Rachael Shapiro

learner. teacher. maker.

Search Results Tag: standard academic english

Elbow, Peter. “Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond ‘Mistakes,’ ‘Bad English,’ and ‘Wrong English.’”

by Rachael

Published on: September 23, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:contrastive rhetoric, geneva smitherman, john ogbu, lisa delpit, mother tongue, peter elbow, politics of discourse, standard academic english, victor villanueva, walter ong

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Elbow, Peter. “Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond ‘Mistakes,’ ‘Bad English,’ and ‘Wrong English.’” JAC: Journal of Advanced Composition 19.3 (1999): 359-388. Print.

Summary

In this lovely essay (lovely thanks to it’s mix of comp-iness, empathy, optimism, and attention to critical race issues), Peter Elbow addresses the question of how writing teachers can preserve the confidence and cultural sanctity of those whose dialects of English have been labeled “wrong” or “bad,” while also facilitating their competence and development in the codes of power in the academy, or, SWE. In response he offers his solution, in which he invites students (though doesn’t require them) to write in their “mother tongue” until they are prepared for submitting final drafts, which he requires to be copy-edited in the conventions of SWE. To accomplish this, he encourages students to seek out peers, writing tutors, family members, or even paid services.

Combatting some likely objections, he relies on linguists and scholars like Delpit, Ogbu, Ohmann, Ong, Smitherman, and more. He argues that “Standard Written English is no one’s mother tongue,” (362). Borrowing from Ong, he defends against critiques that diverse languages make different meanings distinctly possible (and therefore cannot be translated), with citations like Villanueva. He argues that rather than a pure assimilation, writing in one’s mother tongue is a radical move toward preservation, since few people are literate therein. The writing, and hence further social practice, of a mother tongue in effect ends up further preserving its life span. Copy-editing and conforming to SWE, rather, does not colonize the mother tongue–since those are primarily oral in use–but rather encourages development in additional forms of rhetoric and thinking.

Quotes

…we shouldn’t be too quick to assume speakers of stigmatized dialects must abandon all the rhetorical and linguistic habits of their culture. (377)

Linguists tell us that dialects tend to drift toward the dominant language and to die out. I don’t think minority dialects can survive and flourish unless they come to be legitimate for writing. Given the growing recognition of English as a world language rather than merely the language of the UK and the US, however, it’s not unrealistic to imagine a future where multiple and very distinct dialects of English are legitimate and widely used for writing. (37*)

Still, I suspect that dialects can only survive and prosper if they are widely used–in writing and for various purposes. This will probably result in some change, but I’m worried about the survival of dialects if people try too hard to preserve them in their “pure” or unmixed form. [...] When students can write early drafts in home dialect and home rhetoric, I think that both their language and their thinking will be stronger and be more their own–even if not remaining pure. (380)

It may be difficult for speakers of nonmainstream dialects to copy-edit final drafts, but not as difficult as trying to write all their drafts in SWE. The same goes for “giving in”: it may be galling to give in on final drafts to a culture that seems bent on destroying your culture–but not as galling as giving in on all drafts, all writing. (382)

Perhaps this is the most important benefit for speakers of stigmatized dialects. We can show them that writing provides a safer site for language use than speaking–easier access to linguistic power. That is, when they speak to mainstream listeners they must use correct mainstream English–even down to intonation–or risk stigmatization; but when they write to mainstream readers, they can do most of their work in their mother tongue and still end up with a text in SWE. (388)

Kirklighter, et al. Teaching Writing with Latino/A Students.

by Rachael

Published on: April 6, 2011

Categories: critical pedagogy, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2007, cristina kirklighter, identity, latino/a, standard academic english, writing pedagogy

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Kirklighter, Cristina, Diana Cardenas, and Susan Wolff Murphy, eds. Teaching Writing with Latino/A Students. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.

Summary

The book is a great collection of essays that come out of all levels of HSIs (Hispanic Serving Institutions) which suggests ways for teachers to incorporate the needs of Hispanic writers into their composition pedagogies.

Forward: A nice and politically situated call for the work this book does: to begin to theorize the teaching of writing with one of the largest and most overlooked groups of Othered writers.

