Torrington: Considering translingual writing, or "what writers are doing with language and why"

To me, the implications for issues of translingual writing become most apparent when we consider the four levels (national, state, institutional/programmatic, and teacher) Tardy discusses in her article. As I am particularly interested in writing program and writing center administration, I take as foundational premise the understanding that writing is a negotiated, dynamic, complex, situated, culturally and historically conditioned activity. However, that notion, anchored in strong evidence from contemporary writing studies and activity theory research, often gets effaced at each of Tardy's aforementioned levels for a variety of reasons, including budget, student need, and perception of writing pedagogy. This effacement results in a fundamental disconnect between writing center and writing studies pedagogy—and such a disconnect ultimately does a disservice to students, as it reinforces a range of current-traditional writing ideologies.Yet as this week's readings demonstrate, this disconnect also enforces a range of hegemonic and exclusive language ideologies.

A potential response to these detrimental ideologies comes from a translingual approach to writing instructions, which I would argue is akin to a genre studies/CHAT based pedagogy as it "recognize[s] that
we are all language learners . . . that learning language is necessarily continuous precisely because language is subject to variation and change . . . that language learners are also language users and creators . . . [and that] mastery must be redefined to include the ability of users to revise the language that they must also continuously be learning—to work with and on, not just within, what seem its conventions and confines" (Horner et. al. 308). These core recognitions mirror a CHAT pedagogy's interest in helping writers understand that we are all writing researchers negotiating the same concerns listed above.

One important resource for disseminating an reinforcing these complex and contingent notions of language and writing across the university community lies in the space of the writing center. The CCCC second language writing statement makes particular mention of writing centers, noting:

"Writing centers offer crucial resources to second language students. These students often visit the writing center seeking support in understanding writing assignments, developing a piece of writing, and to gauge reader response to their writing. They may also seek input on interpreting teacher feedback or assessment and learning more about nuances of the English language.  Therefore, it is imperative that writing centers model and discuss effective approaches for working with second language writers in tutor training, make available reference materials specific to language learners such as dictionaries on idiomatic English, and hire tutors with specialized knowledge in second language writing.  Writing centers that hire multilingual tutors will have someone who can provide second language writing students with first-hand writing strategies as well as empathy." (CCCC Statement)

The above offers  good starting point, but I believe that in order to counter long-held monolingual ideologies, it is important for the writing center to do more than just hire multilingual tutors and make available second language writing resources. Rather, the writing center must shift its own pedagogy toward helping students develop an understanding of how their linguistic and writing knowledges have built up over time and what tools (artifacts, relationships, knowledge bases) of learning they may already have or need to develop in order to work within the fluent, dynamic contexts of communication. In short, then, the writing center must serve as an anchor space, from which students can become comfortable developing language and writing habits/ways of thinking critically that facilitate their "investigat[ion of] . . . differences in all features of written language, including syntax, punctuation, formatting, media, organization, and genre, [and the ability to address] these in terms of their interrelations" ( Horner et. al. 312).

Torrington: Critical Contrastive Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogies

The notion of critical contrastive rhetoric, particularly as it's taken up Kubota, and, to an extent, Connor and Li (as intercultural rhetoric), strikes me as not only useful for the field of linguistics as a whole, but also crucial to questions of language and writing pedagogy--that is, a critical contrastive pedagogy seeks not to render disparate languages merely "separate but equal" but to explore how languages are constructed, taken up, passed on, and revised through ideological constructs largely based on embodied realities of power. As Kubota notes, this undertaking cannot be realized within current-traditional, explicit, or process based language and writing pedagogies (13-14). 

