Negotiating Academic Literacies

Teaching and Learning Across Languages and Cultures

Vivian Zamel, Ruth Spack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138465527
• eBook ISBN: 9781136608919
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Negotiating Academic Literacies: Teaching and Learning Across Languages and Cultures is a cross-over volume in the literature between first and second language/literacy. This anthology of articles brings together different voices from a range of publications and fields and unites them in pursuit of an understanding of how academic ways of knowing are acquired. The editors preface the collection of readings with a conceptual framework that reconsiders the current debate about the nature of academic literacies. In this volume, the term academic literacies denotes multiple approaches to knowledge, including reading and writing critically.

College classrooms have become sites where a number of languages and cultures intersect. This is the case not only for students who are in the process of acquiring English, but for all learners who find themselves in an academic situation that exposes them to a new set of expectations. This book is a contribution to the effort to discover ways of supporting learning across languages and cultures--and to transform views about what it means to teach and learn, to read and write, and to think and know.

Unique to this volume is the inclusion of the perspectives of writers as well as those of teachers and researchers. Furthermore, the contributors reveal their own struggles and accomplishments as they themselves have attempted to negotiate academic literacies. The chronological ordering of articles provides a historical perspective, demonstrating ways in which issues related to teaching and learning across cultures have been addressed over time. The readings have consistency in terms of quality, depth, and passion; they raise important philosophical questions even as they consider practical classroom applications. The editors provide a series of questions that enable the reader to engage in a generative and exciting process of reflection and inquiry. This book is both a reference for teachers who work or plan to work with diverse learners, and a text for graduate-level courses, primarily in bilingual and ESL studies, composition studies, English education, and literacy studies.

Chapter 1

Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing

Mina P. Shaughnessy

College Composition and Communication, 1976

Basic writing, alias remedial, developmental, pre-baccalaureate, or even handicapped English, is commonly thought of as a writing course for young men and women who have many things wrong with them. Not only do medical metaphors dominate the pedagogy (remedial, clinic, lab, diagnosis, and so on), but teachers and administrators tend to discuss basic-writing students much as doctors tend to discuss their patients, without being tinged by mortality themselves and with certainly no expectations that questions will be raised about the state of their health.

Yet such is the nature of instruction in writing that teachers and students cannot easily escape one another’s maladies. Unlike other courses, where exchanges between teacher and student can be reduced to as little as one or two objective tests a semester, the writing course requires students to write things down regularly, usually once a week, and requires teachers to read what is written and then write things back and every so often even talk directly with individual students about the way they write.

This system of exchange between teacher and student has so far yielded much more information about what is wrong with students than about what is wrong with teachers, reinforcing the notion that students, not teachers, are the people in education who must do the changing. The phrase “catching up,” so often used to describe the progress of BW students, is illuminating here, suggesting as it does that the only person who must move in the teaching situation is the student. As a result of this view, we are much more likely in talking about teaching to talk about students, to theorize about their needs and attitudes or to chart their development and ignore the possibility that teachers also change in response to students, that there may in fact be important connections between the changes teachers undergo and the progress of their students.

I would like, at any rate, to suggest that this is so, and since it is common these days to “place” students on developmental scales, saying they are eighth-graders or fifth-graders when they read and even younger when they write or that they are stalled some place on Piaget’s scale without formal propositions, I would further like to propose a developmental scale for teachers, admittedly an impressionistic one, but one that fits the observations I have made over the years as I have watched traditionally prepared English teachers, including myself, learning to teach in the open-admissions classroom.

My scale has four stages, each of which I will name with a familiar metaphor intended to suggest what lies at the center of the teacher’s emotional energy during that stage. Thus I have chosen to name the first stage of my developmental scale GUARDING THE TOWER, because during this stage the teacher is in one way or another concentrating on protecting the academy (including himself) from the outsiders, those who do not seem to belong in the community of learners. The grounds for exclusion are various. The mores of the times inhibit anyone’s openly ascribing the exclusion to genetic inferiority, but a few teachers doubtless still hold to this view.

More often, however, the teacher comes to the basic-writing class with every intention of preparing his students to write for college courses, only to discover, with the first batch of essays, that the students are so alarmingly and incredibly behind any students he has taught before that the idea of their ever learning to write acceptably for college, let alone learning to do so in one or two semesters, seems utterly pretentious. Whatever the sources of their incompetence—whether rooted in the limits they were born with or those that were imposed upon them by the world they grew up in—the fact seems stunningly, depressingly obvious: they will never “make it” in college unless someone radically lowers the standards.