Intro: lays a quick history and gives overview of the book.

Chapter One: “Teaching Writing at Hispanic-Serving Institutions.” In this chapter, Beatrice Mendez Newman argues that we all need to pay more attention to the effects of our linguistic imperialism on Hispanic writers, and that previously unprepared teachers should be prepped by those with experience on how to best cultivate such pedagogies. She gives several tips like understanding the students and their families, not labeling students as ESL, establishing a community of learners, and making oneself available to students. She makes a really interesting suggestion for “directive conferences” (32). Great citations.

Chapter Five: “A Bilingual Approach to College Composition,” invokes Villanueva’s description of feeling linguistically colonized and advocates for a writing classroom that uses both English and students’ home languages to help them feel more accomplished at both. Suggests methods for constructing a bilingual classroom for teachers with various degrees of comfort, and includes suggestions for specific texts in an appendix. References Elbow’s “Mother Tongue” quite a bit.

Chapter Eight: “It Is All in the Attitude–The Language Attitude.” Isabel Baca received a grant to study what Latino/a students wanted from their writing classes. She describes the outline of course assignments and offers her analysis of student responses to a survey. The results suggest that students want more one on one time with the instructor, no timed writing scenarios, and an institutional task force to support them, as well as the reconsideration of mainstream placement. She argees with “Grosjean’s definition of bilingualism that gets beyond the interpellation of monolinualism’s imperialistic attitudes: “bilinualism as the regular use of two languages,” which withholds assessment of appropriate use functions of any particular language (151). Another awesome quote of his: “A bicultural individual, for example, a Mexican American, is not two monoculturals; the bicultural individual combines and blends the two cultures to produce a unique cultural configuration” (152). She articulates (drawing on Baker and Jones) that the monolingual perspective creates harmful language attitudes in and towards the bilingual student. Good English is appropriate English. See Hagemann, 2003: “A Metalinguistic Approach.” She offers a nice list of things educators should do in their classrooms on page 157.

Chapter 10: ” The Politics of Space and Narrative in the Multicultural Classroom.” Robert J. Affeldt argues that “at this intersection of meaning and bodily space, we can, perhaps, best engage minority students (Latino/a and others) who may have different experiences of the body and how it is shaped by culture” (193). Considering the power of narrative, the author asks: “how is narrating like reasoning” and “how can narrating help our students challenge stereotypes that may limit their ability to negotiate cultural space” (195)? For Affeldt, narrative contains what Aristotle termed energia, “the energy and motion of living events and action” (194), and can help students link personal experience and analysis (195-6). Narrative can be argument. He concludes that bodies enable meaning-making, and that personal writing is political. He writes:

In this respect, the concrete and abstract are not opposed terms but operate as components of a larger ecology of simultaneous relationships that interact with each other. We rely on the concrete, and our personal connection to it, to access crucial source structure that we use to generate and extend meaning. Ultimately, our bodies provide us with a way of realizing and shaping meaning–a way into language, thinking, and social discourse. (198)

These negotiations of self and culture, I discovered, were neither private nor public but blended the two, for they involved personalizing the highly general and politically biased meanings that we all inherit. (201)

I have attempted to illustrate how two student writers, when asked to enter into conversation with a text, occupy space in the underlying narrative cohering the text’s argument. These students are doing more than using narratives to provide evidence. Much like contemporary essayists and scholars, they are narrating as a way of “becoming” in order to generate category structure about personhood so that they can reason about what it means to be Latino/a or Native American in popular culture. Narratives allow us to reason, to abstract, and generalize because they compel us in our everyday discourse to reorganize and reinterpret such features as space, time, action, and character. They are political to the extent that they allow us to access concepts at that point where meanings emerge from our personal sense of embodied space. (207)

Bizzell, Patricia. “What Happens When Basic Writers Come to College?”

by Rachael

Published on: February 8, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1986, academic discourse, Basic Writing, basil bernstein, patricia bizzell, race, richard rodriguez, standard academic english, world view

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Citation: Bizzell, Patricia. ”What Happens When Basic Writers Come to College?” Landmark Essays on Basic Writing. Eds. Kay Halasek and Nels Highberg. Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press, 2001. 15-24. Print.

