A Translingual Approach to the Culture of Writing and Its Teaching: Rewriting Difference

1. A Translingual Approach to the Culture of Writing and Its Teaching:Rewriting Difference Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner University of Louisville

2. Three Developments in Language Practices • global spread of English • increasingly undeniable instability as well as plurality of Englishes • increasingly undeniable linguistic heterogeneity of tertiary-level students and faculty

3. Trans- : Translation, Transformation, Transactions in Language Use • language, language users, practices, conventions, and contexts as always emergent and co-constitutive • All these located not only spatially but temporally • Agency exercised in all uses by all users of language, whether perceived as ordinary or extraordinary, “native” or “non-native”

4. English Only Monolingualist Ideology: How to Teach Students to Write in English? • English single, discrete, uniform, stable code • Parochial Version: English linked with a single and fixed social and civic identity (“Speak English, this is America”) • Global Version: English provides friction-free conduit for global communication of information, goods, and services: deviations create static interference

5. English Only Culture in Writing Instruction • Teaching English = Teaching Writing = Teaching Standard Written English/ “grammar” • English the sole language of instruction, writing, and reading • all U.S. students are or should be English monolinguals

6. NES/NSE (“Native English Speaker”/ “Native Speaker of English”) vs. facts on the ground • Growing majority of English speakers “NNES” • Fracturing/pluralizing of English into growing variety of world Englishes (Nigerian English, China English, Singaporean English, Caribbean English, etc.) • Continuous intermixing of Englishes with one another and other languages • Continuous relocation, intermixing, and diversification (“confusion”) of language users and their linguistic, sociocultural, geopolitical identifications • Circular definitions of “Standard English” (SE = language of educated = those who speak SE) • Instability of Who/What/Where Is (Native) English (Speaker)

7. English-Only Monolingualism Model Other language dialect English dialect Other language Other language dialect

8. Writing Curriculum Model Parallel to English-Only Single course (First Year Composition) or set of courses preparing students for all subsequent writing demands

9. Multilingual/Archipelago Model business English street English English dialect home English chemistry English

10. Writing Curriculum Parallel to Multilingual/Archipelago Model Writing in the Disciplines • Business Writing • Chemistry Writing • History Writing • Technical Writing • Writing about Literature

11. Multilingual/Archipelago Model Reifies language/culture/context • Treats each as discrete set • Traffic between these not acknowledged • Existing hierarchical relations among these sets are denied and thereby maintained • Power relations determining “appropriateness” for each location obscured, hence maintained: “a place for every language and culture; every language and culture kept in its place”

12. “Appropriateness” • Asks: “Which language is appropriate to this context [language, context, and culture understood as stable, discrete, time-less]?” • Elides processes of formation and transformation of language practices and cultural contexts • Defines context and culture exclusively in term of macro-level—conditions existing prior to/outside of individual acts of language • Elides agency of language users • Multilingual individuals understood as linguistic hermaphrodites: two or more separate monolinguals in one person switching passively from one to another language/variety/culture

13. Translingual Approach Drawing on scholarship on rhetoric of the performative (Butler), Giddens’ theory of structuration, applied linguistics research on world Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF): • Emphasizes traffic among languages, language varieties, cultures, language users • locates all of these in time as well as space • Understands these as always emergent and co-constitutive

14. Users Engaging inEnglish as a Lingua Franca Don’t need shared uniform, static code Draw on all participants’ available linguistic resources Adopt attitudes of patience, humility, tolerance for diversity, Strategies of cooperation, accommodation, negotiation, “letting ambiguities pass” ELF “never achieves a stable or standardized form” “intersubjectively constructed in each specific context of interaction” “negotiated by each set of speakers for their purposes” and specific context of interaction

15. English as always in translation and transformation English always in need of rewriting English located not spatially as pre-existing entity one “writes in,” but In space and time, located in practice, what one always (re)writes Poses question: How one does, can, and might rewrite English, and why

16. Bourdieu on Language Ideology n’a rien d’une croyance expressément professée, délibérée et révocable, ni d’un acte intentionnel d’acceptation d’une «norme» ; elle est inscrite a l’état pratique dans les dispositions qui sont insensiblement inculquées, au travers d’un long et lent processus d’acquisition, par les sanctions du marché linguistique. has nothing in common with an explicitly professed, deliberate and revocable belief, or with an intentional act of accepting a “norm.” It is inscribed, in a practical state, in dispositions which are impalpably inculcated, through a long and slow process of acquisition, by the sanctions of the linguistic market. (Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (1990 [1982], p. 51)

