. However, this theoretical position has been critiqued by recent contrastive theorists in favor of a contextual analysis of language performance. As noted by Canagarajah last week, it is not all mistakes in the writings of ESL users that is derived from L1; sometimes they are intentional and driven by certain ideological and identity issues. It has also been noted that the traditional contrastive approach tended to compartmentalize cultures, and looked at them as exclusive from each other. However, even with more current approaches of contrastive rhetoric that looked at language performance in specific contexts and for specific purposes, there is still a unidirectional analytical approach - that is, how ESL students with a native language (which is fixed) perform in the acquisition of the standard variety of English. The question that confronts us then is how native is our "native" language? In this age of globalization and transcultural flows, our native languages are affected by  lexical changes, code meshing, and even certain rhetorical strategies from the standard variety of English which in turn influence ESL writing. My point is our native languages are not as "native" as they were before language contact with standard varieties of English. Thus, there are noticeable changes in both our native languages and interlanguages from this contact.

World Englishes Autonomization

The readings for this week (Canagarajah and You) specifically focuses, I think, on the status of WE both as an object of inquiry, and as something that merits inclusion into college composition studies. I think both Canagarajah and You are arguing for the autonomy of WE in terms of its discursive practices, and its potential to negotiate meaning without recourse to the lexical structure, and syntax of native languages. A very strong argument that runs through their articles is that it is not every time that lexical and syntactical varieties of WE are derived from native language interference; some times, it is the result of certain contextual demands. This is what leads You to investigate the rhetorical strategies in the postings of the virtual community  of white-collar Chinese workers as independent linguistic practices from the influence of Chinese language. Canagarajah also identifies his student's expression "can be able to" not as the result of native language interference, but as a conscious choice motivated by "ideological considerations." So while WE continue to be shaped by globalization, and native language interference, it can also be seen as an autonomous linguistic entity that merits inclusion in multicultural classrooms; and that also requires careful research methods as an object of inquiry.