Language Diversity in the Classroom
A pervasive, collective memory in our culture is that of the “Melting Pot” as a force to amalgamate all immigrants coming to United States shores into the ideal “American.” Unfortunately, along with the rather violent imagery of “melting” away differences in a fiery cauldron and pouring the shapeless substance into a “mold,” this concept was never truly about everyone jumping into the melting pot to create a new American. Rather, it was about those different from the white, European, colonial legacy being expected to somehow conform to that standard.
Along with his egalitarian rhetoric in our nation’s founding documents, Thomas Jefferson also wrote of the lesser humanity of African slaves, and policies in the 19th century were aimed at systematically eradicating Native American culture and language (see Hartman). Even so, our “imagined community” (to borrow Mary Louise Pratt’s phrase) in the mainstream of this nation is an ideal of a homogeneous American culture and language, in spite of the diverse reality, and of persistent discrimination and marginalization by language.
Due to this imagined community, difference from the perceived “standard” culture and language comes to be seen as deficit, and language differences as varying degrees of illiteracy. “School English” becomes “correct” English, and community vernaculars, natural languages though they are, become “broken English” and “wrong.” The effect of this deficit model is that minorities and students of lower socioeconomic levels are not reinforced in school for school success, and they do not attend or graduate from college in numbers representative of their populations. We must be more inclusive so the students who speak nonstandard dialects are able to succeed in school.
The grand experiment of “open admissions” in City University of New York in the 1970s welcomed many nontraditional students into the university system, and many successfully completed bachelor’s degrees (see Soliday). However, the public debate and backlash helped form the new “basic writing” program that in effect put an additional barrier up before these students, calling them “barbarians,” and sending them the message that they needed to master Standard American English before being allowed to do academic work of any kind (see Horner and Lu).
Our societal notion of “monolingualism”—English Only, and Only One Type of English as an educational and cultural —is out of sync with the cultural make up of our nation and with the world. Looking at two projections for world-wide spoken English in the year 2050, even with variance between the two, it’s clear that much more of the English spoken in the world will be English as a second or additional language versus English as the sole or first language (“native” English) (Canagarajah 588). Languages develop and grow, and English is changing. It isn’t realistic to expect our narrow concept of “standard” English to remain static, nor is it egalitarian to exclude from academic English the language variations spoken by so many of our citizens.
As a discipline, composition has begun to answer these concerns, beginning with the 1974 statement by the Conference on College Composition and Communication of “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.” But many composition teachers are either unaware of this statement or don’t know how to implement it into their classrooms, wondering, “Does this mean we let students write any way they want and discontinue teaching Edited American English (EAE)?” The result is a theoretical celebration of diversity theoretically but pedagogical confusion. One answer is the recent focus in the composition field of “contact zones” in the classroom, which explore teaching EAE within the context of other “Englishes” or vernaculars. In a contact zone classroom, students and teachers negotiate about how they will use language by considering what society wants and why and how they will use that information. EAE is definitely still taught, but the focus is on how to be effective in difference rhetorical situations with the language that best serves the purpose.
In order for our educational system to live up to the true egalitarian creed of our nation, we must include language diversity in our classrooms. We as teachers must consider how we will include nonstandard dialects in our classrooms and in student writing and create pedagogy that reflects our beliefs and goals for students.
English-Only and Only One Correct English
A current question in the field of composition is, “How much do we include varieties of English other than Edited American English (EAE) in our classrooms?” Composition studies has rested on an underlying assumption of monolingual English as the goal of instruction, with metaphors of deficiency being used to describe students speaking other languages or nonstandard varieties of English (such as “remedial,” “developmental,” or “basic” writers). This assumption of a monolingual goal for academic writing is both deeply rooted in our nation’s history and profoundly at odds with the needs of our students in a multicultural, transnational world.
Our understanding of the monolingual bent of composition can be informed by examining the broader history of language exclusion in our nation. Violently discriminatory rhetoric about language has been in place since our nation’s inception, obfuscating racial and socioeconomic factors through its conceptualization of language as “autonomous” or separate from community and purpose. The recent English-only movement, the backlash against bilingual education, and the literacy “crisis” in our schools imply a threat to our standard language and therefore our identity as a nation. By implication, we nostalgically look back to an idealized period in the past when the “melting pot” really worked and all those who came to our shores for new opportunities acculturated into a homogeneous “American Culture” seamlessly and found the “American Dream” (see Hartman). National rhetoric is of democracy and meritocracy, but this mythical norm of unity and opportunity through one common language never existed (Hartman; Horner and Trimbur “Introduction”). Rather, our history as a nation is of privileging certain specific forms of culture and language over others, thereby marginalizing those who haven’t been “melted” into conformity in the crucible of homogeneity. Contrary to the stated goals in our nation’s revered historical documents, those deemed “other” and different have been marginalized from the very beginning.
