Abstract
The increasing presence of multilingual writers in higher education, particularly in North American educational contexts, makes it difficult for educators to assume that all students write proficiently in standard edited English. Yet, educators still tend to expect students to produce English texts that are highly polished and error free without necessarily providing much instruction or support. This mismatch between reality and expectation is difficult for educators to resolve without sufficient training or expertise. The present chapter offers some guidance by describing various multilingual writers and their language variation and development. The authors then present common ideologies held by educators or proposed by theorists that can prevent multilingual writers from getting necessary language support. The chapter then proffers several suggestions for embracing grammatical diversity and supporting legitimate language development in order to better align teachers' expectations with the reality of grammatical diversity in high education.
TopBackground
The question of what standard edited English is, and who uses it, represents a complicated and disputed issue on many levels (see Horner et al., 2011a). On one hand, the term might seem self-explanatory: English is a well-recognized language, it ostensibly has a standard form, and the edited form of this language does not feature errors or mistakes. However, the term is much less obvious when accounting for real and legitimate world English varieties. The English used in the United States of America differs from that used in the United Kingdom compared to the English used in India, Hong Kong, or the Philippines. Work done by Braj Kachru since the 1980s as well as that of Canagarajah, Horner, Trimbur and others (see Canagarajah, 2006; Horner & Trimbur, 2002; Kachru, 1990) highlights the fact that languages are not static and that national, local, and even idiosyncratic varieties exist. Such varieties give rise to valuations of correctness and legitimacy despite the fact that each variety can have a “standard” or at least prestigious form. It should also be noted that even standard forms can be rife with ambiguity, inconsistency, and contradiction (see Li, 2010). Given all this, the English used in what Kachru (1990) considers to be inner-circle contexts, such as the United States and United Kingdom, is what most writers conceive of as “standard” English, and its edited form, which conforms to prescriptivist rules about prestigious spelling, grammar, usage, and style is considered edited. In this chapter, I adopt this as the definition of standard edited English while simultaneously acknowledging that other varieties including second-language and foreign-language varieties of English have legitimacy as well.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Multilingual Writers: Individuals who write in more than one language.
Code-Switching: Moving between two or more languages or language varieties within a given text or conversation.
Mistake: Lexical or morphosyntactic violations from a standard that a student knows how to address.
Error: Inaccuracies that a writer doesn’t know how to address because of limited language proficiency.
Standard Edited English: English used by native English speakers in “inner-circle countries” which conforms to prescriptivist rules about prestigious spelling, grammar, usage, and style.
Language Variety: Variation across and within languages as a result of national, local, and idiosyncratic differences among language speakers.
Grammar: Intuitive and prescriptive conventions about the ordering and use of morphosyntactic features of a particular language that provide structure to that language.
Code-Meshing: Making effective rhetorical use of features from two or more languages or language varieties simultaneously to express an idea.