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.