Ryuko Kubota takes us through a fictitious narrative of the “unfinished knowledge” of Barbara (“unfinished,” as she was still in the process of determining how best to serve her second-language students in her classroom), which nicely mirrors our readings for the week. This narrative, which originated as a presentation at the TESOL Convention in Vancouver in March 2000, follows a writing teacher through her discovery and awareness (and lingering questions) regarding how to best teach writing to the second-language students in her classroom. R. Kubota (2003) moves Barbara from an innocently ignorant beginning – with three second language students in her classroom – through an awareness (thanks to the experts in her life) of how she should walk what R. Kubota calls “a fine line…between recognizing and essentializing cultural differences” (18).
At first, Barbara assumes her second-language learners are cognitively impaired, as they just cannot seem to grasp the lexicon, syntax, and organization of the writing she’s expecting them to produce.
After a conversation with Carol, however, Barbara is enlightened. Carol has explained to her the “importance of recognizing and respective cultural differences” (13). However, instead of being enlightened, it appears that Barbara has simply moved into Kaplan’s (1966) essentializing way of thinking, that all writers of a particular language or culture thinks and organizes writing in the same way. Kaplan (1966) depicted illustrations that – in his theory – depicted ways in which writers would write according to culture. Barbara, in her exuberance to “understand” her second language writers, succeeds in essentializing them based on what she sees as their “differences” from Western modes of thinking and writing.
Kaplan’s theory of understanding second-language writers’ writing is the basis of contrastive rhetoric. Kachru explains that “the major theoretical claims of the CRH is that different speech communities have different ways of organizing ideas in writing” (76).
However, David comes along and attempts to enlighten Barbara further than Carol did, as he recognizes that she is in need of further help in understanding that culture is not static, that it is “produced, implicated in politics and ideology, and as employed in various convenient ways to exercise power” (15). This echoes the quote from Foucault (1980, pp. 131-132) that Kachru includes in her chapter: “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ truth” (82). Foucault goes on to explain that the “political economy” of truth has five traits. It is
1. “centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which produce it”
2. “subject to constant economic and political incitement”
3. “the object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and comsumption”
4. “produced and transmitted under control”
5. “the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation.”
This fluidity of culture counters Kaplan’s (1966) view that non-Western rhetorical styles are lacking in truth, are the result of “flawed logic” (Kachru 83).
Barbara is still confused and moves on to speak to Eiko, who explains how reductive an approach it is to unquestioningly accept popular images and ideas of cultures, because they are often “produced by discourses that reflect, legitimate, or contest unequal relations of power between the West and non-West” (R. Kubota 2003). This idea is echoed in Kachru: “While it is perfectly legitimate to raise the consciousness of all writes regarding the rhetorical patterns preferred in the varieties of Inner Circle, it is equally legitimate and desireable to raise the consciousness of English educators regarding the different rhetorical conventions of learners of English” (84). This leads Barbara to realize that she’s reinforcing a binary between herself (as a Midwestern “mainstream” (a complicated term in itself) teacher) and her students when she asks them to compare and contrast the TL and culture with their NL and culture. We read about these types of assingments in Harklau’s chapter in Hinkel’s text. When asking bilingual students to write about “their country” or “their culture”, SLW teachers are actually reinforcing the idea that their students are different or do not fit in or belong. The students in Harklau’s study demonstrated resistance to these types of assignments (actually creating skits over their school breaks that satirized the assignments); in the end, many of these assignments did not result in the learning outcomes the teachers had for them, as they were inappropriate assignments for students who had been living in the U.S. for many years.
Harklau – as many of the author’s of this week’s readings – does not have a firm solution to how to teach SLW to a wide-range of students learning the TL. However, she does state that,
Instructional practices that problematize culture and engage students in tis definition do not preclude explicit training and modeling of American academic cultural norms for written prose, nor do they preclude the representation of mainstream types of culture and cultural values in the classroom. These norms and types are part of the sociocultural and political context in which instructional practices are embedded, and their pervasive influence must be acknowledged and dealt with. (130)
Pairing these ideas of instructional practices with Barbara’s practice of asking critical questions to her students (“she tried raising their critical consciousness of how social injustice is concealed behind the commonly accepted glorious images of culture” (R. Kubota 2003)).
In order to arrive at these instructional practices and methods, Tony Silva’s (1997) article calls for not only more research but better research comparing NES and ESL writing. This article is a bit dated, and it seems to me that much research into SLW has been done in the decade after he conducted his survey of the literature and arrived at his conclusion. But, he also contends that the literature that was available was not readily available (thus the birth of the publication Journal of Second Language Writing). Silva also asserts that the methods of teaching writing to NES should not necessarily and without question be applied to teaching writing in the TL to NNESs: “ESL students, basic or skilled writers, have special needs different from those of NES students and thus are best served by having the option of taking credit-bearing, requirement-fulfilling writing classes designed especially for them”. In addition, and returning to our discussion of contrastive rhetoric and Barbara, “ESL students’ teachers…should be cognizant of, sensitive to, and able to deal positively and effectively with their students’ sociocultural, rhetorical, and linguistic differences” (217).
What I found particularly applicable to my interests in this week’s reading:
• Silva’s statement, “ESL teachers with substantial backgrounds in writing or NES writing teachers with ESL experience would seem to fit the bill nicely” [as effective ESL writing teachers] (1997, p. 217).
• Kaplan’s (1966) idea of the relationship between logic an rhetoric, especially his statement that “A fallacy of some repute and some duration is the one which assumes that because a student can write an adequate essay in his native language, he can necessarily write an adequate essay in a second language. That this assumption is fallacious has become more and more apparent as English-as-a second-language courses have proliferated at American colleges and universities in recent years” (44).
• R. Kubota’s assertion that “recognizing cultural difference is often well intended, as with the original pedagogical impetus of contrastive rhetoric. However, focusing on cultural difference has a hidden risk of Othering and patronizes L2 students, while viewing their language and culture as a deficit or an obstacle to learning to write in a second language” (optional reading, Ch. 10, p. 282). Kubota’s fictitious teacher Barbara learned this after a while, but as Kubota (2003) states, “In teaching, a thin line always exists between recognizing and essentializing cultural difference” (18).
• Part of my difficulty in composing this blog this week was the numerous connections the readings held for my project in 495 last semester, including Kachru’s statement, “It would be a pity to deny large numbers of people of the Western and non-Western worlds the opportunity to participate in and contribute to the development of knowledge in all fields, including science and technology” (84). Also consider, “Any view of rhetoric that keeps a majority of people from contributing to the world’s knowledge base, and legitimizes such exclusion on the basis of writing conventions, shortchanges not only those who are excluded, but also those who would benefit from such contributions” (84).
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