English language learning in China and Activity Theory

This week we are reading You's work on English language teaching in China and Lei's work on EFL and Activity Theory.

China's "Teaching Requirements for College English Curriculum" is interesting in several ways. First, the decision-makers see English as a way to gain cultural capital (to use Bourdieu's term). Considering the discussions we have had about the hegemonic domination of English and all that learning English entails culturally, socially, and politically, the idea that English is a neutral "tool" is problematic. I wonder why the decision-makers do not seem to explore the ideological issues behind the push for English language learning. Rather than fighting the domination of English, the push seems to be to join that domination in order to improve the socio-economic condition of the country and its citizens in the global marketplace.

The focus on people learning English for the global marketplace is a different consideration than our typical focus on learning English for American post-secondary education. The goals are different and thus I wonder if our typical ways of thinking about learning English might need to be altered. A businessperson may not be concerned with the domination of English if it allows that person access to a larger client base. Assimilation might not be so prevalent because using English in a workplace may not impact identity the same way it might for students at an American university.

The negative ramification of this push for English language learning is that it allows English speakers to maintain their ethnocentrism. As the resurgence of the English Only movement suggests, there are many Americans who do not appreciate multilingualism or value natural diversity. Since English continues to grow globally and speakers of other languages increasingly accommodate English speakers, there is nothing to challenge the ethnocentrism that perpetuates the marginalization of speakers of other languages.

The other thing that interests me about You's "Globalization" article is the role of technology. I find it interesting that technology is seen as a tool that can help individualize language learning and ease the burden on teachers. At ISU, we also value technology as evidenced by all of our composition classes being taught in computer labs. This setup assumes that 1) students know how to use technology or will learn it asap, 2) students should use it for composing, and 3) teachers will use it for instruction. While I share the belief that technology can open ways of composing and learning, I wonder why we don't often question the assumptions behind the prioritizing of technology.

Lei's article focuses on reconceptualizing writing strategies as an activity, rather than as a linear process. Lei uses activity theory to investigate the writing strategies of two students studying English at a Chinese university. He found that the students used the Internet (search engines, dictionaries) and literary works (fiction, poetry, journalism) to mediate their work. The two students also used language; they used their L1 (Chinese) to to work through many stages of writing and they worked hard to increase their English vocabulary. Both students used rhetoric to mediate their writing, such as by incorporating metaphor into their tool set, and other people, such as their instructor and peers.

Overall, Lei illustrates the various resources that these students used and points out that these tools depend on the sociocultural context of the writing situation. I think it would be revealing to analyze my own writing strategies according to this framework. It would also be fascinating to ask students in the classes that I teach to make activity maps to explore their writing strategies as well. Analyzing our writing activities this way could expand our creative possibilities as we think about writing and language learning. We don't need to be limited to traditional, linear-based models of teaching and learning.

Graduate Students in L2

I have been looking forward to reading Suresh Canagarajah, and to tell you the truth, I am quite disappointed. His first chapter in his book on Critical Writing is also published in the Bedford/St. Martin's anthology of Second Language Writing, so I had just read it last week for my literature review. Then, after reading so much about EAP and critical EAP and critical genre awareness for my project, I reread Canagarajah's piece. And it strikes that that his work is general and doesn't pay tribute to any of the scholars who have been doing work on all of these same issues.

C. mentions the schools of critical thought, but goes on to state his more generalized interpretation of critical writing. His focus is on ESOL (English for speakers of other languages), which I take largely to mean international students. He speaks to critical EAP in that students should question their place in the academy and find their own sites of resistance rather than be dominated by existing power structures. He also speaks to critical genre awareness when he discusses the texts themselves as being sites of resistance (my term, not his). His answer to addressing writing critically, focuses on forms of English used in writing. He explains linguistic imperialism and then explains his "negotiation" theory, where students negotiate language their dialects with academic writing rather than adopting and blindly assimilating to the language of the academy, which would necessarily mean (temporarily?) giving up some facet of identity and self. So rather than code-switch between vernacular and standard languages (and hence identities), Canagarajah thinks students should use both (which I believe he has called code-meshing in other pieces).