Summary: She looks at three common approaches to answering the question posed in her title. One is that there’s a “clash among dialects;” one says they face a clash “of discourse forms;” and one explains that ways of thinking are connected to particular cultural epistemologies (15-17).

If we see the relation between dialect, discourse coventions, and ways of thinking as constituting a language community, then we can no longer see dialects or discourse conventions as mere conveyances of thoughts generated prior to their embodiment in language. Rather, dialect and discourse generate thoughts, constitute worldview. (17-8)

When teachers see students’ problems in only one of these ways–when they see it as only a dialect problem, or only a thinking problem–they risk similarly narrow views of basic writers’ experiences. We can correct this excessively narrow focus through the notion of a language community: that is, a community that coheres because of common language-using practices. (167)

Thus basic writers, upon entering the academic community, are being asked to learn a new dialect and new discourse conventions, but the outcome of such learning is acquisition of a whole new world view. (168)

It seems, then, that biculturalism is likely to be very difficult when the academic world view is one of the world views involved , because the academic seeks to subsume other world views to which the students may retain alliance. (171).

But precisely because of the hegemonic power of the academic world view, my hypothesis is that they will also find its acquisition well worth the risks. (173)

Discussion: A problem here is that this theory of language recognizes that language is political and that meaning cannot be directly translated between discourses, while still privileging academic discourse. We can see that there are, hence, still some elements of racism underlying such understandings- as sort of separate but not equal move. This is a difficult point for me to acknowledge, in part because I really respect Bizzell and see her as a sort of intellectual role model for myself. Meanwhile, I also see her leftist leaning and desire to want to help those who are socially disadvantaged through the teaching of writing, while not quite making the move that would reveal and challenge her own unearned linguistic privilege. This is the inherent problem with the remedial model of basic writing scholarship: while it seeks to serve the students’ needs, it does so in a way that only assuages their difficulties, without posing radical change to the system that ultimately created those difficulties, the same system that benefits those scholars.

Bizzell, Patricia. “Basic Writing and the Issue of Correctness, or, What to Do with Mixed Forms of Academic Discourse.”

by Rachael

Published on: February 8, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2000, altdis, basic writers, Basic Writing, geneva smitherman, hybridity, keith gilyard, patricia bizzell, standard academic english, victor villanueva

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Citation: Bizzell, Patricia. “Basic Writing and the Issue of Correctness, or, What to Do with Mixed Forms of Academic Discourse.” Journal of Basic Writing 19 (2000): 4-12. Print.

Summary: This article looks at the function of hybrid academic discourse for basic writers. She criticizes the ways in which basic writers are seen as deficient at performing academic writing, which is a supposed problem that we must fix, and claims instead that “Standard English and traditional academic discourse are no longer the only discursive resources used for serious intellectual work” (5). This essay serves as a refinement of her earlier piece listed below, but focuses on the potentiality of hybridity as a tool for basic writers. She insists that home literacies can be just as apt to contribute to students’ learning, and turns to an investigation of the ‘hybridity’ metaphor as a way to understand how languages are already hybrid. Bizzell reaches the important conclusion that a conscious pedagogy will understand the evolution and multiplicities of language relative to its location, and that “if traditional ‘correctness’ is no longer the issue, student skill and application still will be important” (11). Bizzell’s point is well-taken, and yet we must consider what “skills” are important, and determined by whom, and who will assess “application,” and according to whose rubric. Even within our own discourse about hybridized and mixed discourses, SAE is given privilege at the same time it is undermined (ie “no longer the only:” it never was). This essay helps get at the indefinable quality of any discourse, including SAE.

Quotes:

It might be more accurate to say that what has remained constant is the privileged social position of whatever currently counts as academic discourse. Teachers use their own preferred linguistic standards in functioning as gatekeepers to higher education, limiting access along already established lines or race, class, and gender privilege. (6)

For pedagogical materials to be truly local, they probably should be developed on site, and in collaboration with the students one has in front of one in any particular semester. (11)

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