17. Challenging English-only Ideology in the Culture of Writing and Its Teaching • Ideology invulnerable to critique alone by virtue of its inscription in dispositions • Change in dominant ideology requires teaching practices inculcating alternative dispositions: what’s taken as “ordinary” cultural practice

18. Principles for Translingual Pedagogies • All writing/reading as “translation” engaging with and producing difference • Necessity of readers’ and writers’ labor in producing and struggling over range of possible meanings • Experience of confusion and difficulty as “normal” and productive resource • Seeking out difficulty and difference • Necessity of tolerance, patience, humility, cooperation, accommodation, negotiation, and letting ambiguities pass in reading/writing

19. Pedagogical Strategies for Treating Translation as the Norm Introduce students to examples of texts appearing to mix languages: • challenges canonical notions of language norms • risks quarantining these as exotic aberrations • risks reinforcing the canonical/normal status of writing of writers not already marked as racial and/or linguistic Others in the social imaginary • risks view of translation as necessitated only by exotic/aberrant texts/writers

20. Teaching English (as always) in Translation • Translation often occurs below level of consciousness • Pedagogy must bring these acts of translation to surface of consciousness as necessary to meaning production • Reading and writing as integrally related labor of negotiating/producing meaning • Experience rereading/revising interpretation of “same” text and having meanings of their own writing negotiated

21. Reading/Writing as Negotiation Aloha kākou. Let us greet each other in friendship and love. My given name is Haunaniokawēkiu o Haleakalā, native of Hawai’i Nei. —Haunani-Kay Trask, “From a Native Daughter” I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions. . . . In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained. . . . Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. –Henry David Thoreau, Walden

22. Destabilize Standard Written English It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them:— Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati. —Thoreau, Walden There have been several analyses of this phenomenon. First, there is the ‘religious angle’ which is to do with Indian society. In India a man feels guilty when fantasizing about another man’s wife, unlike in the west. The saat pherasaround the agni serves as a lakshman rekha. — Times of India news-brief, www.timesofindia.com, Oct. 12, 2001; qtd. in Bhatt 2008.

23. Strategies for Destabilizing SWE, continued • Etymological investigations to reveal the “mixed” linguistic character of English • Examination of canonical texts from different historical periods, disciplines, and genres and within the “same” disciplines and genres to reveal the radically varying character of what is and has been deemed “standard” /“appropriate” written English

24. Alternative Norms for Reading and Writing • all writing involves drawing on all one’s various linguistic resources for particular ends • meaning and acceptability of deployed resources negotiated between readers and writers • Students granted more agency and responsibility as writers and readers for production of meaning • Students don’t write “in” English but must always rewrite English with every writing

25. Rewriting English • Anticipate expected/deeply sedimented/institutionally endorsed forms and meanings • Experiment with and propose meanings and syntactic/lexical/organizational forms alternative to these • Consider whether and how to propose different ways of reading their writing to readers, and to ask readers for greater patience and tolerance

26. Rereading English Reading not as efficient and correct/proper decoding of text but, Slowing the flow of discourse to engage in: • Considering alternative meanings /ways to “translate” texts • Decide which meaning to settle on, why • Take responsibility for meaning chosen as agentive act

27. The Unacknowledged Academic Translingual Reading/Writing Dispositional Norm • Reading and writing that questions received meanings, considers and proposes alternative interpretations • Reading and writing that slows the flow of discourse to reflect on and confirm, revise, and even rewrite, knowledge as a consequence of that labor

28. Rape = sexual assault, OR Rape = also, common vegetable • “Canola” oil as Canadian branding of rapeseed oil, used for cooking and industry • Rape popular vegetable in China • China largest producer of rapeseed • “Rape” among first English words taught in Chinese textbooks

29. Encouraging Translingual Dispositions toward English: Revising Teacher Responses to Student Writing “From a Native Daughter is an essay by Trask in which she spills out her heritage and upbringing.” “Both Trask and Lasch use language as a stepping stool.”

30. Strategy of Questioning Teacher Responses to Student Writing • Presents habitual/sedimented response (norm) to anticipate • Calls standardized norms into question by considering meaning in “erroneous” forms, logic to “erroneous meanings • Engages practice of slowing discourse flow to consider range of alternative meanings/forms • Engages question of whether and/or how to cue readers to consider non-habitual forms/meanings See Lu, “Professing Multiculturalism,” CCC 1994

31. From Monolingual to Translingual Culture of Writing and Its Teaching Monolingual → Translingual pedagogy: transmission exploration values: “efficiency” labor, tolerance, patience expectations: correct/appropriate negotiated, recreated language(s): discrete/stable/uniform interdependent, fluctuating writing: conformity to code rewriting/transforming reading: decoding meaning production/negotiation text: information conduit site of meaning (re)production students: followers collaborators