The first pedagogical question the teacher asks at this stage is therefore not “How do I teach these students?” but “What are the consequences of flunking an entire class?” It is a question that threatens to turn the class into a contest, a peculiar and demoralizing contest for both student and teacher, since neither expects to win. The student, already conditioned to the idea that there is something wrong with his English and that writing is a device for magnifying and exposing this deficiency, risks as little as possible on the page, often straining with what he does write to approximate the academic style and producing in the process what might better be called “written Anguish” rather than English—sentences whose subjects are crowded out by such phrases as “it is my conviction that” or “on the contrary to my opinion,” inflections that belong to no variety of English, standard or non-standard, but grow out of the writer’s attempt to be correct, or words whose idiosyncratic spellings reveal not simply an increase in the number of conventional misspellings but new orders of difficulty with the correspondences between spoken and written English. Meanwhile, the teacher assumes that he must not only hold out for the same product he held out for in the past but teach unflinchingly in the same way as before, as if any pedagogical adjustment to the needs of students were a kind of cheating. Obliged because of the exigencies brought on by open admissions to serve his time in the defense of the academy, he does if not his best, at least his duty, setting forth the material to be mastered, as if he expected students to learn it, but feeling grateful when a national holiday happens to fall on a basic-writing day and looking always for ways of evading conscription next semester.

But gradually, student and teacher are drawn into closer range. They are obliged, like emissaries from opposing camps, to send messages back and forth. They meet to consider each other’s words and separate to study them in private. Slowly, the teacher’s preconceptions of his students begin to give way here and there. It now appears that, in some instances at least, their writing, with its rudimentary errors and labored style, has belied their intelligence and individuality. Examined at a closer range, the class now appears to have at least some members in it who might, with hard work, eventually “catch up.” And it is the intent of reaching these students that moves the teacher into the second stage of development—which I will name CONVERTING THE NATIVES.

As the image suggests, the teacher has now admitted at least some to the community of the educable. These learners are perceived, however, as empty vessels, ready to be filled with new knowledge. Learning is thought of not so much as a constant and often troubling reformulation of the world so as to encompass new knowledge but as a steady flow of truth into a void. Whether the truth is delivered in lectures or modules, cassettes or computers, circles or squares, the teacher’s purpose is the same: to carry the technology of advanced literacy to the inhabitants of an underdeveloped country. And so confident is he of the reasonableness and allure of what he is presenting, it does not occur to him to consider the competing logics and values and habits that may be influencing his students, often in ways that they themselves are unaware of.

Sensing no need to relate what he is teaching to what his students know, to stop to explore the contexts within which the conventions of academic discourse have developed, and to view these conventions in patterns large enough to encompass what students do know about language already, the teacher becomes a mechanic of the sentence, the paragraph, and the essay. Drawing usually upon the rules and formulas that were part of his training in composition, he conscientiously presents to his students flawless schemes for achieving order and grammaticality and anatomizes model passages of English prose to uncover, beneath brilliant, unique surfaces, the skeletons of ordinary paragraphs.

Yet too often the schemes, however well meant, do not seem to work. Like other simplistic prescriptions, they illuminate for the moment and then disappear in the melee of real situations, where paradigms frequently break down and thoughts will not be regimented. S’s keep reappearing or disappearing in the wrong places; regular verbs shed their inflections and irregular verbs acquire them; tenses collide; sentences derail; and whole essays idle at one level of generalization.

Baffled, the teacher asks, “How is it that these young men and women whom I have personally admitted to the community of learners cannot learn these simple things?” Until one day, it occurs to him that perhaps these simple things—so transparent and compelling to him—are not in fact simple at all, that they only appear simple to those who already know them, that the grammar and rhetoric of formal written English have been shaped by the irrationalities of history and habit and by the peculiar restrictions and rituals that come from putting words on paper instead of into the air, that the sense and nonsense of written English must often collide with the spoken English that has been serving students in their negotiations with the world for many years. The insight leads our teacher to the third stage of his development, which I will name SOUNDING THE DEPTHS, for he turns now to the careful observation not only of his students and their writing but of himself as writer and teacher, seeking a deeper understanding of the behavior called writing and of the special difficulties his students have in mastering the skill. Let us imagine, for the sake of illustration, that the teacher now begins to look more carefully at two common problems among basic writers—the problem of grammatical errors and the problem of undeveloped paragraphs.

