Mappting the L2 English Writing Controversy
The three main positions in the controversy of what and whose standards we should use to teach L2 English writing are: 1) the English-Only position; 2) the Accommodationist position; and the 3) Translingual position. There are dozens of other positions based on the ways each L2 writing instructor teaches and gives feedback according to the contexts, needs, and proficiency levels of each group of students they teach. I will briefly explore each view, explain a bit about its rationale and underlying values, and include a few illustative personal experiences. I will also present my own view which is somewhere in between the Accommodationist and the Translingual, but closer to the former, especially in practice.
English-Only is a monolingual view one hears bandied about by Republicans in US State Legislatures and in public by intolerant individuals threatened by the mere existence of other languages, most likely because of the diverse racial and ethnic groups that speak them. Many nations have an official language policy spelling out which one(s) will be the language(s) of government documents and pronouncements. These choices, one assumes, are based on demographics of the country, or less democratically, on the ethnicity and language background of the group in power. In the ESL/EFL teaching community, one rarely hears open, sustained arguments for the English-only position because it is unrealistic, undemocratic, non-linguistic and has racist, anti-immigrant, and xenophobic implications. Indeed, it would probably be hard to find and keep a teaching job if an ESL/EFL teacher expressed a belief in the inherent superiority of English above all other languages when the principle of linguistic relativity means that all languages are equally valid and useful, capable of doing what their speakers need them to do.
Interestingly, those who subscribe to English Only may not maintain high standards for their own English. For example, the current representative of US English power with his America First and Make America Great Again ideologies, the President of the US, has trouble completing sentences, expressing a coherent thought, and reading, listening, and comprehending in English. He also frequently mispronounces, misspells, and misuses basic words. Most educated multilingual English speakers teachers speak, read, and write according to much higher standards than his. Other government figures such as ex-President George W. Bush and ex-Vice President Dan Quayle also struggled to articulate their thoughts clearly in English.
The Accommodationist view holds all languages are equal, but wants to accommodate ESL and EFL students according to their particular needs and contexts, a point emphasized by Casanave. If students want to learn Standard English, even if we may not like or agree with its hegemony, we should teach Standard to them to the best of our abilities while making them aware that it's a construct that is no one's actual native language/dialect. Accommodationists, second language writing specialists such as Matsuda, Atkinson, Tardy, Crusan, and Shapiro, value improvement and development in English and in English Writing when students also express such values and needs. With some populations, enforcing the entire gamut of Standard English rules would make no sense. For example, when I taught ESL in churches and storefronts to immigrants who worked in Chicago factories, students barely literate in Spanish, I concentrated on oral strategies for negotiating with bosses, talking to doctors, and participating in school conferences with ther children's classroom teachers; they needed these English skills to survive and to avoid being taken advantage of. On the other hand, when at the same time, I taught ESLWriting to college students at the University of Illinois at Chicago I taught them how to read and write essays because they would need these skills in later courses and possibly later in life. I gave them feedback for improvement on every aspect of their writing from assignment fulfillment, strength of argument, and organization to vocabulary, syntax, and grammar.
As an Accommodationist, Casanave is particularly upset with Jensen who doesn't correct the English of her students' dissertations as long as they are intelligible although intelligibility is a subjective phonomenon. What's intelligible to her as the dissertation director is not necessarily intelligible to other members of the committee and future researchers who might struggle to understand the dissertation because of errors. At least at Iowa, dissertation committees and the graduate college don't expect error-free English, but they do expect English standards to be observed--e.g. correct plurals, tenses, agreement, prepositions. My colleagues and I spend dozens of hours each semester editing our students' dissertation chapters for Standard English. The needs of student groups vary by era and time as well. In the nineties at Iowa, many Asian international students, mostly graduate students, wanted to stay in the US after graduation; they wanted more cultural and linguistic information, for example, idioms and English expressions, from the Writing and Speaking Centers to make their lives easier. Nowadays, in the 2010s, Asian undergraduate students are headed back to their countries as soon as they graduate. Business acumen from their finance and accounting major courses may be more important to them than English language and writing skills. They want to be able to do well in their reading, writing, and presentation assignments while they are here at the University though. The contrast reminds me of Garner and Lambert's integrative vs. instrumental motivation for learning an L2.
