I'm interested this week in exploring Canagarajah's uptake of Lave and Wenger's seminal study on discourse communities, particularly in the ways that the former sees the notions of language and access mediating discourse community membership in complex ways. In "A somewhat legitimate and very peripheral participation," Canagarajah writes: “The problem is that certain degrees of legitimacy, peripherality, and participation are constructive, and certain others are not. Lave and Wenger do not fully appreciate the fact that constructs such as 'peripherality' and 'participation' are not absolute. They are relative and relational. To what degree should one enjoy peripherality in a community in order to be effectively inducted into its practices and become a legitimate participating member? What amount of participation qualifies as acceptance of one as a legitimate member of that community?” (198). The relativity and relationality of language/discourse community participation that Canagarajah identifies remain paramount for novice speakers attempting to gain access in any community governed by its own language rules, as these speakers on the periphery may be facing asymmetrical means to access, discordant antecedent genres and vernaculars, and tacit linguistic boundaries only apparent to a given community's insiders.
While I think that in "The Place of World Englishes" Canagarajah models much of the pedagogical work needed to empower student to negotiate the above impediments in academic settings (and You furthers this ideology in his two pieces), I argue that much of this empowerment comes from both novice and expert speakers alike sharing the stories of their linguistic navigation journeys. Just as literacy narratives offer writing researchers a way to conceive of the many literacies writers bring to bear across a range of writing situations, language participation narratives (I think that'd be a good name) offer speakers to contextualize and reflect on the strategies they used as they entered into new discourse communities. Canagarajah offers on excellent exmaple of such a narrative in his "A somewhat..." piece. But I'd like to offer my own here.
Yesterday, I began brewing beer.
While the community of those who enjoy tasting, brewing, and sharing good craft beer may not seem like a site ripe for linguistic study, I have already begun to see how far out on the periphery of this community I am, and I am already testing linguistic strategies for legitimizing my participation. For example, on my first trip to the Hop Shoppe in downtown Bloomington (the place where you purchase supplies for brewing), I simply said something along the lines of "This is my first home brew. Tell me what I need." The expert (owner) then embarked on a long monologue filled with a barrage of words and terms that sounded foreign to me--"chiller" (noun; a device that is able to quickly cool the beer), "malt extract" (noun; a powdered substance made from ground up barley), "rack" (verb; to fill a container, like the kind used for fermentation), "gravity" (noun; a measure of the density of a liquid compared to that of water). This was truly its own variety of English, with lots of functional shifts and in-group speech. My head swimming with these terms, I went home and immediately began to re-read all the beer brewing resources I own (several books) and scour homebrew forums and websites for more terms that I could appropriate (that is, use without fully understanding what they mean) for my next visit to the store. When I returned today, I was able to tell the owner that I had "pitched the yeast too hot"--to which he made a panicked face, as this basically means that I killed the yeast that would consume sugars and make alcohol, thus ruining my first ever batch of beer. In other words, though I had enough language to pass as someone on the inside, I have not yet acquired the means to pair this new variety of speech with the practices of the community.
The point of this brief and sad tale is that, as Canagarajah notes, “[S}peakers 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). Such preparedness helped me negotiate the differences between what I was saying to the brew shop owner and how much I actually knew about the practices of the community--and though this is a small-scale example, I believe that we can find the same kinds of linguistic and discursive negotiations, ever-shaped by the relational and the relative factors working on a particular speaker's resources, in our students.
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