One of the lauded “founding fathers” of our nation’s egalitarian ideals, Thomas Jefferson, wrote, “The Negro is inferior to the white man in body and mind” (Hartman 197), and an 1868 commission on Indian affairs declared that Native Americans’ “barbarous dialects should be blotted out and the English language substituted” (Hartman 200). Rather than including the original Native Americans, or those forcibly brought here, “The history of linguistic oppression is a history of civilizing the savage, domesticating the barbarous, and Americanizing the immigrant” (Hartman 198). Our colonial history ensures that language has been used as control by the powerful over the less powerful:
In the United States, as in other imperial and colonial societies, the language of the powerful is the language sought by those wishing to ascend into “civilization.” The better one speaks “standard” English in the United States, the more likely one is to be elevated in American society. The speaker of “Standard” English is then able to assume the role of a “civilized” being and is entitled to the accoutrements of the civilized. The colonial model of language as oppression follows: the colonizer uses language to assimilate and control the colonized; the colonized strive to speak the langue of the colonizer, and develop an inferiority complex to the extent that they fall short (Hartman 199).
Language has historically been used purposely to exclude. The English-Only movement and a push for an “Anglo-Saxon” national identity grew out of the fear of the new wave of immigration in the late 19th century and placed university English departments in a key position determining who spoke and wrote “proper” English and therefore was college-ready (Berlin 22). Standard English has been seen as embodying our nation’s democratic ideals, as can be seen in Theodore Roosevelt’s words: “We must have but one flag. We must also have but one language” (Hartman 189) and “The greatness of this country depends on the swift assimilation of the aliens she welcomes to her shores” (191). Implied in these statements as well is that those who learn Standard English will share in the “mythical freedom enjoyed by all U.S. citizens,” in other words, “Talk like us and you will succeed like us” (Hartman 190).
In the late 19th century, entrance into college, and, by extension, the standard language needed to enter, were seen as “cultural capital” by the elite, threatened by upwardly aspiring immigrants and newly wealthy entrepreneurial workers. This cultural capital was desired as something to mark and retain one’s place in society. In his history of composition, Berlin states “By World War I, [universities were] pledging allegiance to a democratic meritocracy while upholding the time-tested values of background and breeding as their admission policies” (35). These “values” were demonstrated by passing entrance examinations and freshman composition courses very much geared toward the Standard American English (SAE) spoken by the elite (Tom Fox 23). Berlin sees this process as a “triumph of the professional middle class” in “naturaliz[ing] its own rhetorical practices, concealing ideology by denying the role of language in structuring experience” (Berlin 120).
For those who grow up in our country speaking a nonstandard dialect, the metaphor of deficit is imposed, judged by how far from the standard is their community discourse. Shor quotes Williams: “Imagine the impact on one’s self-esteem and self-concept to discover that the language that is spoken in your community and which you embrace as part of your identity is nothing more than an inferior copy of someone’s else’s language” (Shor 49). This notion of deficit is manifested in the numbers of students entering and graduating from college, with lower socioeconomic level students and minorities underrepresented (see Studley; Education Trust). We must understand and come to terms with our history of exclusion through language so we can move forward to combat the policies and rhetoric still being used to marginalize minority and lower socio-economic students whose language is not aligned with the standardized norm.
Removing Language Barriers? Open Admissions at CUNY
Theorists such as James Berlin, Tom Fox, Ira Shor, Min-Zhan Lu, and Bruce Horner have chronicled the history of marginalization of minority, lower socioeconomic, and second language students in our higher education system. These theorists point back to the period of “open admissions” at City University of New York in the 1970’s, when an unprecedented number of students not traditionally enrolled in college gained access because exclusionary, standardized testing procedures and tuition barriers were temporarily removed. Up until this time, most students in most colleges in the United States were white, middle and upper middle class, and though the make up of the student body did not change as much as the politics surrounding this turbulent time might suggest, lower socioeconomic students and minority students did enter in greater numbers than they had.
