Cross-Language Relations in Composition

16. In Praise of Incomprehension

230 16. In Praise of Incomprehension Catherine Prendergast The most significant achievement of the chapters in part 1 of this volume is that they bring attention back to language; such sustained attention has not been the focus of the field’s energies since the years immediately following the Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution. Cross-language work demonstrates that rhetorical concerns of purpose, argument, and ethos are animated through language choices. Yet how cross-language relations can be animated in our too often monolingual classrooms is another question entirely . As Geneva Smitherman and more recently Scott Wible have observed, efforts to design writing pedagogies informed by the language research of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution and background statement were thwarted when political shifts in the 1980s redefined progressive pedagogy as irresponsible pedagogy. This precedent suggests that efforts to implement the insights from this volume in the classroom are likely to meet similar political pressure. And then there remains the question of whether such efforts should be undertaken at all. Perhaps I’m reading in, but I imagine Scott Richard Lyons felt taxed by the implicit task of relating his long-standing cross-language work to the enterprise of teaching composition. He writes: “Readers of this collection will doubtless want to know what role might be played by today’s teachers of writing in the struggle to preserve Native tongues and linguistic diversity. Unfortunately, my answer is: probably very little.” I agree with Lyons that composition is an inherently imperial enterprise and therefore not a natural environment for cross-language work. As Lyons points out, readers of this volume shouldn’t expect its chapters to provide lesson plans, particularly on the weighty topic of preserving languages whose existence is directly threatened by continued imperialistic action. Composition can’t help but partake of those “gross actions and inactions” that, as Min-Zhan Lu puts it in her chapter, “directly and indirectly pressured users of English to see symbolic and surgical fixes,” including pedagogical fixes for imagined brokenness. But I do think there is a difference between the administrative apparatus that is composition (problematic, as most can agree) and the acts of +RUQHU&KLQGG $0 In Praise of Incomprehension 231 writing and teaching writing, which are transcendent enough to take flower even in the unfertile ground of the required first-year course. That said, I hasten to also acknowledge that only a small portion of language acquisition and use, particularly of any form of English globally, takes place in the classroom at all. In environments of political and economic oppression , language learning goes underground. As Elaine Richardson reminds us in her chapter of the American context: “Historically speaking, Black folks didn’t get their rhetorical training through the classroom.” The same could be said for many across the globe in developing countries who have little choice but to acquire English for themselves and their families in whatever ways they can both afford and embrace. Where the classroom becomes an expression of political control, as it did, for example, in Czechoslovakia during the communist regime, the most vibrant forms of language learning happen elsewhere. Slovaks I have interviewed who learned English during communism uniformly attested to retaining little from English classes at school, even where English classes were available to them. On the other hand, these same people participated in a subculture of unofficial English lessons: they read smuggled-in paperbacks, learned the lyrics to Beatles songs, made their own cassette tapes of English expressions, and devised language games that would force exercise of their English. While I would in no way argue that the political climate in post-communist Slovakia rivals the level of oppression experienced pre-1989, there remain global inequities that have resulted in continued expansion of the boundaries of the classroom. Although English classes are now required at many Slovak schools and workplaces, and a supplemental education market is booming, to the many who seek to learn English—fast—these resources are not enough. A wealthy few can afford to send their children abroad to intensive courses in English-speaking countries. The less wealthy pay for after-school courses and tutoring to augment school offerings and look for opportunities within their daily lives and circumstances to improve their English or that of their family members. I met one repairman who listened to tapes while driving in his car on service calls to far corners of Slovakia. I watched a scholar and father of two wash dishes...