WE and literacy/composition studies

Here are the questions I'll be handing out in class tomorrow:

Canagarajah – The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued

1. Canagarajah argues that “ME” (standard) speakers need to be able to negotiate WE “in order to be functional postmodern global citizens” (591). How true is that? Does he ignore or downplay any issues with that statement and throughout this article?

2. He advocates teaching “communicative strategies” rather than “grammatical rules” (593). How would that be enacted in a composition classroom? (Would it differ if the class has only nonnative speakers or mixed background students? standard or nonstandard speakers?)

3. What do you think of “code meshing” in the classroom? What can it serve to do? In which situations does it not function?

a. What do Canagarajah’s examples or Michael-Luna & Canagarajah’s examples show?

b. Could code meshing go beyond lexicon and syntax to rhetorical style and overall organization? Would it have to be explicated and defended every time it was used?

Matsuda and Matsuda – World Englishes and the Teaching of Writing

4. The authors seem to be setting up their principles under the assumption that L2 writing or composition teachers have some basic/working knowledge of WE. Do they? Have you ever received teacher training on WE/local varieties of a language? When/where/how should such training happen?

5. Looking at Matsuda and Matsuda’s third principle (372): How will/can teachers know the difference between an error and a choice? What about the rest of the world or academia, considering that the text or structure might not be isolated only to that class? (Think also of Canagarajah’s example of the Malaysian student’s “can able to,” p. 609, and how the class addressed that construction.)

Michael-Luna and Canagarajah – Multilingual Academic Literacies: Pedagogical Foundations for Code Meshing in Primary and Higher Education

6. Consider Canagarajah’s (2006) claim that “we permit WE only in certain well-defined contexts,” including “WE for literary texts; ME for ‘serious’ texts” (594). Then look at the texts used in the elementary classroom (61-3). Is code meshing only appropriate in “literary”—not academic—texts? (Or am I too cynical?) What can we see from examples of students’ written uses of code meshing?

7. How could the attempt at enabling code meshing in higher education—a failed experience, in the authors’ own words—be adjusted to successfully promote students’ local languages?

Applications

8. Does teaching WE/teaching about WE belong in ESL classroom, college composition, or both? (Perhaps related: Where do we place students who speak a variety of WE as their L1? L2?)

9. Do you have any success stories/strategies of integrating students’ local languages into classroom writing? What about teaching monovarietal students WE or about WE?

I'm looking forward to this discussion!