This time period heralded the birth of the heavily debated Basic Writing program, designed to help prepare and assimilate these new students, and the politics of language were brought to the forefront. These nontraditional students were admitted to the college because the politics of the time demanded it, but many of them were then marginalized within the system in non-credit basic writing courses, which they had to pass before moving on to the “real work” of college. Within composition, nontraditional students were largely shunted off to “basic writing,” skills-level classes or ESL classes, quarantined from the rest of academia until they proved themselves worthy by mastering error-free English syntax and grammar. Critical theorists like Ira Shor argue that Basic Writing was added as a “gate before the gate” of composition due to the imminent threat of “mass higher education [becoming] a near-entitlement” during open admissions (Shor 93). Basic Writing was “a new field of control to manage the time, thought, aspirations, composting and credentials of the millions of non-elite students marching through the gates of academe” (Shor 93). The rhetoric of deficiency surfaced in composition theory during this time period, setting these students apart as “different” and removing them from a long history of remediation in our country. Other metaphors of deficit were imposed during the public debate over access to higher education for non-elite students. For example, students entering college under the new Open Admissions policy were referred to as the “new barbarians,” a phrase that implies a threat against the speaker’s way of life or “civilization” and ties it to language: the definition of “barbarism” includes both “an uncivilized or primitive state” and “a word or expression which is badly formed according to traditional rules” (AskOxford.com; Horner and Lu 8).
Tom Fox argues that the assumption by the elite who had always attended college was that the new “masses” would lower “standards.” However, Fox states “we know each time standards are called into question, each time professors or educational bureaucrats begin to moan about the falling quality of student work, what’s really underfoot is a desire to make sure the same students who have always gone to college still go” (Tom Fox 7). In college entrance exams, “standards” are measured narrowly by discrete skills tests assessing mastery of de-contextualized SAE (Tom Fox 25). Furthermore, rather than allowing for continued academic language development in school, the assumption is that students cannot do any college-level work until they pass these tests and courses. Language background and political hindrances are ignored, and standards become “neutral” and “free-floating,” a supposed opportunity for any individual to succeed. “Schooled literacy” becomes “correct” literacy (Tom Fox 25). The assumptions—that certain ways of using language are considered “better”—are invisible, and therefore the debate becomes about right and wrong rather than about which community’s discourse is privileged and makes for an easier transition for students entering academia. Fox argues that literacy in EAE has been linked to morality in a way that other areas of education haven’t: “To shout with urgency that students don’t know science is to argue for science education, to claim that students are illiterate is to argue that they are unfit for college” (Tom Fox 43). We need to resist this notion of right and wrong in writing. It isn’t about not wanting quality or having high expectations for our students, but rather about making sure we help students to see what strengths they already have and to develop them through college-credit courses as opposed to “gate-keeping” and the punitive feel of non-credit classes in which students see no value and over which teachers don’t have enough developmental control.
Basic Writing and ESL composition, often non-credit prerequisites for “regular,” required composition classes, pigeon-hole non-elite students, keeping them from advancing as quickly in academics, nominally giving them access to higher education but in practice keeping them marginalized. Historically, ESL students have also been placed in non-credit, basic writing courses, with the notion that the features of their writing which differed from Standard English writing marked them as “deficient” and not ready for college-level work, along with the other students who hadn’t mastered Standard American English (Matsuda 21). These outdated models of separating out speakers of nonstandard varieties of English and ESL students from mainstream English-speaking students are outdated. Students can’t be expected to leave the ESL “compartment” and immediately be expected to write in a “native-like” way (Valdes 34), nor can those less familiar with SAE be expected to master academic language within one semester. Both ESL and basic writing students are marginalized in similar ways, victims of not having grown up with Standard English (Matsuda “Illusion”). The approach is one of “deficit,” and the assumptions are that language is separate from, and must come before, knowledge, that any language “deficiencies” will disappear in a semester in the service course of ESL or “remedial” composition, and that students will succeed only by acquiring the language of the academy or of the dominant culture, which they must absorb from us. Our universities have always included remediation of various sorts, contrary to what the public debate might have one believe (Soliday chapter 2). We must reposition marginalized, non-elite students’ academic unpreparedness in the historical continuum of remedial writing in the United States to counter the notion of an “illness” to be “cured” with remediation—a remedy—of temporary funding and emergency measures (still in place 40 years later) (Horner and Lu 18). We must find ways of including marginalized students in academia.
