Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students
296
Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students
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Overview
This volume facilitates teacher self-reflection and enables readers to better understand the motivations and pedagogical implications--especially for L2 writing--of a more openly pedagogical approach.
Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students explains what it means to commit to an academic pedagogy, in terms of form, self, content, and community--and what it can accomplish in the L2 writing classroom. It's a guide for writing teachers who wish to embark on a journey toward increased critical awareness of the role they play, or potentially could play, in the lives of their students.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472029808 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 06/27/2013 |
| Series: | The Michigan Series on Teaching Multilingual Writers |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 737 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students
By A. Suresh Canagarajah
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2002 University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-02980-8
CHAPTER 1
Understanding Critical Writing
So what happens to writing when you attach the word critical to it? Does anything happen at all? Is this another newfangled label that promotes a novel pedagogy or method for purely commercial reasons or other ulterior motivations without substantially affecting the writing activity? Or, on the other hand, is too much happening — far too much for our liking — shifting our attention to things unrelated to writing? Is this label bringing into composition something extraneous to the writing activity, such as political causes and social concerns that are the whims of one scholarly circle or the other? We in the teaching profession are rightly suspicious of anything that claims to be new, fashionable, or revolutionary nowadays.
For me, the label critical brings into sharper focus matters that are always there in writing. It develops an attitude and a perspective that enable us to see some of the hidden components of text construction and the subtler ramifications of writing. We gain these insights by situating the text in a rich context comprising diverse social institutions and experiential domains. In doing so, the label also alerts us to the power — and dangers — of literacy. Texts can open up new possibilities for writers and their communities — just as illiteracy or ineffective writing can deny avenues for advancement. Writing can bring into being new orientations to the self and the world — just as passive, complacent, or mechanical writing parrots the established view of things (which may serve the unfair, partisan interests of dominant institutions and social groups). Indeed, the text is shaped by such processes of conflict, struggle, and change that characterize society. By connecting the text to context (or the word to the world), the critical perspective enables us to appreciate the complexity of writing and address issues of literacy that have far-reaching social implications.
Defining the Critical
Before I spell out how critical redefines writing, we should consider briefly the currency of the label itself. We have by now come across critical theory, critical thinking, critical pedagogy, critical ethnography, critical linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and even critical classroom discourse analysis — just to mention a few. We can of course go on attaching this label to any field we want because there is something predictable and distinctive that happens when we do so. It is natural for us to think of uncritical as the opposite of this label. But it is unfair to say that those who don't practice a critical approach are choosing to be apathetic or naive. There are good reasons why someone may choose to adopt an alternative approach. Indicative of these more serious motivations are terms like objective, detached, disinterested, pragmatic, formalistic, and abstract. These adjectives are less pejorative antonyms for the term critical.
To understand the ways these terms relate to each other, we need to take a brief detour through history. The Enlightenment movement of seventeenth-century Europe has much to do with the values attached to these terms. Taking pride in adopting a more rational, systematic, and scientific approach to things, the movement initiated radical changes in many domains of inquiry. Its effects are still there in certain traditions of the study of writing. In order to understand writing, the movement would have said, we need first to identify and demarcate the object of our analysis — the text. We should separate the "text-in-itself" from other related activities and domains so that it can speak for itself. For example, the writer's intentions, feelings, values, and interests should be separated from the text. Neither is the text the reader's processing of it in terms of his or her intentions, feelings, values, and interests. Also, the scholar must see to it that he or she doesn't bring any biases or predisposition to the analysis. This disinterested attitude was considered favorable to letting the object speak for itself. At its best, the study of the text could be undertaken without any involvement of the scholar by employing predesigned procedures and methods. As a culmination of the Enlightenment tendency, Structuralism took the scholar further inside the isolated text. It claimed that if one entered the core of the text, cutting through the superficial clutter of content, meaning, and surface structural variations, one would discover the basic underlying rules that account for the text's universal laws of production and reception. This attitude encouraged an abstract and formalistic approach. Schools as diverse as New Criticism in literature, text linguistics in discourse analysis, and the "current traditional" paradigm in rhetoric display such an approach today. Literacy instruction, influenced by this tendency, has been formalistic, skill driven, and product oriented.
