Creative Shuttling

John Trimbur notes that ". . . U.S. linguistic culture produces a systematic forgetting of the multiple languages spoken and written in North America and thereby constitutes a key source of American ambivalence toward multilingualism" (577). As he goes on to show, there was nothing un-systematic about that "forgetting." In essence, the forgetting was a form of cultural suppression. Trimbur argues for a transnational perspective to assess the status of other languages in the U.S. in relation to English: "To understand the cultural exchanges that shaped U.S. linguistic culture--its linguistic memory and its habits of forgetting--requires a transnational perspective that enables us to see how U.S. English took shape in relation to other languages" (579).

One of the key historical figures he uses as a reference point is none other than Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was worried about the Germans taking over and "Germanizing" the culture (instead of Anglifying it). He paraphrases Heath's analysis of the pattern in the U.S. "where the language of non-English-speakers who are seen to pose a social, economic, or political threat becomes the 'focus of argument' about linguistic status and political legitimacy (10)" (580). In Franklin's time, it was was the Germans. It is now Spanish-speaking people. We are experiencing such a moment with the hostility toward Spanish-speaking in many parts of the U.S., which is fueled by a sense of "social, economic, or political threat." Immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America (documented and undocumented) to take jobs in the U.S. has caused the kind of xenophobia that Franklin exercised about the Germans. Cities and towns have passed "English-only" ordinances or have exerted more localized attempts to control language such as hanging "English-only" signs in businesses. Meanwhile, such analyses of "linguistic threat" fail to address how North American policies have created such transnational labor migrations (NAFTA, for instance).

These systems of reaction to language difference (coupled with other kinds of difference) have shaped our educational system into a monlingual language environment: "Since the overturn of the classical curriculum and the establishment of graduate education on the German model in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. university has drastically curtailed the educational role of languages other than than English--whether Greek and Latin in the old-time American pietistic colleges or German for the Americans who went to German universities to get PhDs. Instead English has become the unquestioned medium of instruction and the vernacular of modernity identified with science, technology, and the professions" (583). Trimbur identifies the cultural, social, and economic structures that lead to monolingualism in U.S. culture, but I wonder, too, the interplay of cultural, social, and economic forces with specific individual choices. What is the mix here between taking on a new language (L2 or L3) and maintaining a tie to one's home language (L1)? What about that process?

Trimbur argues, in the end, for addressing "the status planning of languages and an additive language policy whereby all students as a matter of course speak, write, and learn in more than one language and all citizens thereby become capable of communicating with one another in a number of languages, code-switching as appropriate to the rhetorical situation. The goal such a national language policy, I believe, goes beyond a discourse of linguistic rights to imagine the aboliton of English monolingualism altogether and the creation in its place of a linguistic culture where being multilingual is both normal and desirable, as it is throughout much of the world" (587).

These sentiments are echoed throughout all of the readings. Canagarajah argues for the metaphor of "shuttling" back and forth across languages. His argument is that we should study the engagement with language and writing as a "movement" rather than as a static process. We should

"study the movement of the writer between languages; rather than studying the product of descriptions of writing compentence, we would study the process of composing in multiple languages; rather than studying the writer's stablity in specific forms of linguistics or cultural competence, we would analyze his or her versatility (for example, life between multiple languages and cultures);rather than treating language or culture as the main variable, we would analyze his or her versatility (for example life between multiple languages and cultures); rather than treating writers as passive, conditioned by their language and culture, we would treat them as agentive, shuttling creatively between discourses to achieve their communicative objectives" (591).

His study of Sri Lankan Professor K. Sivatamby demonstrates this principle of "shuttling" creatively across Tamil and English for a variety of publication contexts. Dr. Sivatamby makes several rhetorical/linguistic choices to fit the contexts and audiences that he is addressing. One of the points that most interested me was how Dr. Sivatamby compensated for the dearth of library materials by managing genre constraints: avoiding a traditional literature review and engaging in his analysis quickly, using ethnography as well.

In essence, Canagarajah models the kind of analysis we can do of multilingualism and writing; however, a key constraint occurs when the researcher is not fluent in the writer's language (a further issue).

Matsuda's essay is an interesting counterpart to Berlin and other histories of rhetoric and writing instruction where international students are not a focal point or even much mentioned. This is, perhaps, another linguistic suppression: "The history of international ESL students in U.S.higher education goes at last as far back as 1784. . ." (644). In discussing the successive waves of international students, Matsuda sketches a view of the language curriculum that is tied as well to national policies and social and economic forces (WWI and WWII). I found it particularly interesting to see the discussion of how different colleges and universities handled the "integration" or "segregation" of international students (placement, credit-bearing and non-credit bearing courses, students "sprinkled" throughout sections or grouped together). I found Matsuda's historical analysis of linguistic homogeneity and international students to be very fruitful as it assesses the inner workings of linguistic "containment."

Matsuda ends with this analysis: "To work effectively with the student population in the twenty-first century, all composition teachers need to reimagine the composition classroom as the multingual space that it is, where the presence of language differences is the default" (649). Again, to echo my previous posting, what does it mean to reimagine the composition classroom as the multilingual space?" Just a couple of ideas:

--assignments that describe and analyze multilingual contexts?
--texts that are multilingual and in translation?
--research that involves multilingual texts?
--overlapping/linked courses in language and composition?
Others???

Works Cited:

Canagarajah, A. Suresh. "Toward a Writing Pedagogy of Shuttling between Languages: Learning from Multilingual Writers." _College English_ 68.6 (July 2006): 589-604.

Matsuda, Paul Kei. "The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition." _College English_. 68.6 (July 2006): 637-651.

Trimbur, John. "Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. English." _College English_ 68.6 (July 2006): 575-588.