U.S. Monolingualism Out of Sync
Our societal notion of a monolingual ideal that excludes nonstandard dialects and discourse not only puts us on the wrong side of our purported democratic ideals, but also puts us squarely on the wrong side of world trends for the future. In projections for world-wide spoken English in the year 2050, two different scholars’ estimates predict that “native English” spoken by the first English speakers in the United States, England and other countries will be in the minority:
|
|
Graddol |
Crystal |
|
English as the sole or first language |
433 Million |
433 Million |
|
English as second or additional language |
668 Million |
462 Million |
Canagarajah 588
English is changing, as languages naturally do. As James Sledd states, “Variation in English remains, and has indeed increased, despite centuries of effort to stamp it out. Its longevity results from its utility” (277). Sledd also notes that the having a standard English by which all others are measured defines English as a world language. Having a standard is not the problem, but ignoring variations, each with its own purpose and utility behind it, and expecting the standard not to change is the problem.
As Helen Fox declares in Listening to the World, “the dominant communication style and world view of the U.S. university, variously known as ‘academic argument,’ ‘analytical writing,’ ‘critical thinking,’ or just plain ‘good writing,’ is based on assumptions and habits of mind that are derived from western—or more specifically U.S.—culture, and this way of thinking and communicating is considered the most sophisticated, intelligent, and efficient by only a tiny fraction of the world’s peoples” (xxi). As our economy becomes increasingly international and we are called on frequently to communicate with people from other cultures, whether as immigrants to our country or as part of multinational business, it behooves us to be aware of other ways of writing. Patricia Bizzell, in “The Intellectual Work of ‘Mixed’ Forms of Academic Discourses,” reviews how alternative discourses are now being used by many in academia, not only to make scholars and students new to academia comfortable, but because they “make possible new forms of intellectual work” (5). Bizzell’s example is a personal, meditative essay by a renowned (white, male) scholar in The Journal of American History, which was received with consternation and confusion by some of the readers of the journal, but ultimately deemed to have broadened the discussion and added a missing element. As Bizzell sums up her article, referring to the old fable of the blind men and the elephant—each one coming to his own incomplete conclusions because he had experienced only part of the animal—“If we want to see the whole beast, we should be welcoming, not resisting, the advent of diverse forms of academic discourse, and encouraging our students to bring all their discursive resources to bear on the intellectual challenges of the academic disciplines” (9).
Composition specialists must begin to see the “new” student population “not as a special group destined to disappear quickly into the mainstream but as a population that will significantly change the character of the entire student community in this country. Tomorrow’s mainstream student group will be made up of what we consider today to be ‘diverse’ students” (Valdes 65). Min-Zhan Lu posits that with the myriad variations of English used in the U.S. and the world today, it is more important for students to understand how to use and negotiate between these languages than it is for them to imitate one “target” language (“Living-English Work”). Helen Fox states, “we need to recognize that many of our students have been brought up to think and express themselves very differently and that these ways are worthy of our attention and understanding.” Horner chimes in with a similar theme: “While the ‘globalization’ of English might seem to be bringing about a more monolingual world, in practice it has meant more of a ‘dispersal’ and fragmentation of English, leading to both more interlanguage contact and the establishment of more varieties of English” (Horner 572). And James Sledd weighs in on the utility of any language variety that persists: “no language and no variety would long survive if it did not serve some purposes of some people better than any other language or variety serves them” (Sledd 279). We need to recognize students’ reasons for using nonstandard English and bring this discussion into the classroom. As teachers we need to “call into question our learned distastes toward nonidiomatic English lexicons and grammar—our learned inclination to view them as either exotic or downright stupid, nonsensical, incorrect” (Lu 613) and recognize the ability of these alternative forms of language to express and represent life experiences elusive to Standard English. As composition teachers we must be open to alternative discourse and vernaculars and help our students communicate in the varieties of language most useful to them.
