As we support students in their writing development, there are many dilemmas that we face along the way. This section explores some of the common tensions encountered when supporting student writing.
Using Examples
- A common question when creating student writing supports is the role of examples in the process. Many instructors are concerned that using examples may lead to plagiarism. What are some principles to guide us in this process?
- When students have a clear idea of the writing task, as explored in class with the support of instructor-guided review of examples, they are less likely to need to resort to consulting other students or less ethical online sources to find the answers they need.
- When guiding students through examples, it is important to explicitly guide them through the difference between using structure models and “patchwriting” (where sections of text are borrows and re-used). Novice writers often stick closely to structure models (e.g., the 5 paragraph essay). With practice, more mature models are able to break away from these structures.
- One strategy to consider is to use an example that is like the course assignment in genre and overall structure, but different than the course assignment itself (e.g., a workplace text rather than a course text, an example based on a closely related topic that will not be used in the students’ assignment).
Avoiding Linguistic Discrimination
Multilingual writers strive to develop their writing in a context where linguistic discrimination is often present. Linguistic discrimination (Dovchin, 2019), linguicism (Skutknabb-Kangas, 2016), and linguistic racism (De Costa, 2020) are processes by which unequal power and resources are distributed to one group over another on the basis of language. In the global context, English is a language which has received tremendous global power as a result of colonial and globalized processes, and status and resources are often unequally distributed to native English speakers as a result of their linguistic status. Linguistic discrimination manifests in institutional contexts and at the level of individual interactions. Even as multilingual writers are striving to improve their English, they are the same time participating in systems where they receive discrimination on the basis of their non-native speaker status, which can harm their ability to meaningfully participate alongside native speakers in classroom situations, and diminishes the regard for their perspectives when presented in writing (Sah, 2019).
Linguistic discrimination also occurs between varieties of English. Kachru (1996b) describes the creation of three concentric circles of English use: inner circle countries (e.g., England, Canada, New Zealand), where native-speaker varieties of English are the dominant language; outer circle countries (e.g., Nigeria, India, Nepal), where English was historically established in the process of colonization; and expanding circle countries (e.g. China, Vietnam, Korea), where English gained status through the processes of globalization. Within these concentric circles, inner circle varieties typically hold greater status and prestige (Kachru, 1996a). As a result, multilingual writers who are proficient users of an outer circle variety may find their English use criticized as non-standard or inadequate for professional writing (Sah, 2019).
Because of these contextual factors, multilingual writers often find themselves positioned primarily as lacking in their ability to fully meet native-speaker norms, rather than as resourceful users of multiple languages or multiple varieties of global English. This deficit positioning typically works to maintain the dominant power of native-speaker Englishes in the global language hierarchy (Davis and Museus, 2019), and tends to create structures that discriminate, rather than empower, students to communicate effectively in academic and professional environments.
Attribution: The Academic Literacies section presented here is taken from Page, C. (2021). Supporting Multilingual Writers. In C. Page (Ed.) Inclusive Teaching. Kwantlen Polytechnic University. https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/inclusivepedagogies/
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
The video below discusses the concept of linguistic discrimination, and the common ways that it shows up in social interaction.
Translator: Marianela Paletta Reviewer: Robert Tucker Hi, thank you! Just to speak to that, never feel weird about speaking in front of a linguist. We love all language. I’m going to be talking about linguistic discriminations. So, how we judge others for the way that they speak, and actually write as well, and why we should stop.
Here is an e-card that was floating around recently: “I don’t judge people based on race, creed, color, or gender. I judge people on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.” Okay, this seems good, right? Well, at least we’re not being racist or sexist or other-ist, we’re just judging language. Wrong! When you’re judging language, you are actually judging on these things, as I will show you.
So, first, I’ll talk about why we do this judgment in the first place. Then I’ll talk about what we are actually judging, things we’re picking up on in someone’s language, and then why it’s actually bad to do this. So, why do we judge? Because we’re kind of told to, right?
Especially, think back to your elementary and high school teachers, they explicitly tell you that this is good language, and this is bad language. So, we are supposed to judge. We’re often taught by our parents, our friends, the society in general, actually. But also because it makes us feel good, right? It makes us feel like we’re better, that we’re higher on the social hierarchy, that we have better education. So it’s a form of snobbery. And when we do this, we’re reinforcing the hierarchy.
