Cross-Language Relations in Composition

Introduction: From “English Only” to Cross-Language Relations in Composition

1 Introduction: From “English Only” to CrossLanguage Relations in Composition Bruce Horner This collection participates in an emerging movement within composition studies representing, and responding to, changes in and changing perceptions of language(s), English(es), students, and the relations of all these to one another. This movement critiques the tacit policy of “English Only” dominating composition and pursues teaching and research that resist that policy. It draws attention to the fact that within much composition teaching and scholarship, both the context of writing and writing itself are imagined to be monolingual: the “norm” assumed, in other words, is a monolingual, native-English speaking writer writing only in English to an audience of English-only readers (Horner and Trimbur). This tacit policy of monolingualism manifests itself in other ways as well: the institutional divides separating most composition programs and courses from English as a Second Language (ESL) programs and courses, including courses in “ESL composition,” and separating composition courses from courses that involve students in writing in any language other than English; the nearly complete absence in composition textbook “readers” of writings by anyone other than North American and British writers whose first language is English (even translations of texts written in languages other than English are rare); the insistence in composition textbooks on standardizing students’ English and their neglect of competing standards and definitions of English; composition historians’ neglect of writing in languages other than English; and the neglect in composition scholarship of any non-anglophone scholarship on writing. Such practices define composition as composing in, and only in, an English that has a fixed standard that students are told they must learn to produce in order to participate fully in the civic life of the nation (as full citizens). Language, literacy, and citizenship are viewed as interdependent: to be literate is to know the language, and to know the language is requisite to citizenship. To the history and ongoing project of composition, so understood, and to literacy and citizenship, writing in other languages, or in other forms of English, is entirely irrelevant. +RUQHU,QWURLQGG $0 Introduction 2 This collection contests this state of affairs. Multilingualism, rather than monolingualism, is taken as both the historical and ideal norm. The context of writing and the writing itself are defined as multilingual: not only is the monolingual writer writing only in English to an audience of speakers of only English viewed as an aberration, but even in the case of such aberrations, the “English” being written and the English of the audience is understood to be plural—Englishes—and hence the situation is at least in a certain sense multilingual. Moreover, even the monolingual writers writing only in English to an audience of speakers of only English are viewed as operating in the context of—both responding to and provoking responses in turn from—other languages, including other Englishes and other tongues, and thus they are themselves engaging in cross-language relations, albeit of a peculiar kind. This position on multilingualism is aligned with scholarship in applied linguistics demonstrating the multiple and fluctuating character of English as not a single, unchanging world language, or lingua franca, but a constellation of ever changing Englishes (see Kachru, Alchemy; Parakrama; Pennycook, “English”; and Rubdy and Saraceni, English). This scholarship has revealed that treating one set of conventions as posing a universal definition of “English” is at odds with the fact of a variety of different sets of established practices with English effecting its pluralization into “Englishes” (see Kachru, Alchemy). Further, it has shown the necessity of approaching all languages and language varieties as inevitably in flux, their defining borders as at best porous and constructed, with even the stability of the plurality of Englishes in question (Gal and Irvine; Parakrama; Pennycook, “English” and “Performativity”). It highlights the politics of standardizing such varieties and the privileging of so-called native English speakers’ language practices over those of speakers of English as a “second” language, the practices of both over those of speakers of English as a “foreign” language, and “native” over “indigenized” and creolized Englishes (see Nayar, Singh). But while the work of this collection is aligned with such scholarship, it necessarily begins from and responds to a different set of conditions and heads in a different direction. Much of the scholarship on English as a Lingua Franca, for example, is concerned with spoken rather than written language (see Matsuda and Matsuda). Thus, at least some of its findings—for example, regarding the phonological...