Horner, Lu, Royster, and Trimbur, Language Difference in Writing

Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur.  “OPINION: Language Difference in Writing:  Toward a Translingual Approach.”  College English 73.3 (Jan 2011) 303-321.

Horner, Lu, et al describe how the intended ossification of language use in the classroom is in direct conflict with the actual usages that intersect in the classroom by way of the average (U.S.) classroom’s heterogeneity.  Though traditionally perceived as “interference”  the authors propose that a “translingual approach” that will serve “as a resource for producing meaning in writing speaking, reading and listening” (303).  Taking up the 1974 CCCC’s “Students’ Rights to Their Own Language”, the authors challenge educators to approach language difference with “an attitude of deliberative inquiry” (304).

The authors begin by outlining two current responses to language difference, explaining that both responses are problematic in that they treat “language and language practices as discrete, uniform, and stable” (307) and herein, they hit upon what must change in order for language practices to work within a translingual approach.  Essentially, language practices must value the complicated ways that language gets taken up and used by speakers.  This understanding of language practice is particularly relevant to the sorts of language policies at work in social/cultural groups; as well, it presents specific ramifications to the ways that writing programs promote translingualism in their administrative, hiring, and pedagogical practices (for students and student teachers).  The end of this article functions specifically to those ends (for writing programs) by offering references to those who are interested in taking up this idea of translingualism in writing program.

Trimbur, Linguistic Memory and Politics

Trimbur, John.  “Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. History.”  College English 68.6 (July 2006) 575-88.

Trimbur begins the first half of his history of language policy by citing Pratt’s claim that, rather than hostility, Americans tend to feel ambivalence to language differences between cultures. He then sets out to investigate the roots of this ambivalence by presenting its inception in the work of America’s founding fathers.  Trimbur represents this early language policy as language-neutral, laissez-faire.  However, his characterization rings true only so far as his examples, which at times either support or contradict the claim of ambivalence.  Though Benjamin Franklin is a founding father, his sentiment for the Pennsylvania Germans seems to point to his hostility—not ambivalence—for Germans, their language, their swarthiness (Trimbur 580).  The Franklin example is further problematized in that contemporary arguments against linguistic difference seem to echo its tones.  Trimbur goes on to explain a shift to the promotion of American English—which Webster addresses as a purer Anglo-Saxon representation of English than British English—as the preferred language of American language policy.

The second half of Trimbur’s article addresses how America’s language policy manifests in the college classroom where “the primacy of English as the medium of instruction in the U.S. university retains a powerful hold on teaching and learning” (585).  The status English holds in the university, Trimbur explains, effectively halts possibilities for an academic environment that includes multilinguistic contexts. Trimbur evokes the Students’ Right to Their Own Language as the call that, if adopted into university curriculum, can best mediate students’ challenges to incorporate academic language into the languages they already utilize.

Notes and Quotes

“Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours?  Whey should Pennsylvania, found by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion […]?”  (Ben Franklin qtd. in Trimbur 580).

“If anything, this unidirectional monolingualism has been codified in melting-pot ideologies as a ‘natural’ language shift to English only (with consequent loss of mother tongue) that occurs by the third generation in immigrant families, thereby making bilingualism and the maintenance of home languages appear to be aberrant and un-American” (584).

I understand the quote above to be saying that it’s natural to lose one’s mother tongue after several generations.  My problem with that idea is that it doesn’t really account for the experiences of the first and second generation.

“Linguistic memory—the incomplete forgetting of ancestral language—virtually guarantees ambivalence about multilingualism in the United States, as traces of other languages—embedded residually in mundane rituals, ethnic and racial identifications, the names and taste of food, the sound of a word, a style of dress—collide with English monolingualism and its Anglo-Saxon heritage” (584-5).

I don’t know that the forgetting Trimbur describes guarantees ambivalence.  Surrogation, as Trimbur presents Roach’s explanation, is a type of forgetting that leaves remnants.  I believe that the “satisfactory alternate” (579) is probably primarily satisfactory for those in power or on the side of power.

“The primacy of English as the medium of instruction in the U.S. university retains a powerful hold on teaching and learning, curtailing the development both materially and programmatically of a multilingual curriculum” (585).

Though we may not embrace multilingual classrooms as a rule, we are starting to create spaces for these sorts of classes to exist beyond the confines of the foreign language classroom.

“As I see it, multilingualism signifies more than the tolerance of many languages.  It also entails the status planning of languages and an additive language policy whereby all students as a matter of course speak, write, and learn in more than one language and all citizens thereby become capable of communicating with one another in a number of languages, code-switching as appropriate to the rhetorical situation”  (587).

Perhaps multilingualism will occur in the same way that Trimbur describes the loss of the mother tongue; in several generations we will see that our youth have forgotten the ambivalence or hostility of their parents.