Composition’s Response—Bringing the World into the Classroom
Composition as a field, and as individual researchers and theorists, has begun responding to the concerns of language marginalization within its discipline. In 1974 the CCCC “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” asserted that students did indeed have the right to express themselves in the discourse and dialect of their own communities. But the question remains—do we as teachers simply let students write any way they want? Do we stop teaching EAE? How do we actually bring language diversity into the classroom?
One answer being bandied about in composition theory is a pedagogy of “contact zones,” also called “border pedagogy,” in the composition classroom. This pedagogy encourages dialogue in the classroom about students’ community discourses and traditional academic discourse and counters old metaphors of complete “acculturation,” or loss of language and culture, for students who grew up speaking alternative discourses or languages other than English. No longer is unquestioned acceptance of the necessity of EAE the academic model. Neither is the vision any longer of the teacher, armed with EAE, having all the “correct” knowledge while students bring nothing of academic worthiness to class. In fact, the pedagogy of contact zones attempt to demonstrate that students need not leave behind community discourse to succeed. Within a classroom contact zone where cultures and languages meet, negotiations take place that foreground the power relations behind language use so that students are not asked to blindly adopt the language of those in power. Students negotiate discourses and choose which to use for their purposes.
This new pedagogical approach seeks to correct for deficit metaphors used previously to describe students deemed not academically prepared. Some of these metaphors were generated by well-intentioned practitioners. For example, Basic Writing pioneer Mina Shaughnessy saw academically unprepared students as “beginners,” “outsiders,” or “foreigners” within their own country, needing “growth,” “initiation into,” or teaching of the “foreign language” of academic discourse and Edited American English. Current theorists argue that seeing basic writers as beginners condescendingly labels them as cognitively less-developed and denies their adulthood and maturity. Moreover, seeing them as foreign to the language implies that they are foreigners in their own land and that a new language must be imposed on them.
In the turbulent times of Open Admissions” in CUNY, these conceptions helped early advocates of Basic Writing and Basic Writing students to convince those in power that these students were educable and worthy of tolerance of their academic unpreparedness (Horner and Lu 119), which benefited students who previously had been seen as “slow” and “nonverbal” and therefore incapable of academic work by many in mainstream institutions (Horner and Lu 118). However, the problem was that language was seen as neutral, and the assumption was that students lost nothing when leaving behind their community discourse to learn the necessary mainstream language. The conflicts students did feel, unacknowledged as they were, then often interfered with students’ ability to embrace academic discourse. A contact zone metaphor seeks to welcome students’ language and experience into the classroom with the goal of empowering students’ authorship and helping them to find a meaningful place in academia. As opposed to marginalization until or if one can master the “master” discourse, a contact zone as a new metaphor for the composition classroom embraces the idea of language as socially constructed and contextualized, leading to the idea that any teaching of language or composition discourse is necessarily political, unlike the assumption in the past that Standard English was the neutral, apolitical norm. Seeing language as apolitical is an essentialist view of language, the view that the essential meaning communicated by any discourse is the same and therefore a change in discourse style requires no shift in thinking or places no restrictions on identity even as one sheds the language of one’s community. If language is separate from meaning, one can conceptualize “autonomous” language, wholly within students and therefore disconnected from the student’s community and experiences prior to coming to school and above any conflict between communities (Adler-Kassner and Harrington).