Okay, so what do we judge? Well, there are many features that I could talk about, but then I’d be here forever. I could talk about gender, I could talk about the features we associate with social class, race, sexuality, region, age, and so on. But I’ll just focus on the first three.
So, I’m going talk about the features that we associate with gender, the features we associate with social class, and the features we associate with race. Let’s talk about gender first. So, vocal fry has been talked about a lot recently. Vocal fry is a quality of vowels. We also call it laryngealisation or creaky voice in linguistics, and it’s very frequent. In fact, I’m using it probably, and you’ve heard it every day of your life, and you didn’t even realize it. But we associate it with people like Kim Kardashian, okay? But, men and women use this equally. So it’s not actually a thing that women do only; it’s a thing that we all do. But we only associate it with women, and it becomes stigmatized when women use it, not when, say, Ira Glass uses it, or Bill Clinton. Uptalk is also associated with women, especially younger women. That’s when you end a sentence in the question intonation, but it’s actually a statement. (Laughter) I used to use this all the time. However, because it’s stigmatized I stopped using it, right? Now, it turns out in Australia many men use it, and it’s not stigmatized when men use it.
And then also there’s this myth that women talk more than men. It’s been shown over and over again not to be true. Men talk more than women. So, even just talking, women talking, is stigmatized. So, in general, women’s speech is more stigmatized than men’s. Why? Because men are higher on the social hierarchy. So when you stigmatize women for any of these features, you are reinforcing the hierarchy.
There are many features associated with social class, but let’s take double negatives. Double negative is when you have two negative words in a sentence, like: “I don’t know nothing.” So you have “don’t” and “nothing”. Two negative words. Now, this is considered by many people to be illogical, because if you multiply negative and negative, you get a positive. But if you add them, there still negative, right? And if you look at a language like French: “ne” and “pas”, you have two negative words in a sentence, and that’s not considered to be illogical.
So, we are only stigmatizing it in English, not other languages, and we’re only stigmatizing it because of the social class of the people who use it. “Ain’t” is another one. “Ain’t” is a great word, I think, but many people don’t even consider it to be a word. One of my friends, his young son is in elementary school, and his teacher told him, straight up: “‘Ain’t’ is not a word.” So now this little kid runs around telling everyone, “‘Ain’t’ is not a word.” I don’t know what criteria she is using, because anything that I can think of, it would count as a word. And it also fills in a gap in the paradigm. So: you aren’t, he/she isn’t, I – “amn’t”? No: “ain’t,” right? So we need that word, I think. But we stigmatize it because of who uses it. And then things like, “I seen it yesterday.” “Seen” is a non-standard use of a past tense instead of “saw”. But there’s no logical reason that “saw” is better than “seen”, if you just think about it. They’re just different ways of pronouncing the same word. It’s only because of who says it, that it gets stigmatized. So, if you’re lower on the social hierarchy, your variety of language will be stigmatized. We also have many features associated with race, and this really depends on the race too. But there are many non-standard features of English. For example: double negatives, “ain’t”, “seen” for “saw”, which are shared with social class.
But let’s look at African-American vernacular English or Black-English specifically. So there’s this use of “be” that doesn’t exist in the standard dialect of English. It’s called the habitual “be”. So you say something like, “She be walking the dog,” and it means: “She walks the dog all the time,” or, “Customarily, she walks the dog.” Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a completely good use of the word “be”, it’s just different from the standard. And, in the same dialect, because “be” is used for this particular meaning, it’s no longer used in things like “they’re angry”, instead “they angry” would be the correct way to say that sentence. So, in this case, the more stigmatized the race is, the more stigmatized the features of language associated with that race will be.
Okay. I could also talk about all these other features, like sexuality, region, age, etc. But I won’t for time. In all of these cases, the lower status, the “x” – sexuality, whatever – is, or considered to be, then the more stigmatized the variety is. What else do we judge? We judge people who speak other languages than us. So, here is a case that just came up this last week. “She goes to see Wales rugby star Jamie Roberts, who, despite being taught in Welsh until he was 18, is now a qualified doctor and currently studying for his Master of Science degree in Queen’s College, Cambridge.” What on earth does speaking Welsh have to do with anything? Let alone being able to be a doctor or study science? Right? They got a lot of trouble on Twitter as you can imagine.
We also judge the way people write, and this is almost entirely based on social class and/or race. So: its/it’s, they’re/their/there, whose/who’s, Gee, I wonder why we mess those up, right? I mean, even I do this; I’ve got a PhD. in linguistics, and I still mess these up sometimes. So, we have a high expectation that everyone is going to be able to write perfectly all the time, and that’s unfair.
