Laura's blog is chock full of interesting questions for us to consider in 601 on Tuesday. As I read over the special issue of CE July 2006 again, I kept wondering what a writing program cognizant of multilingualism--at all levels-- would look like?. As all the articles remind us, in one way or another, we are in disciplinary and programmatic settings where multilingualism is not necessarily valued--where the assumption is that linguistic competence is demonstrated in English. While many in our field will profess an allegiance to valuing various aspects of diversity, do we really value linguistic diversity? How is that defined? And what would a multilingual writing curriculum look like? I'm not asking this idly. I'm really wondering how to set up a first-year course and a writing curriculum that would work to value multilingualism?
I've had a number of classes where most of my students were multilingual. These were so-called "basic writing" classes at the community college and state university where I taught. Although I tried hard to acknowledge my students' facilities across languages, we ended up focusing on English. I tried to mine their language competence in other areas and drew on my own experiences as an exchange student trying to become fluent in French. Yet I feel I didn't do much beyond the anecdotal to do anything very deep with language study and multilingualism. I simply didn't know how, and when time was limited, I fell back on what I could do and what I knew best. I wonder what I missed out on, and I am also aware of my own limits when it comes to achieveing any sort of multilingualism. I took six semesters of college French, studied in France for a semester, and I have studied Spanish off and on for a number of years since high school (always losing ground because I don't keep up). It's so typical for many of us in the U.S. to feel linguistic security in being "English-only" speakers. I don't like that about being American. I can't believe how many times I met people in Europe and in Central America who spoke three or four different languages. Yet in America, we can get away with just one language and feel absolutely fine about it. Right now, I've been studying espanol in my spare minutes because I'm bound for Mexico in a few weeks, and I want to talk to people instead of making them reach over the linguistic divide to talk to me in English. Once again, I'm seeing my own limits as a student of more than one language: struggling to remember how to pronounce words, conjugate verbs, remember articles (feminine of masculine).
What I also wondered as I read through the articles again is how the question of multilingualism is also constructed/affected by the way "foreign language" instruction is handled in the United States--postponed until later in a child's education when developmentally mastering a language is much harder? And there is also the question of America's position as a global superpower and the assumption that English will be the language that everyone will strive for because of America's economic position. Linguistic economics. So composition studies reflects those assumptions rather than being unique in its expectations. A reform of composition studies would likely necessitate a reform of the whole of language instruction (K-12, too) as well, but in the meantime, we could do a lot more as a field.
It was said that 1 in 4 people in the U.S. are multilingual. So if we sort that out in our classrooms, will we find the same statistics?
I have more to say and some notes to post, but it is late, and I have to get to sleep. Don't believe the time stamp on this blog posting. The time stamps have been way off lately.
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I took Steve Parks's 732 course in '04 and for my final project I responded to some of the questions you raise here about what it might look like to have a program that could value multi-lingualism and language diversity. I'm actually happier with that paper now, re-reading it, than I was then. I proposed a new concept for meeting the college writing requirement, and followed it with a proposal for changing education from kindergarten up, beginning with changing the way teachers are trained, and then offered the following proposal for graduate education:
The development of such a curriculum for undergraduates and for public education also requires a different level of education for the graduate student in composition and rhetoric. Assuming that such students will not be the teachers of the K-12 classes, but rather for the undergraduates or masters degree students who need this new level of instruction, comp/rhet scholars will need to do more than study the historical work of the field. PhD studies should include work with real students texts from a range of socio-economic and regional locations, with a goal to developing a descriptive view of student writing as it is actually executed. Studies in linguistics should include courses taught by linguistics professors, and should include on-site work with students in a variety of settings where writing happens (giving a new context for service learning). In order to teach other students how to value and appreciate dialectically varied writing, PhD students need training, probably by senior scholars like Geneva Smitherman or Victor Villanueva, or other scholars who have real lived experience as a marginalized language speaker/writer. PhD students should also study the history and rhetoric of movements and laws behind standardized testing, to learn how and when to get involved in that process to prevent further requirements toward a non-existent standard. PhD students in composition and rhetoric should also speak at least one language other than English and should be able to explain the language structure variations between English and at least two other languages, one of which is not European. They should be able to express an essayistic thought in both image and music, and have instruction in networked communication and computer-mediated instruction. If all of these things were in place, then there might be the possibility of changing the face of English to reflect the multi-lingual, multi-cultural, ethnically diverse country that America is and always has been..
I think maybe I should add this paper to the list of potentially publishable. It would also be interesting to hear comment on this proposal from other folks.
Je peux beaucoup parler sur cette question. precose
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