On the other hand, contact zones allow for the fact that “different ways of using words—different discourses—might exercise different constraints on how one ‘crafts’ the meaning ‘one has in mind’” (Horner and Lu 107). From this perspective, our inner selves are contextualized in social situations, and therefore we can’t transcend our social situations. Theorists arguing for this new pedagogy, such as Horner and Lu, see all composition classes, especially the most marginalized Basic Writing classes, as contact zones where power relationships should be examined as a context for writing. Teaching the English of those in power is a form of imperialism if we do not allow students to negotiate their own language use. From this perspective, language conventions are not neutrally “correct.” Instead, changing conventions from community discourse to academic discourse changes our meanings. The teaching of standard EAE to those who communicate in other discourses creates a site of struggle between discourses because different discourses do not have equal political power. The choice of which one to use in any given situation is a political decision, and learning a new discourse will entail new ways of thinking as well as new ways of using language (Horner and Lu 106). From Horner’s and Lu’s perspectives, the boundaries between discourses are not solid, and we can teach in the “border” where they overlap:
“[N]egotiations between border residents injects a healthy sense of power relations in to the picture and refutes both the idea of the writer as autonomous individual and the notion of writers operating from a location indisputably at the center of organically unified discursive communities with shared goals, suggesting instead a conception of writing as the ongoing re-negotiation of positions in response to inevitable histories of conflict and contradiction, and a conception of the field of teaching writing as essentially a site of contestation.” (Horner and Lu 126)
A contact zone also counteracts metaphors of deficiency by recognizing and valuing students’ language variations. For example, to counteract the way African American Language is often labeled as “incorrect” use of English in mainstream classrooms, and thereby demonstrating its users’ “cognitive deficiencies,” Keith Gilyard, English professor and researcher, dispels myths surrounding African American dialect in the United States. Tracing the history of slavery, which brought Africans to American shores and then deliberately separated them by language so as to inhibit slaves’ ability to communicate with each other, Gilyard explains how new language varieties were created from African languages and English, of necessity when slaves needed to communicate with others they worked with, thus establishing a “pidgin” language and later a Creole language, as many other world languages have developed. Whereas the “deficit view” of language varieties spoken by African American labels these varieties as “broken English” and “unsystematic, inferior, and the direct cause of poor reading and writing,” in actuality, they are “rule-governed systems that have developed as a result of conflict, conquest, and culture mixing. They are equal in a linguistic sense to any other varieties of English and are not a major obstacle to literacy” (84). Furthermore, “One would be justified in saying, to the horror of many language guardians, that [Atlantic Creole—or African American Language] represents an advanced variety of English, historically speaking, particularly with respect to verb usage” due to its lack of redundant verb endings (87). All languages do change, but some changes are historically privileged and others historically marginalized, like African-American dialect in the United States. In a contact zone classroom, all languages are valued and kept in the historical and cultural context within which they developed.
In a contact zone, students are seen as having choice and power within overlapping discourse communities. Students as well as teachers get to decide “what society wants” and whether they wish to comply. Furthermore, Horner and Lu believe students in college will, in fact, choose to learn EAE because they realize the power inherent in having facility in this much-used language of society, but the point is, it will be a choice made with full understanding of why. By welcoming students’ community discourses into the classroom, contact zone pedagogy strives to overcome the pattern of imposing language on students by modeling for students the idea that standard EAE is not a “fait accompli” but instead, historically arbitrary conventions. If students realize conventions are not a matter of “right” or “wrong” or “good” or “bad” English, but rather a question of which uses of English have been historically privileged, they can see “convention” as what it implies—an agreement by a group of people. Errors can be seen as “instances of a failure on the part of both the writer and reader to negotiate an agreement (the process of offering, testing, and amending) as to the kind of relationship that should exist between them and as to the kind of significance to be attributed to the written notations offered” (Horner and Lu 141). We allow for errors when we read someone’s work who we assume has the “authority” to play with the language, but without this assumption, say with a student we think doesn’t have control of EAE, we see errors as unacceptable.
Horner advocates a negotiation between student and teacher so that EAE and the power structure of society is not seen as reified and unchanging, which denies that students do have some power (Horner and Lu 156). A negotiation would explore all the many possible meanings one can create through revision of language. From this perspective, we can question the traditional idea that “one has to know the rules before one breaks them” since the rules are arbitrarily decided based on power relationships on society. We can challenge both the “common view of “style” as belonging only to those who are beyond “error,” and a certain type of college curriculum treating matters of grammar or usage as the prerequisites to higher education” (Horner and Lu 170). We can employ a “multicultural approach” to composition which examines individual and cultural uses of words and grammar to explore how conventions and grammar change meaning and to be certain students are able to express exactly the meaning they want to. Shor advocates a multicultural syllabus that brings in all voices and backgrounds, “seeking a critical and democratic balance between community speech and the dominant usage, without denying either” (Shor 50). With this multicultural approach, we can empower students by recognizing the rhetorical abilities they already have in their community vernaculars and discourses when they arrive in the classroom.
Traditional “academic” writing is still taught, but nothing is presented as something that must be absorbed without question (Shor 35). Shor quotes Williams once again: “One of the new realities which America is going to have to accept is the fact that few Americans, regardless of their ethnolinguistic background, speak a variety of English that closely resembles the written standard. One of the answers to the questions ‘Why can’t Johnny read?’ is that Johnny speaks a variety of English that is not represented on the written page” (Shor 53). In order for all citizens to fully participate in our society, in order to live our democratic creed, we must be willing to teach in a “contact zone” where all varieties of English have a voice through which to negotiate meaning.