For me, such an undertaking directly relates to the problems with the commonplace of transfer in the field of rhetoric and composition. Most writing studies scholars assume that transfer of learning, if it happens at all, can only happen in context (and thus, cannot really "transfer" per se). The problem with the commonplace is that it reifies the field's sense of responsibility for "teaching students how to write" and thus works to reinscribe (re-prescribe?) more explicit pedagogies. Loosening this commonplace begins with an interrogation of its base assumptions and guiding questions. My particular interest in transfer and learning theories lies in how a writer learns to write—an interest that necessitates a consideration of literacy. Questions motivating this interest include: What is literacy? What counts as a literate act? How do we know someone has learned to write when we see it? Who gets to decide that someone has learned to write? Who decides what good writing looks like? When do we know writing activities have transferred, and what counts are transfer? Which activities are transferable? These questions reflect the fact that debates about literacy in the field of rhetoric and composition traditionally position the concept as invoking a set of binaries: literate vs. illiterate, reading and writing vs. orality,  informed vs. ignorant; consequently, the term literacy has come to connote a singular, acontextual cognitive understanding of printed English text.

Similarly, the notion of language learner invokes binaries that pit L1 against L2, native English speaker vs. nonnative speaker, etc. I argue that critical contrastive pedagogies can help negotiate the seemingly fixed boundaries delineating these binaries by giving students the language (and the "permission"/means) to explore the ways their own unique language ideologies can position them as communicators in the world. As Kubota notes, such a pedagogy demands that we ask the following questions WITH our students (as opposed to asking them TO our students): "How do languages become positioned in the world?, How do language users, in turn, become positioned by language?, Who benefits by particular positionings of languages?, etc. Ultimately, sorting out such understandings of what writing [and communication in general] entails, what it ‘‘looks’’ like (Who decides this?), and how it gets done (again, Who decides and why?) is a discursively constructed process and cannot be supplanted, manipulated, or controlled simply by a teacher’s belief that 'English writing is linear and yours is not'" (21). For me, these questions become crucial to both language and writing classrooms (and, by extension, spaces like the writing center that often serve L2 populations), as asking them becomes the catalyst for what writing studies scholar Kevin Roozen has called “instances of disruption and ontogenesis” (Invited Lecture, Illinois State University, Fall 2012), or moments in the activities of writing [or speaking] where discontinuities compel writers [or speakers] to shift or expand their  practices; these instances are often marked by remediation and repurposing, as writers [or speakers]  negotiate how their own diverse literate experiences work within the cultural and historical contexts of a particular composing practice or genre.

Torrington: Complicating Contrastive Rhetoric

Connor's and Kubota's texts push me to consider the ways that communication gets taken up across cultural, social, and historical context, as well as the ways these shifting communicative systems get studied and theorized across the disciplines. Even as Connor works to articulate a more fluid framework for contrastive rhetoric, she operates under particular notions of genre and writing that, if codified, could limit the domain of contrastive rhetorical studies in counterproductive ways. For example, she writes: "although contrastive rhetoric has often defined national cultures in the received mode, researchers in contrastive rhetoric have certainly not interpreted all differences in L2 writing as stemming from the L1 or interference from the national culture. Instead, these researchers have explained such differences in written communication as often stemming from multiple sources, including L1, national culture, L1 educational background, disciplinary culture, genre characteristics, and mismatched expectations between readers and writers" ("New Directions" 504). Given that new research paths in the fields of literacy and writing studies show how the trajectories of literate activity across a range of situations, I argue that merely pluralizing the sources of difference across cultures fails to account for the contingent, shifting relationships among a writer's or speaker's communicative resources. In other words, though it may be possible (and in some cases, even useful) to map out and contrast patterns of speech or writing across contexts, such an investigation must necessarily account for the dynamic and often tacit influences acting on a language learner or writer at any given moment in his or her development.

Contrastive rhetoric studies, then, must operate within frameworks that allow it, as Kubota notes, "to escape a binary logic of same versus different, diverse versus homogeneous, and unsystematic versus systematic" (15). Such frameworks will help scholars negotiate with language learners "critique[s] of cultural representations from the concepts of discourse and power/knowledge" (15). Another potential framework for navigating power structures in language comes from writing studies. In “Awareness Versus Production: Probing Students’ Antecedent Genre Knowledge,” Natasha Artemeva and Janna Fox ask “When instructors walk into an introductory . . . classroom on the first day of class, what should they assume about their students’ prior knowledge of disciplinary genres? How could they find out which past experiences may allow students to engage appropriately with communication tasks in a new discipline and which may hinder such engagement?” Writing instructors are interested in applying these kinds of questions to our understanding of our students’ experiences with writing and their knowledge of how writing works in specific settings, and I believe that studies of contrastive rhetoric could adopt a similar conceptual framework of antecedent knowledge--particularly as such a concept not only helps students and instructors gauge prior language knowledge, but also it compels students to be aware of the full complexities of their antecedent literate practices, which in turn helps them repurpose those practices in new contexts. 