Should he begin in his exploration of error not only to count and name errors but to search for patterns and pose hypotheses that might explain them, he will begin to see that while his lessons in the past may have been “simple,” the sources of the error he was trying to correct were often complex. The insight leads not inevitably or finally to a rejection of all rules and standards, but to a more careful look at error, to the formulation of what might be called a “logic” of errors that serves to mark a pedagogical path for teacher and student to follow.

Let us consider in this connection the “simple” s inflection on the verb, the source of a variety of grammatical errors in BW papers. It is, first, an alien form to many students whose mother tongues inflect the verb differently or not at all. Uniformly called for, however, in all verbs in the third person singular present indicative of standard English, it would seem to be a highly predictable or stable form and therefore one easily remembered. But note the grammatical concepts the student must grasp before he can apply the rule: the concepts of person, tense, number, and mood. Note that the 5 inflection is an atypical inflection within the modern English verb system. Note too how often it must seem to the student that he hears the stem form of the verb after third person singular subjects in what sounds like the present, as he does for example whenever he hears questions like “Does she want to go?” or “Can the subway stop? In such sentences, the standard language itself reinforces the student’s own resistance to the inflection.

And then, beyond these apparent unpredictabilities within the standard system, there is the influence of the student’s own language or dialect, which urges him to ignore a troublesome form that brings no commensurate increase in meaning. Indeed, the very s he struggles with here may shift in a moment to signify plurality simply by being attached to a noun instead of a verb. No wonder then that students of formal English throughout the world find this inflection difficult, not because they lack intelligence or care but because they think analogically and are linguistically efficient. The issue is not the capacity of students finally to master this and the many other forms of written English that go against the grain of their instincts and experience but the priority this kind of problem ought to have in the larger scheme of learning to write and the willingness of students to mobilize themselves to master such forms at the initial stages of construction.

Somewhere between the folly of pretending that errors don’t matter and the rigidity of insisting that they matter more than anything, the teacher must find his answer, searching always under pressure for short cuts that will not ultimately restrict the intellectual power of his students. But as yet, we lack models for the maturation of the writing skill among young, native-born adults and can only theorize about the adaptability of other models for these students. We cannot say with certaintyjust what progress in writing ought to look like for basic-writing students, and more particularly how the elimination of error is related to their over-all improvement.

Should the teacher then turn from problems of error to his students’ difficulties with the paragraphs of academic essays, new complexities emerge. Why, he wonders, do they reach such instant closure on their ideas, seldom moving into even one subordinate level of qualification but either moving on to a new topic sentence or drifting off into reverie and anecdote until the point of the essay has been dissolved? Where is that attitude of “suspended conclusion” that Dewey called thinking, and what can one infer about their intellectual competence from such behavior?

Before consigning his students to some earlier stage of mental development, the teacher at this stage begins to look more closely at the task he is asking students to perform. Are they aware, for example, after years of right/wrong testing, after the ACT’s and the GED’s and the OAT’s, after straining to memorize what they read but never learning to doubt it, after “psyching out” answers rather than discovering them, are they aware that the rules have changed and that the rewards now go to those who can sustain a play of mind upon ideas—teasing out the contradictions and ambiguities and frailties of statements?

Or again, are the students sensitive to the ways in which the conventions of talk differ from those of academic discourse? Committed to extending the boundaries of what is known, the scholar proposes generalizations that cover the greatest possible number of instances and then sets about supporting his case according to the rules of evidence and sound reasoning that govern his subject. The spoken language, looping back and forth between speakers, offering chances for groping and backing up and even hiding, leaving room for the language of hands and faces, of pitch and pauses, is by comparison generous and inviting. The speaker is not responsible for the advancement of formal learning. He is free to assert opinions without a display of evidence or recount experiences without explaining what they “mean.” His movements from one level of generality to another are more often brought on by shifts in the winds of conversation rather than by some decision of his to be more specific or to sum things up. For him the injunction to “be more specific” is difficult to carry out because the conditions that lead to specificity are usually missing. He may not have acquired the habit of questioning his propositions, as a listener might, in order to locate the points that require amplification or evidence. Or he may be marooned with a proposition he cannot defend for lack of information or for want of practice in retrieving the history of an idea as it developed in his own mind.