Practical Thoughts for Teachers in a Contact Zone
The contact zone metaphor offers teachers a useful mindset from which to begin to include language diversity in the classroom; however, the pedagogical details are still elusive. One key question we as composition teachers need to address is what our stance will be toward student writing in our classroom. Carol Severino offers a useful continuum within which we can envision ourselves:
|
|
Assimilationist |
Accommodationist |
Separatist |
|
Attitude About Cultures |
A Blended U.S. Culture |
Intersecting Cultures |
Independent Cultures |
|
Attitude About Differences |
Correct Differences |
Explain Differences |
Ignore Differences |
Severino 337
Once we situate ourselves on this continuum, we can then decide how we will respond to student writing and build our pedagogy from there. The contact zone pedagogy is situated in the “accommodationist” spot, where differences are explained through negotiation between students and the teacher. In our negotiations, through conferences or class discussions, we can show appreciation for the validity of alternative languages and discourses and encourage students to share what they bring with them to the class and what they already know about language. We start from there to help them develop their communicative abilities for a variety of possible purposes. We need to let students express why they use nonstandard forms of English—is it lack of previous instruction or purposeful use of community dialect? Is it to rebel or to capture a meaning not able to be expressed in EAE? And importantly, we need to ask, what do students most want to learn?
Examining various suggestions from theorists who have posited methods of including students’ vernaculars in the composition classroom further helps in developing a pedagogy. Peter Elbow sees room for students’ own languages in the beginning of the writing process, allowing students to fully express themselves as they draft and then develop their ideas. He believes, however, that in the short-term view, students’ final drafts should then be edited (in the classroom or through the student’s use of a copy editor) into EAE. While working for the “long-range goal of changing the culture of literacy … the short range goal [is] of helping students now” (126). Long-term goals may be to change SAE to include language diversity, but short term students will be at a disadvantage if they are not fully competent in EAE (2002). Min-Zhan Lu advocates careful conferencing with students about “errors” to be certain we don’t usurp students’ meanings but instead help them express their unique ideas. She details an example where she and her composition class negotiated with a Chinese student who had the peculiar phrase, “can able to,” used repeatedly in her writing. It turned out this was a manifestation of a struggle for the student to express an idea from her Chinese culture that was somewhere between the SAE meanings of these words. Lu and her students had a lively discussion of shades of meaning, and the student eventually settled upon “may be able to.” If this “mistake” was corrected without the discussion, the student’s precise meaning would have been lost. We as teachers need to keep this model in mind when we confront an error-ridden paper. Conversation with the student is vital here.
Suresh Canagarajah advocates what he calls “code-meshing” rather than code-switching. He agrees with Elbow that time is needed before SAE and EAE will incorporate alternative discourses, but he sees hybrid texts as a way to begin injecting change now. As an example, he uses Geneva Smitherman’s “The Historical Struggle for Language Rights in CCCC,” in which she includes her own African American vernacular to show her relationship and stance to various elements in her essay regarding language rights. For example:
“Not content with knocking Knickerbocker upside the head, Lloyd also slammed the journal and the organization” (8).
and
“Besides, as I commented to a fellow comrade (a psychologist, who was one of the founders of the Association of Black Psychologists), what else was we gon do while we was waitin for the Revolution to come?” (18).
Smitherman is a respected member of the academic academy (which Canagarajah acknowledges is why she can use nonstandard dialect successfully), and her use of her vernacular demonstrates her changing position with regard to being a member of the academic culture and challenging it. This option of “hybrid text” can give students authorship, empowerment, and help with language development, and it could slowly change language and the world, from the inside out.
Conclusion
As teachers of composition, we must consider language diversity and where we place nonstandard dialects in relation to Edited American English in our classrooms. We must consider how we will respond when students speak and write in nonstandard dialects, and how we will help students best develop their language skills to communicate in all the situations that will be required of them when they leave college. We must be open to the fluidity of English in academia, allowing room for alternative discourses in our classrooms and in student writing. We can establish “contact zones” in our classrooms to model a safe contact zone in broader society. We live in a contact zone between many cultures and languages, one in which conflict is resolved too often by excluding certain groups of people. Perhaps we can model inclusivity and explore dynamic new ways to envision the world through dynamic language. It starts with a mindset, and from there pedagogy develops. And from there, who knows, we could possibly begin to change the world.