Outside the US, Casanave points out that many EFL contexts unfortunately seem to prefer (white) native speakers as teachers even though they might not speak and teach as well and have as much empathy with their students as non-native speakers. Indeed on many websites geared toward recruiting recent graduates of US universities, the only requirement to teach English is to be a native speaker. To her credit, Casanave points out that English native-speakerism both here and abroad is supported by an underlying racism. However, she also frequently emphasizes the reality of English as a lingua franca, as the language of international scholarship, and as the language of international negotiations, to such an extent that she doesn't encourage teachers and students to explore how this situation came to be, which groups this reality benefits and perpetuates, and if and how this situation can be changed. In fact, she excuses teachers who don't explore the sociopolitics of language by saying they don't have time in class to, even though it wouldn't necssarily involve more than 10 minutes of discussion every few classes. One could say that they have no time not to talk about it. A wise recommendation is to discuss the sociopolitical underpinnings of the reality of English hegemony. But that discussion should not be confused with introducing non-standard forms of English for students to learn, a practice I would agree there is no time for and would only confuse most students.
Canagarajah and his US Compositionist supporters who don't share his applied linguistics background (e.g. Horner, Lu, Royster, Jordan, Donahue) would say in opposition to Casanave that it is absolutely necessary to analyze the hegemony of English in class, and I agree. In the eighties, I did this mostly when teaching African American students in Chicago how to write in SAE Standard American English), a dialect they did not speak. We put up parallel forms on the board in their own dialect and in SAE. Neither is better than the other, but as an accomodationist, I recommended using Black English for informal speech and SAE for formal writing. I did not push code-meshing in class. Canagararajah actually agrees with Casanave that one ignores the reality of Standard English's hegemony at their own peril (although the Compositionist Translinguals might disagree.) The problem is that C. contradicts himself. If you are going to blend languages (e.g. Spanish, English and Nahuatl in one essay as does Gloria Anzaldua), and use L1 or Black English expressions, and if you are not going to provide a context and a translation for these terms, you are NOT writing in Standard English and ignoring it at your peril (unless you are an internationally famous scholar.) Canagarajah and the Compositionists also don't believe in language boundaries--e.g. that Chinese is a different language than English--which is not grounded in linguistics. Another non-linguistic translingual belief is that English is changing so rapidly that we can't pin it down to a standard. But the grammar stays the same for hundreds of years even when social media introduces new vocabulary and emoticons.
As Casanave says, the standards controvery, like the other controversies she maps in her book, have no easy solutions. But steps in the direction of reducing English hegemony and increasing bi- and multilingualism include English monolinguals learning L2s, and ESL and EFL teachers getting to know their students' present and future English needs and teaching to address them so students can learn and develop their L2s and their L2 Writing as much as they can and want to.
The three main positions in the controversy of what and whose standards we should use to teach L2 English writing are: 1) the English-Only position; 2) the Accommodationist position; and the 3) Translingual position. There are dozens of other positions based on the ways each L2 writing instructor teaches and gives feedback according to the contexts, needs, and proficiency levels of each group of students they teach. I will briefly explore each view, explain a bit about its rationale and underlying values, and include a few illustative personal experiences. I will also present my own view which is somewhere in between the Accommodationist and the Translingual, but closer to the former, especially in practice.
English-Only is a monolingual view one hears bandied about by Republicans in US State Legislatures and in public by intolerant individuals threatened by the mere existence of other languages, most likely because of the diverse racial and ethnic groups that speak them. Many nations have an official language policy spelling out which one(s) will be the language(s) of government documents and pronouncements. These choices, one assumes, are based on demographics of the country, or less democratically, on the ethnicity and language background of the group in power. In the ESL/EFL teaching community, one rarely hears open, sustained arguments for the English-only position because it is unrealistic, undemocratic, non-linguistic and has racist, anti-immigrant, and xenophobic implications. Indeed, it would probably be hard to find and keep a teaching job if an ESL/EFL teacher expressed a belief in the inherent superiority of English above all other languages when the principle of linguistic relativity means that all languages are equally valid and useful, capable of doing what their speakers need them to do.
Interestingly, those who subscribe to English Only may not maintain high standards for their own English. For example, the current representative of US English power with his America First and Make America Great Again ideologies, the President of the US, has trouble completing sentences, expressing a coherent thought, and reading, listening, and comprehending in English. He also frequently mispronounces, misspells, and misuses basic words. Most educated multilingual English speakers teachers speak, read, and write according to much higher standards than his. Other government figures such as ex-President George W. Bush and ex-Vice President Dan Quayle also struggled to articulate their thoughts clearly in English.