The cultivation of such an empirical perspective on texts was certainly productive in many ways. It brought a clarity, discipline, and rigor to the descriptive activity. Getting the predisposition of human subjects muddled in the analysis, or getting distracted by superficial variations, can be misleading. The approach certainly generated important insights into certain general properties of textuality and literacy. But there is also something lost in this type of approach. For the sake of analytical convenience we are deliberately simplifying the disposition and implications of texts. The text becomes more and more isolated, detached, abstract, and generic. The values that inform its structure and form are ignored. It becomes empty of content, losing its complexity and depth. With the decontextualized approach, the influences of social conditions and cultural diversity on text construction are lost. The ways in which texts are shaped by, and in turn shape, sociopolitical realities are obscured. Much of this happens because the text has become static, passive, and one-dimensional. Writers and readers themselves become automatons who employ predesigned formal procedures with detachment to generate texts. All this amounts to adopting an innocence and complacency toward the literate activity. As a corrective, the critical approach grounds the text in the material world to orientate to its troubling social functions, the value-ridden nature of its constitution, and the conflicting motivations behind its production and reception.
Now let's return to our original question: how does the critical orientation redefine writing? We may summarize the shifts in perspective in the following manner.
• From writing as autonomous to writing as situated. The production of texts is not an end in itself. We don't write simply to produce a text — and leave it at that. We produce texts to achieve certain interests and purposes. Furthermore, after a text is produced, it gets used in unanticipated ways. Launched into the public world, it takes a life of its own and effects results and processes totally unanticipated by the writer. Therefore, texts not only mean but do. Their functionality goes to the extent of reconstructing reality, rather than simply reflecting reality. We need to inquire what the word does to/in the world.
• From writing as individualistic to writing as social. For many of us, the stock image of writing is that of the lonely writer locked away in his small apartment (in crowded New York City) or a cabin (in the quiet woods of New England) pouring his thoughts on paper under mysteriously received inspiration. But writing is not a monologue; it is dialogical. One has to take account of the audience (implicitly or explicitly) while writing. This may involve a set of intended audiences, but it also involves an ever-expanding unintended audience (stretching limitlessly across time and space). In constructing a text, a writer is conducting a conversation with all this diversity of readers. This process is different from the definition of it we get from communication theory — which is often diagrammed as follows: writer->text->reader (or speaker->words->listener). Writing is not a one-way transmission of ideas, nor are constructs like writer and text autonomous. The writer's "intentions" and "thoughts" are considerably influenced by the expectations, norms, and values of the audience (or community). The text itself then becomes a mediated construct — one that is shaped by the struggle/collaboration/interplay between the writer, reader, and the community for thought. We have to become sensitive to how the text embodies the influences of this social interaction.
• From writing as cognitive to writing as material. For many, writing is a purely mental activity of putting down on paper the relevant ideas, words, and information that one has the capacity to generate. They view writing as a play between the mind and the text for meaning, order, and coherence. But there are many material resources required to do writing. At the simplest level, one needs a pencil, pen, typewriter, or computer to compose one's thoughts. Which of these one uses is often decided by one's economic status. Each of these instruments presents different levels of advantage to the writer. Furthermore, one needs to be privileged to devote the time required for writing. Writers also need the means to tap necessary resources from publishers, libraries, media industries, and the market. The text is shaped out of a negotiation of these constraints and resources. How these material factors impinge upon the text requires examination.
• From writing as formal to writing as ideological. Another commonsense assumption is that one only needs grammar, structure, and rules to construct a text. These are treated as abstract, value-free features of textual form. But writing is more than language or structure. It is also a representation of reality, an embodiment of values, and a presentation of self. Form itself is informed by diverse conventions of textuality, values of appropriacy, and attitudes to style. If writing is not just rules but how to use those rules — that is, for what purpose and with what attitude — then this is a contentious area of cultural difference and ideological preference. One has to consider what values are implied by the form and whether textual norms can be modified to represent alternate values.