There’s also things like using “whom” correctly. It’s a pretty simple rule, but we don’t teach it properly. Also I feel like it’s dying out, so maybe we should just let “whom” go. It doesn’t really do much for us. And then there’s a bunch of made up rules like not splitting an infinitive. There is no reason for that rule, which is completely manufactured. Also, “to boldly go” sounds a lot better than “boldly to go”, or “to go boldly”. Right? If you’d learn nothing else from this, please at least ignore that rule. But, anyway, so you have to go to the right kind of school to learn all of these. So if you’re mocking someone for not learning these, you might be mocking the fact they didn’t get as good an education as you, which is not a nice thing to do. So, why should we stop? Well, it’s unattractive, right? It makes us feel good to be snobby, but it’s not actually a good thing. And it tells the world more about you, than the person you’re judging.
And there are also, and I would say this is even more crucial, there are legal implications for this type of judgment. Relatively recently, there was the famous Trayvon Martin murder case, and his friend, Rachel Jeantel, was a witness. She was treated horribly for many reasons. She was judged for her gender, her size, her race, but also, more importantly to this, for her language. Because her variety of English was different from the standard, and she was treated as if she didn’t even speak English by one of the lawyers. So, if we really want our justice system to be truly blind, we have to stop judging people for their language. So I am going to argue that linguistic discrimination is just as bad as any other kind of discrimination; we just think it’s more socially acceptable. And crucially, really, when you’re judging people for their language, you’re just sneakily judging them for all these things, right? And you’re pretending it’s about something else, like, “Oh, this is just a better version of a language that makes you a better person.” That’s not true. So, instead of judging people for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure, I think we should follow God’s lead. [I only judge on whether or not they’re an asshole.]
For reflection: What strategies help us to prepare students for effective workplace communication while avoiding linguistic discrimination?
Linguistic Racism and Critical Systemic Functional Linguistics
Mahboob and Szenes (2010) explored the topic of linguistic discrimination in higher education. They evaluated grades assigned to papers written by non-native speakers of English, comparing them to those written by native speakers. Their research sought to explore whether the differences in grades could be attributed to linguistic racism. In their linguistic analysis of students’ papers, they discovered that non-native English speakers lacked the ability to use the words, phrases, and structures that were often associated with stronger communication. Mahboob and Szenes conclude that structured pedagogies, such as those explored in this module, that provide all students with access to the language and genres of power, are one strand in challenging ongoing inequalities.
Student Perspectives on Writing Development
In a currently ongoing mixed-methods study, students shared their experiences of learning and communicating as non-native English speakers. Their stories revealed the tensions explored here. On the one hand, students valued clear, respectful, and direct feedback on how to improve their writing. On the other hand, overt expressions of linguistic discrimination (e.g., referring to students’ writing as “ESL”, harshly penalizing students for minor errors) were perceived as some of the more salient negative classroom experiences.
In the study participants’ perceptions, respect for their languages and capabilities as multilingual writers was valued. When feedback on language and writing was clear, fair, and balanced, students generally perceived it as helpful and non-discriminatory.
Making Space for Non-Western Ways of Knowing and Communicating
Another area of tension is supporting students’ development within their chosen field in the Canadian context, while avoiding assimilative practices. For those of us from the dominant culture, this involves reflection and recognition that our ways of communicating are not the only possibilities.
An early attempt to recognize cultural differences is seen in Robert Kaplan’s (1966) paper on contrastive rhetoric, which attempted to map out typical culturally-based communication patterns, making educators aware of differences. More recently, this approach has been critiqued (e.g., Kubota & Lehner, 2004) for generating a stereotyped model that upholds colonial ways of labelling the Other and ignoring differences of power. Kubota and Lehner suggest adopting a more critical approach to recognizing differences in communicative styles, which includes recognizing our students’ cultural hybridity, where different aspects of cultural and professional identities mesh together when purposeful choices are available to writers.
References
Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Writing
The Four Feathers Writing Guide, produced at Royal Roads University, integrates Coast Salish teachings with academic writing processes in order to support Indigenous student writers. Chapter topics include connecting oral traditions and academic writing, developing a vision, gathering information, and sharing knowledge.
KPU Indigenous Studies librarian Rachel Chong has developed the Indigenous Information Literacy resource to support students in conducting research using Indigenous information sources.