The Accommodationist view holds all languages are equal, but wants to accommodate ESL and EFL students according to their particular needs and contexts, a point emphasized by Casanave. If students want to learn Standard English, even if we may not like or agree with its hegemony, we should teach Standard to them to the best of our abilities while making them aware that it's a construct that is no one's actual native language/dialect. Accommodationists, second language writing specialists such as Matsuda, Atkinson, Tardy, Crusan, and Shapiro, value improvement and development in English and in English Writing when students also express such values and needs. With some populations, enforcing the entire gamut of Standard English rules would make no sense. For example, when I taught ESL in churches and storefronts to immigrants who worked in Chicago factories, students barely literate in Spanish, I concentrated on oral strategies for negotiating with bosses, talking to doctors, and participating in school conferences with ther children's classroom teachers; they needed these English skills to survive and to avoid being taken advantage of. On the other hand, when at the same time, I taught ESLWriting to college students at the University of Illinois at Chicago I taught them how to read and write essays because they would need these skills in later courses and possibly later in life. I gave them feedback for improvement on every aspect of their writing from assignment fulfillment, strength of argument, and organization to vocabulary, syntax, and grammar.
As an Accommodationist, Casanave is particularly upset with Jensen who doesn't correct the English of her students' dissertations as long as they are intelligible although intelligibility is a subjective phonomenon. What's intelligible to her as the dissertation director is not necessarily intelligible to other members of the committee and future researchers who might struggle to understand the dissertation because of errors. At least at Iowa, dissertation committees and the graduate college don't expect error-free English, but they do expect English standards to be observed--e.g. correct plurals, tenses, agreement, prepositions. My colleagues and I spend dozens of hours each semester editing our students' dissertation chapters for Standard English. The needs of student groups vary by era and time as well. In the nineties at Iowa, many Asian international students, mostly graduate students, wanted to stay in the US after graduation; they wanted more cultural and linguistic information, for example, idioms and English expressions, from the Writing and Speaking Centers to make their lives easier. Nowadays, in the 2010s, Asian undergraduate students are headed back to their countries as soon as they graduate. Business acumen from their finance and accounting major courses may be more important to them than English language and writing skills. They want to be able to do well in their reading, writing, and presentation assignments while they are here at the University though. The contrast reminds me of Garner and Lambert's integrative vs. instrumental motivation for learning an L2.
Outside the US, Casanave points out that many EFL contexts unfortunately seem to prefer (white) native speakers as teachers even though they might not speak and teach as well and have as much empathy with their students as non-native speakers. Indeed on many websites geared toward recruiting recent graduates of US universities, the only requirement to teach English is to be a native speaker. To her credit, Casanave points out that English native-speakerism both here and abroad is supported by an underlying racism. However, she also frequently emphasizes the reality of English as a lingua franca, as the language of international scholarship, and as the language of international negotiations, to such an extent that she doesn't encourage teachers and students to explore how this situation came to be, which groups this reality benefits and perpetuates, and if and how this situation can be changed. In fact, she excuses teachers who don't explore the sociopolitics of language by saying they don't have time in class to, even though it wouldn't necssarily involve more than 10 minutes of discussion every few classes. One could say that they have no time not to talk about it. A wise recommendation is to discuss the sociopolitical underpinnings of the reality of English hegemony. But that discussion should not be confused with introducing non-standard forms of English for students to learn, a practice I would agree there is no time for and would only confuse most students.
Canagarajah and his US Compositionist supporters who don't share his applied linguistics background (e.g. Horner, Lu, Royster, Jordan, Donahue) would say in opposition to Casanave that it is absolutely necessary to analyze the hegemony of English in class, and I agree. In the eighties, I did this mostly when teaching African American students in Chicago how to write in SAE Standard American English), a dialect they did not speak. We put up parallel forms on the board in their own dialect and in SAE. Neither is better than the other, but as an accomodationist, I recommended using Black English for informal speech and SAE for formal writing. I did not push code-meshing in class. Canagararajah actually agrees with Casanave that one ignores the reality of Standard English's hegemony at their own peril (although the Compositionist Translinguals might disagree.) The problem is that C. contradicts himself. If you are going to blend languages (e.g. Spanish, English and Nahuatl in one essay as does Gloria Anzaldua), and use L1 or Black English expressions, and if you are not going to provide a context and a translation for these terms, you are NOT writing in Standard English and ignoring it at your peril (unless you are an internationally famous scholar.) Canagarajah and the Compositionists also don't believe in language boundaries--e.g. that Chinese is a different language than English--which is not grounded in linguistics. Another non-linguistic translingual belief is that English is changing so rapidly that we can't pin it down to a standard. But the grammar stays the same for hundreds of years even when social media introduces new vocabulary and emoticons.
As Casanave says, the standards controvery, like the other controversies she maps in her book, have no easy solutions. But steps in the direction of reducing English hegemony and increasing bi- and multilingualism include English monolinguals learning L2s, and ESL and EFL teachers getting to know their students' present and future English needs and teaching to address them so students can learn and develop their L2s and their L2 Writing as much as they can and want to.
Great summary Carol :)
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