Works Cited
Adler-Kassner, Linda and Susanmarie Harrington. Basic Writing as a Political Act: Public Conversations About Writing and Literacies. Hampton Press, Inc., New Jersey. 2002.
AskOxford.com: Oxford Dictionaries. http://www.askoxford.com/concise _oed /barbarism?view=get. Accessed on 5-14-09.
Berlin, James. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies. NCTE, 1996.
Bizzell, Patricia. “The Intellectual Work of ‘Mixed’ Forms of Academic Discourses.” in Schroeder et al, ed, AltDis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy. Boynton/Cook, 2002.
Canagarajah, A. Suresh. “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued.” College Composition and Communication. 57.4 (June 2006): 586-619.
DeLuca, Geraldine, et al, eds. Dialogue on Writing: Rethinking ESL, Basic Writing, and First-Year Composition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.
Education Trust. “Education Watch: The Nation. Key Education Facts and Figures. Achievement, Attainment and Opportunity from Elementary School Through College.” http://www.edtrust.org. Washington, DC. 2003
Elbow, Peter. “Vernacular Englishes in the Writing Classroom? Probing the Culture of Literacy.” In Schroeder et al, 2002: 126-138.
Fox, Helen. Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing. NCTE. Urbana, Illinois. 1994.
Fox, Tom. Defending Access: A Critique of Standards in Higher Education. Boynton/Cook, 1999.
Gilyard, Keith. “Let’s Flip the Script: An African American Discourse on Language, Literature, and Learning.” In DeLuca et al 2002: 83-103.
Hartman, Andrew. “Language as Oppression” the English-only Movement in the United States.” Socialism and Democracy, the bulletin of the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy. 17.1 (2003): 187-208.
Horner, Bruce. “Introduction: Cross-Language Relations in Composition.” College English 68.6 (July 2006): 569-574.
Horner, Bruce and John Trimbur. “English Only and U.S. College Composition.” College Composition and Communication. 53.4 (June 2002): 594-630.
Horner, Bruce and Min-Zhan Lu. Representing the “Other”: Basic Writers and the Teaching of Basic Writing. NCTE, 1999. ADD IN SPECIFIC ESSAYS I USE
Lu, Min-Zhan. “Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone.” in Horner and Lu, 1999: 166-190.
Matsuda, Paul Kei et al, ed. Second-Language Writing in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Bedford/St. Martin’s/NCTE, 2006.
Matsuda, Paul Kei. “Second-Language Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Situated Historical Perspective.” In Matsuda et al 2006: 14-30.
Matsuda, Paul Kei. “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition.” College English 68.6 (July 2006): 637-651.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” in Wolff, Janice M., ed. Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice Together. NCTE, Urbana, IL. 2002.
Schroeder, Christopher, et al, ed. AltDis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy. Boynton/Cook, Portsmouth, NH. 2002.
Severino, Carol. “The Sociopolitical Implications of Response to Second-Language and Second-Dialect Writing.” in Matsuda et al 2006: 333-350.
Shaughnessy, Mina. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for Teachers of Basic Writing. Oxford University Press, New York, 1977.
Shor, Ira. Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change. University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Sledd, James. “Standard English and the Study of Variation: It All Be Done for a Purpose.” Language Variation in North American English; research and teaching. 1993: 275-81.
Smitherman, Geneva and Victor Villanueva, ed. Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice. Southern Illinois University Press. 2003.
Smitherman, Geneva. “The Historical Struggle for Language Rights in CCCC.” In Smitherman and Villanueva, 2003: 7-39.
Soliday, Mary. The Politics of Remediation: Institutional and Student Needs in Higher Education. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002.
Studley, Roger E. Inequality, Student Achievement, and College Admissions: A Remedy for Underrepresentation. University of California, Berkeley, 2003.
Trimbur, John. “Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. English.” College English 68.6 (July 2006): 575-588.
Valdes, Guadalupe. “Bilingual Minorities and Language Issues in Writing: Toward Professionwide Responses to a New Challenge.” In Matsuda, et al 2006: 31-68.
Zamel, Vivian. “Strangers in Academia: The Experiences of Faculty and ESL Students Across the Curriculum.” In DeLuca et al 2002: 359-375.