Hip-hop doc

Sarah and I didn't have time to show it last week, but here's an interesting documentary on global hip-hop:

Global Hip-Hop Part 1

Global Hip-Hop Part 2

Torrington: On the Art of Deep Hanging Out; Or, Discourse Communities and Homebrewing

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.

Torrington (and Hercula) Hiphopopotamus

Torrington: Language Ideologies Response

This week, I want to take seriously Gee's claim that "Theory and meaning are moral matters" (20)--that is, I want to consider how such an injunction serves to frame inquiries into language ideologies toward the goal of social justice. For me, the readings this week remain connected by the idea that the study of language must be an ethical endeavor, grounded in the notion that the many languaged beings we share our world with not only stand as equally "correct" in their semiotic systems, but also equally agented to communicate through them. Such an endeavor, as Matsuda and Matsuda note, is particularly complicated, as "[t]he dominance of codified varieties of English is constantly being reified by well-intended teachers and editors who try to help students and authors learn features of standardized written English" (371). In other words, in an effort to help students "compete" with native speakers on a global scale, teachers often end up reproducing deeply held beliefs that the English language is a great equalizer.

The problem with the fact that such a commonplace has not only become stuck in popular rhetorics but also in the institutional channels that comprise much of contemporary education around the globe is that this belief inherently does violence to others by failing to account for the agencies they posses--or, as Gee puts it, the discourses they posses, as    “Discourses are ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing . . . Discourses are ways of being ‘people like us.’ They are ‘ways of being in the world.’ They are ‘forms of life.’ They are socially situated identities. They are, thus, always and everywhere social products of social identities” (3). In some ways, then, failing to recognize the agency of another's language by valoring "standard" English equates to failing to recognize their personhood. Such a failure indicates, to paraphrase Bamgbose, a collective allowance of the opportunity offered by globalization "to denegrate into opportunism" (360). 

How, then, do we as teachers and scholars and researchers reclaim for both ourselves and our students the linguistically diverse resources offered us by globalization? As Matsuda and Matsuda argue, we can begin by  refusing "to overly valorize either the dominant discourses or alternative discourses. Furthermore, we as teachers and researchers need to play a greater role in challenging the undue privileging of the dominant discourses that have been institutionalized as the status quo" (373). Important to this refusal is Pennycook's "pluralization strategy," which demands that we "locate [world] . . . Englishes within a more complex vision of globalization . . . [one that] seeks to understand the role of English both critically--in terms of new forms of power, control, and destruction--and in its complexity--in terms of new forms of resistance, change, appropriation, and identity" (5). We can also, as a wise woman once told me (shout out to Sarah Hercula!) draw upon the rich linguistic resources our students carry with them in order to open up conversations about language, power, writing, and speaking. 

But I argue that it is also imperative for those of us interested in taking up Gee's call at the beginning of this post to reframe our thinking about/approach to teaching and researching language. Just as access to the English language has come to signify a level playing field (so to speak), so too has access to technology (the myth of the so-called digital divide). In her book Digital Dead End: Fighting For Social Justice in the Information Age, Virginia Eubanks talks about her work with a local YWCA. She details her efforts to provide the women of the YWCA access to technology, believing that access was the key to helping these people succeed in securing better jobs. Yet her assumptions proved to be wrong, as the majority of these women already held low-paying, long hours tech-support jobs where they accessed and used technology daily, and they also used technology extensively in their interactions with social services offices. Lack of interaction with technology was not the problem, then--the limiting and often exploitative nature of these interactions was. As such, Eubanks learned that in order to empower a group of people by giving them a tool/teaching them a particular skill, it is necessary to meet people where they're at. In terms of language use/English language instruction, I argue that the same theory applies--and I am confident that such a theory remains firmly rooted in a morality focused on social justice.