Similarly, the query “What is your point?” may be difficult to answer because the conditions under which the student is writing have not allowed for the slow generation of an orienting conviction, that underlying sense of the direction he wants his thinking to take. Yet without this conviction, he cannot judge the relevance of what comes to his mind, as one sentence branches out into another or one idea engenders another, gradually crowding from his memory the direction he initially set for himself.

Or finally, the writer may lack the vocabulary that would enable him to move more easily up the ladder of abstraction and must instead forge out of a non-analytical vocabulary a way of discussing thoughts about thoughts, a task so formidable as to discourage him, as travelers in a foreign land are discouraged, from venturing far beyond bread-and-butter matters.

From such soundings, our teacher begins to see that teaching at the remedial level is not a matter of being simpler but of being more profound, of not only starting from “scratch” but also determining where “scratch” is. The experience of studenthood is the experience of being just so far over one’s head that it is both realistic and essential to work at surviving. But by underestimating the sophistication of our students and by ignoring the complexity of the tasks we set before them, we have failed to locate in precise ways where to begin and what follows what.

But I have created a fourth stage in my developmental scheme, which I am calling DIVING IN in order to suggest that the teacher who has come this far must now make a decision that demands professional courage—the decision to remediate himself, to become a student of new disciplines and of his students themselves in order to perceive both their difficulties and their incipient excellence. “Always assume,” wrote Leo Strauss to the teacher, “that there is one silent student in your class who is by far superior to you in head and in heart.” This assumption, as I have been trying to suggest, does not come easily or naturally when the teacher is a college teacher and the young men and women in his class are labeled remedial. But as we come to know these students better, we begin to see that the greatest barrier to our work with them is our ignorance of them and of the very subject we have contracted to teach. We see that we must grope our ways into the turbulent disciplines of semantics and linguistics for fuller, more accurate data about words and sentences; we must pursue more rigorously the design of developmental models, basing our schemes less upon loose comparisons with children and more upon case studies and developmental research of the sort that produced William Perry’s impressive study of the intellectual development of Harvard students; we need finally to examine more closely the nature of speaking and writing and divine the subde ways in which these forms of language both support and undo each other.

The work is waiting for us. And so irrevocable now is the tide that brings the new students into the nation’s college classrooms that it is no longer within our power, as perhaps it once was, to refuse to accept them into the community of the educable. They are here. DIVING IN is simply deciding that teaching them to write well is not only suitable but challenging work for those who would be teachers and scholars in a democracy.

Chapter 2

The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University

Mike Rose

College English, 1985

“How many ‘minor errors’ are acceptable?”

“We must try to isolate and define those further skills in composition…”

“…we should provide a short remedial course to patch up any deficiencies.” “Perhaps the most striking feature of this campus’ siege against illiteracy

“One might hope that, after a number of years, standards might be set in the high schools which would allow us to abandon our own defensive program.”

These snippets come from University of California and California state legislative memos, reports, and position papers and from documents produced during a recent debate in UCLA’s Academic Senate over whether a course in our freshman writing sequence was remedial. Though these quotations—and a half dozen others I will use in this essay—are local, they represent a kind of institutional language about writing instruction in American higher education. There are five ideas about writing implicit in these comments: Writing ability is judged in terms of the presence of error and can thus be quantified. Writing is a skill or a tool rather than a discipline. A number of our students lack this skill and must be remediated. In fact, some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing
• 2. The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University
• 3. A Journey into Speech
• 4. Between Students’ Language and Academic Discourse: Interlanguage as Middle Ground
• 5. What Is Literacy?
• 6. From Outside, In
• 7. From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle
• 8. Initiating ESL Students into the Academic Discourse Community: How Far Should We Go?
• 9. A Common Ground: The Essay in the Academy
• 10. The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition
• 11. Evaluating Second Language Essays in Regular Composition Classes: Toward a Pluralistic U.S. Rhetoric
• 12. Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues
• 13. Arts of the Contact Zone
• 14. Questioning Academic Discourse
• 15. Dancing With Professors: The Trouble With Academic Prose
• 16. The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse
• 17. Discourse, Artifacts, and the Ozarks: Understanding Academic Literacy
• 18. The Ownership of English
• 19. Strangers in Academia: The Experiences of Faculty and ESL Students Across the Curriculum
• 20. Borrowing Others’ Words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism
• 21. The (In)visibility of the Person(al) in Academe
• 22. Blurred Voices: Who Speaks for the Subaltern?
• Credits