Tamar Beliefs Question 5 p. 57

I think that ethnocentrism and English-centrism are what many of the more recent critiques of CR and IR want to address.  

The idea of thinking “logically” is itself a culturally bound concept.   I have seen rubrics (in ESL) that rate students on the “logic” of their writing/arguments.  In these classes, what is taught is a traditional thesis statement in the intro and support paragraphs, each with a topic sentence and examples to support that thesis.  With the proper “connectors” the writing is deemed logical. Does this mean that something that deviates from this pattern is illogical? I think this is the implicit message sent to many L2 writing students.  

If we believe that writing is a form of thinking materialized, do we really want our students to conform so strictly to this narrow view of “logic”?  Do we want to limit the expressive potential of students in this way? Sure we need to take into account our audience/readers, purpose and context, but what if we gave students the chance to express ideas without such tight restrictions on form?   If their language is comprehensible, is it possible that this freedom might produce “better” writing because these writers are not limited to an organizational pattern that might be unnatural for them and free to express their ideas? Native English speaking readers might in fact learn something, or find a new style fresh and engaging even if it takes a little more work than the “say-what-you-will-say; say; say-what-you-said” intro/body/conclusion style of English (academic) writing.

I appreciate Casanave’s question related to this issue of logic:  “To what extent might those factors be culturally shared, individual and idiosyncratic, developmentally, or educationally shaped?” (p. 55)

Casanave asks more important questions that get to this ethnocentrism as well as racism and classism when she says:

….when someone says “Americans write and think directly” we need to ask:

           Which Americans?  Writing what, and writing for what purposes?  (p. 56)

This connects to many of Canagarajah’s critiques of CR and IR as having too limited and static a conception of language.  This is relevant not only to L2 writers of English, but to L1 writers who speak/write in a form outside the dominant variety.