Lu: Professing Multiculturalism (Dani):
● English Studies has done little to combat ghettoization of two of its own cultures: composition teaching & student writing
● One view of composition
○ Contest separation of form and meaning
○ Against a conception of ‘academic discourse’ as discrete, fixed, and unified
○ Results in no classroom practice
○ Reinforces students’ sense of discrepancy between theirs and ‘error-free writing’
● Shift attention towards dialogically coordinating a varied and profound heteroglossia(?)
○ Mapping the heteroglossia on internal/external scenes of writing
○ The writer’s effort to look at one discourse through the eyes of another
○ The writer’s willingness to resist the forces of ‘official’ discourses
● “Why do we assume [...] that until one can prove one’s ability to produce ‘error-free’ prose, one has not earned the right to innovate ‘style’?”
● One way to help students: connect their “difficulties” with the refusal of “real” writers to reproduce the hegemonic conventions in written English
● Discussion of student’s usage of “can able to”
Beyond Internationalization(Grobman):
>one of the most crucial debates in composition studies is whether its purpose is “to help students fit into society or to convince them to change it”
>Timothy Weiss (“Gods”) points out that “the competition for domestic as well as international markets has attained an intensity that brushes aside the interculturally ignorant and inexperienced”
>ALthought internationalization emphasizes the limitations of instrumental views of writing and transforms classrooms into social arenas, multiculturalism reframes it by bringing politics into pedagogy.
>technical writing used to be clear, but with internationalization things are not as they used to be
>no writing gives complete clarity, because every pseron is predisponsed to a linked language and ideology
>Patrick Moore claims that certain discourses require unambiguity, he claims which comes from standardization by a community of discourse which agrees to such conventions, a social view of writing
>Intercultural communication makes audience issues much more complex
>We encourage student's appropriation of academic discourse to enable them to critique it
>Using multiculturalism, we can provide students with the tools for critique and for understanding the complex relationship between ideology and language and the sturctures that often result in marginalization based on race, class, and gender in the US and across the globe.
>WE can use classrooms as a contact point with other cultures
>We can teach students, for example, abouthowcultural differences are manifested in rhetorical conventions. We can teach them that Asian writers often use inductive discourse patterns (delaying the topic to the end), whereas Western communicators lean toward deductive patterns (introducing the topic at the beginning—what many specialists call bottom-lining) (Kubota).
>However it is not enough to inform them, where they only replicate the works, but they need to be taught a deep reverence for their multicultural audience.
>Call back to students being literate in not just the traditional sense but as Weiss says: they must learn to be better readers of human behavior and communicative signs as well as better interpreters of cultural differences and ambiguities
>Students don't need formulas anymore. They need authentic sensitivity and respect for differences