Since I have read quite a bit on possible solutions to multidialectal students, I find this, like many others, interesting in concept but more complicated in practice. Since I have been immersed in genre studies this year, I can't help but think that that is not going to be effective in many situations. Genre studies still purports that there is not an either/or binary to academic writing, but that academic writing and life writing are filled with various situations that must be addressed on a case-by-case basis. So teaching international students skills to help them address various situations (ideally) would not force them to give up their identities, but rather solve a solution to the transfer problem. Teaching critical genre awareness and critical EAP is one way to safeguard against succumbing to domination and to see various sites of writing as possible sites of resistance. Resistance is still possible within a genre studies approach. And it is not necessarily limited to language and issues of vernaculars. While I am probably taking an unpopular stance with regard to Canagarajah's work, I am really giving away what I think some of my conclusions will be in my project.

I also want to briefly come back to the point that C. does not credit or discuss others who have discussed these ideas. For example, he discusses writing as an activity as if all of the conclusions were his ideas. And although those may be his ideas, there is an entire school of thought on activity theory, particularly for college writing, that he does not even acknowledge, such as Paul Prior and Charles Bazerman. Since I can't imagine C. is unaware of their work, I wonder if his lack of citation is his own way of resisting academic conventions, including typical citation practices and establishing frameworks. While in theory I suppose I should respect this move, I can't help but be disappointed in the lack of conversation. Unfortunately, it makes his work less useful for me as I investigate critical pedagogy as it relates to genre studies.

FYC and L2

It is difficult to know where to start for this week, which focuses on Leki's "Legacy of First-Year Composition" chapter and Matsuda's "Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity" article. Given our reading so far this semester, some of this is not surprising. Yet many of these author's points continue to make me question my own assumptions and subjectivity as a composition instructor. And I'm grateful for that challenge.

One thing that Leki points out that English departments tend to teach English genres in first-year composition, despite the fact that many majors are in these classes and despite the idea of FYC as a service course. So English departments define what good writing is, even though each discipline, and each professor perhaps, has its own definition of good writing (63). There does not seem to be consensus on what good writing is, behind the absences of grammatical mistakes or stigmatized dialect features, nor is there an awareness that there is no consensus.

The second "wow" moment is Leki's analysis of an advertisement analysis prompt. Since I learned that advertisement analyses were common and productive in FYC and I have done them myself, I am abashed to see this type of assignment through Leki's lens. Certainly my prompt wasn't as "pompous" as the example given, but the idea remains the same. Is it fair to ask students to perform a cultural critique if they do not know the culture? Is it fair to ask them to write something new and original (and is that even possible)? How would they know cultural history? How do they know the field? I am realizing that my own assignments have quite a few assumptions that are problematic for both L1 and L2 learners.

These issues once again bring me to think about critical pedagogy and genre. If we as instructors critique our own genres the same way that we encourage students to critique politics, advertisements, social media, and so forth, then we should unveil some of these assumptions.

Leki also brings up the issue that universities focus on writing achievement above oral achievement. While I think ISU is slightly above the curve on that aspect since Comm 101 is the companion course to English 101, rather than English 102, I think this is another area that genre can help. Since we think of genre as writing situations, rather than essay writing, we increase the opportunity for multimodal composing. I always have my students present their work as well, although that is probably not the level of oral competency that Leki is aiming for.

Matsuda's article was less revolutionary for me because I have looked into dialect issues in composition and thus am aware of the problems with assuming similar backgrounds and language skills for students. Many pedagogies, such as basic writing approaches, critical pedagogies, feminist pedagogies, and cultural pedagogies make similar arguments about how we should not assume homogeneity in composition classrooms. What he does help me understand is how institutionalized these assumptions are. The assumptions are embedded in the very structure and goals of our curriculum, especially one that expects writing "problems" to be "solved" through a semester-long writing course.

Given our current and increasing political climate of English Only and anti-immigration, I don't see this situation improving soon. Conservative measures that only further enforce monolingualism, rather than valuing multilingualism, will only increase pressure on students and teachers to assimilate to English quickly and remove any noticeable language variation. Unfortunately, until larger national and ethnocentric American values change, I doubt institutional values will change.

Book Review

I am planning on reviewing Sarah Benesch's Critical English for Academic Purposes: Theory, Politics, and Practice. I wish I had a more recent book to review, since this was published in 2001, but I don't see a more recent text that is as relevant to my paper topic of critical EAP. There are other recent books on genre studies, but I want to look at critical approaches to genre studies regarding L2 learners, so critical EAP seems like the best approach.