Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition: Global Interrogations, Local Interventions

2. MULTILINGUALITY IS THE MAINSTREAM by Jonathan Hall

31 2. MULTILINGUALITY IS THE MAINSTREAM Jonathan Hall MULTILINGUALITY IS THE mainstream. On a global basis, this is a simple statement of fact. Around the world billions of people—from highly educated to illiterate, encompassing rich and poor, men and women and children of every religion and every nation—are users of two or more languages. Most of the English speakers in the world also speak another language—in fact more people speak English as a second language than as a first language (Graddol, Future and English Next). So we’re not talking about a bare majority here—we’re talking about the norm, the mainstream. It’s only in the United States and in some other countries where English is the local language that multilinguality is regarded as at all odd or problematic . It’s only in the United States, with its “melting pot” tradition, that the expectation for immigrants is that as they learn English they will gradually extinguish their other languages. If statistically speaking multilinguality is the mainstream, where then does this “subtractive expectation” come from?1 Have we in the composition community really come to terms with the ways in which assumptions of monolingualism—or of multilinguality as a merely transient phenomenon—affect the work we do in our classrooms and in our research? To be sure, within composition studies, a robust critical tradition has over the past decade examined the ideological assumption of monolingualism within all aspects of academic work. Bruce Horner and John Trimbur traced the historical development of a normative “monolingual culture.” Suresh Canagarajah turned the discussion to the pedagogical work of World Englishes in the present and future of composition (“Place”). Paul Kei Matsuda exposed “the myth of linguistic homogeneity” in the composition classroom—and the ways in which this assumption can persist even in the face of contrary evidence. Gale Shuck explored some of the consequences of 32 Jonathan Hall monolingualist thinking for writing program administrative work (“Combating ”). As the work of English as a global language has come under scrutiny, the monolingualist research culture of academia has also come under fire (Donahue, “‘Internationalization’”; Lillis and Curry, “Professional”). Most recently, the “translingual approach,” endorsed by many scholars working in the field, has sought to provide a starting point for the development of a writing pedagogy not based on a foundation of monolingualism (Horner et al., “Language Difference”). All of this work has documented the effects of monolingualism in our teaching, our research, and our administrative practices. The question I’m interested in is: what might a U.S. higher education system that does not begin from an assumption of monolinguality look like? What form might an academia of the future take if the idea that multilinguality is the mainstream were adopted seriously? If multilinguality is reconceived as a resource rather than as a deficit, how will this lead to institutional change in education and research? What might a culture of multilingualism or plurilingualism (Canagarajah, “Multilingual Strategies”) or translingualism look like? In this essay I’ll employ two principal strategies for making invisible monolingualist assumptions more explicit and thus more critique-able. I’ll begin with a fantasy, an imagination of an alternative universe, or at least an alternative education system, based on different assumptions. Returning to our present reality, I will then examine some data from a survey on education and language background, conducted at a public urban university, and explore some consequences for the work of composition regarding the significant linguistic diversity that it reveals. Fictional Prelude: The Story of “John” at “Carrothers College” Let’s begin with a thought experiment. Consider a scenario in an alternate U.S. educational universe: John’s instructors at Carrothers College were very concerned about his progress. When he arrived on campus as a first-year student, he struggled with the placement essay, which included a simple “code-meshing” component , similar to a basic exercise that most students had practiced dozens of times in high school, which asked them to strategically incorporate elements of their non-English language into their mostly English-language essay.2 John scattered a few words of Spanish here and there throughout his essay, Multilinguality Is the Mainstream 33 but he never really got beyond the level of superficial lexical borrowing. As a result, he was placed in a special section of first-year composition designated “College Writing for Monolingual Learners,” which was officially described as equivalent to...