• From writing as spatial to writing as historical. For many, the text (once produced) is an inert object that occupies a space. It is how words populate five pages, structured in a seamless manner, that is treated as the concern of writers and readers. But the text has evolved through time. While the writing was being done, the writer took care of many other responsibilities in his or her everyday life. There were many false starts and failed attempts. There were many visions and revisions of what the writer wanted to say. There were collaborations and conflicts around the evolving text. The changing social conditions of the community and the personal fortunes of the writer also shape the text. After being produced, the text continues to live in history, being decoded differently according to differing social conditions. The text then is not a seamless whole that stands static through reading and writing. How it is shaped by the disjunctions, fissures, struggles, and conflicts during its construction and reception needs attention.
If we can summarize all these differences in one simple slogan, the shift is from writing as an object to writing as an activity. In integrating the text into the flow of sociohistoric currents and understanding it as one more purposive activity we do in everyday life, writing becomes not a product but a practice. It is in perceiving writing as a situated, mediated, dynamic social activity that the work of critical practice begins. We cannot stop with charting the internal linguistic structures and rhetorical patterns of the text. We have to also interrogate the values and ideologies that inform the text; the ways in which the external contexts of production and reception shape the text; the prospects for human possibilities to be limited or expanded by the text; and the ways in which the unequal status and differing identities of writers (and readers) affect the constitution of the text. In short, we begin to see how writing is implicated in social conflict, material inequality, cultural difference, and power relationships. In critical writing, students would become sensitive to these factors. They would wrestle with textual constraints, tap the available material resources, and negotiate the conflicting discourses in their favor to communicate effectively. In teaching critical writing, instructors have to make students aware of these diverse constraints and possibilities as they strive for a representation of knowledge that is emancipatory and empowering.
The orientations listed earlier differ from the perspectives of some other current schools of thinking that may employ similar constructs in their definitions. For example, that writing should be contextualized is widely held by many schools these days. But for some, contextualizing the text means seeing the specific details/words/images in terms of the total framework of the text. Or it can mean seeing the details in terms of rhetorical/genre conventions. But this sense of context is still "internal" to the text. I have articulated an ever-widening context that expands beyond the writer/reader and the community to historical and social conditions. On the other hand, even when social context is acknowledged by some schools, it is treated as lying outside the text; it doesn't affect the text's very constitution. Furthermore, theorizing the politics of writing has become fashionable in many circles today — especially among those influenced by poststructuralist and postmodernist perspectives. However, here again, politics is defined in terms of discursive and linguistic issues only, leaving more recalcitrant material factors out of consideration. This orientation explains the trend in Western academic circles toward celebrating the rhetorical activity of interpreting the tensions within the text to show how ideological struggle is manifested there. The poststructuralist schools perceive language as one of the tools that sustain inequality and domination at the microsocial level; therefore, deconstructing the written text to expose the tensions therein is treated as equal to bringing the whole unfair social edifice crumbling down. Though I acknowledge the importance of language and discourse in reflecting/sustaining/enforcing inequality, I still feel that the historical and material dimensions of power have to be addressed in their own terms. Therefore my perspective on writing brings together text-internal and text-external factors, discursive and historical forces, linguistic and social considerations.
Orientating to the Multilingual Writer
I have been talking of the writer in very generalized terms up to this point. It is time now to give flesh and blood to the type of writers this book is concerned with. The pedagogical context assumed in this book is the teaching of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). The ESOL student community includes those who are learning English as a second language — in other words, those living in former British colonies such as India, Nigeria, and Jamaica and those linguistic minorities living in the traditionally English-speaking countries of Canada, the United States, and Britain, all of whom actively use English as an additional language in social and educational life. These are largely bilinguals. Included in this group are speech communities for whom English has become considerably "nativized." Through a long history of interaction, English has now become locally rooted, accommodating lexical, grammatical, and discoursal features from native languages. While some of these speakers would consider English their native language (i.e., speaking English as their first or sole language), they will still face challenges in using the "standard" English dialects (of the Anglo-American variety) treated as the norm for academic writing. Therefore they should also be considered bidialectals who have to shift from one variant of English to another in their writing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students by A. Suresh Canagarajah. Copyright © 2002 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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