Beyond what we've discussed already....

If I were to try to name one common thread of the four pieces I read for class this week, I’d have to say it was “Beyond World Englishes.”  While we’ve read about plurality of languages – many different kinds or types of English – it seems as if this week’s readings are pushing us beyond regional or geographic pluralities to a resistance of even those abstract understandings. Each of these articles or chapters challenge and move beyond what we’ve been discussing. For example, while I felt I was being “linguistically correct” or “linguistically sensitive” in using a term such as NNES, I find that, really, we shouldn’t even be using such terms. As Mangelsdorf suggests, “Even a seemingly benign term such as ‘English Language Learners’ renders students’ other languages invisible” (124). Thus, we need to not be content with current theory and work toward moving even further (and, at the same time, challenging the pedagogical application, hoping practice will attempt to keep up with theory). Each of these articles this week challenged me to think beyond what I’d recently learned.

Mangelsdorf’s article on Spanglish struck a memory chord with me from my student-teaching days in the early nineties in Springfield, Illinois. The high school at which I completed my semester of student-teaching was described to me by town residents as the “moderately dangerous” high school in town. I was not placed in the school with the students from the west side of town (the more affluent side); nor was I placed in the “roughest” high school (the northeast side of town). Instead, I was placed in the high school with the kids on the southeast side. This school had a large number of African American students; and, for the most part, I was unfamiliar – and uncomfortable. I was a bit fearful for my safety: I was not accustomed to having to pass through and show my ID to a school resource officer. I grew up in a small, non-diverse town and my experience with a diverse population came at the U of I where I sat in class and boarded with a wide range of people of different backgrounds. But, my student teaching experience was with a slightly different population than the one at my university.  The text most problematic for me to teach was Huckleberry Finn with its commentary on slavery, civil rights, racism, etc. In each of the five American Lit class periods, I decided to ask the students how they wanted to “deal” with the word “nigger” in the text (we read the text aloud. We had to. These students were not going to read it on their own nightly, according to my supervising teacher). One class wanted to just say the word “nigger” as they read. Another wanted to substitute “n-word”. Yet another wanted to substitute “African-American”. I had to keep this all straight from class period to class period. Yet, it did strike me as odd that different classes had different ways in which they wanted to address this as we were reading.

I was reminded of this while reading Mangelsdorf’s narrative that some of the students were ashamed of Spanglish and that others embraced it as “their own” language. Some of her students felt that they should be free to use it as context dictated, while others viewed it as being a subaltern dialect to the subaltern Spanish language. Language attitudes definitely differed, and this is important to keep in mind so that we do not make decisions that rely on generalizations.

Another point that I’d like to follow up on with this article is Mangelsdorf’s connection of language dialects (Spanishes) with identity with her example of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera narrative (which I have on my reading list for the semester break). I’d like to explore this relationship among the concepts of languages, narrative, and identity.

The article I chose in the Cross-Language Relations in Composition text is “Resistance to the ‘English Only’ Movement: Implications for Two-Year College Composition” by Jody Millward. In this chapter, Millward reviews what was discussed in the first section of the book and then applies it to the unique culture of the two-year college. She states, “Clearly, two-year students evidence complex identities shaped by the intersections of class, working status, ethnicity, and language, and two-year college teachers struggle to find ways to address these complexities in their classrooms” (222). Because of this diverse culture, instructors at two-year colleges (as well as those teaching any FYC course) should, ideally, be prepared to teach multilingual composition courses (Matsuda in Millward 223). Millward proposes that community college faculty employ such concepts as full multilingualism, language shuttling, guanxi, and other concepts to guide their pedagogy.

Millward provides several concrete, practical examples of assignments community college teachers can implement in their classrooms. One that she mentions encourages students to examine their own language experiences in the form of the personal narrative (226). She also encourages four-year institutions to join with two-year colleges for research and practical application (228).

Alim discusses building language and cultural awareness with students as well. I actually e-mailed this article to my son’s high school English teacher and World Studies teacher as they are discussing the book Race: A History Beyond Black and White. Apparently, yesterday in their World Studies class the teacher shared her own experience teaching students who used a form of BL. The class also discussed lyrics of hip-hop and rap songs As this article had actual practical applications, I wondered if perhaps high school teachers could modify them for the high school level (either they’ll appreciate my sharing gesture or they’ll think I’m the batty mom telling them how to teach – either way, I was excited to share). At any rate, what Alim is doing in this article is reviewing some of the relevant theory behind language and identity connections, tensions, and classroom practices and then proposing a base of practical classroom projects – suggestions to increase instructors’ and students’ linguistic awareness. And did anyone else notice the code-meshing? See page 173, “To keep it real with our students, …”.

A challenge I see with Alim’s assertions, though, is that it is easy for him to be within – sort of – the culture he’s discussing. While his investigation is primarily emic (he’s inside the culture he’s looking at), I , for example, would have a hard time knowing what I was talking about with BL or CHHLPs.

I saved Pennycook’s article for last as it is the most complex and challenging. Hopefully I’m grasping this accurately. What I think Pennycook is challengins us to do is to move or progress further in our valuation of other languages to the point that we do not see them as being contained by regions. And, while he supports the direction proposed by opposing a “monolingual mindset,” he insists that true change will come only after we go so far as to challenge the ideological assumptions underlying those monolingual mindsets in the first place. In other words, we need to treat the illness and not just the symptoms (?). His translingual model of language commands language use to be viewed “among interlingual resources (what language resources people draw on), colingual relations (who says what to whom where) and ideolingual implications (what gets taken from what language use with what investments, ideologies, discourses and beliefs” (30.6). I’m looking forward to discussing this article further in class. I understand what Pennycook is saying (I think), but sometimes such theory is better discussed in a group (?).