Both Martin and Helena have raised for me some interesting questions about
how people use
language-deriving-from-historically-distinct-speech-communities, whether we
call these separate "Languages" (from England and Wales) or separate
"registers/genres" (from technical communities or literary communities).
Martin noted that English was used in schools in Wales:
>In some selected examination subjects and classes
>By kids for swearing and cursing (anglo saxon is particularly good for
>this)
>By kids to discuss aspects of activity that have come into their lives
>through English (soccer, soap opera, some popular music, some aspects of
>human relationships)
Each of these cases would correspond to a distinct 'register' of English
(i.e. the subset of the language's resources, or the specialized
probabilities of using resources from the total set, in a particular kind
of social Activity -- usually defined by some specialization as to topic,
construction of interpersonal relationships, and/or medium). So in this
case the mixing (from the suspect viewpoint of 'pure' languages as natural
units) is register specific or activity-specific (in part): we talk of
these particular matters and do these particular things more in English
than in Welsh. Our earlier discussion would ask us how we would
re-conceptualize what is happening from an "internal" perspective, not as a
mixing of _our_ "Welsh" and "English" but as the normal language patterns
of _their_ complex community where, in this sense, linguistic resources
deriving historically from communities in England and those from
communities in Wales are simply both available and both part of language
and speech in the present community. This issue of viewpoint has
substantial implications for how we view language learning and language
development under such not-so-unusual conditions.
Of course not all cases of 'mixing' or function-dependent use of different
available linguistic resources are so neatly parcelled out according to
topics or activities (chemistry or cursing); the function-specific
distribution of probabilities (more likely to use one resource than the
other in some circumstances) can be at a finer-grained (shorter timescale)
level, down to the Act or utterance, or word-choice, or even (operation
level ala Leontiev) spelling or pronunciation differences, intonational
contour selections, etc.
Helena's example from a technical institute shows another interesting
problem of potential conflict among lects (lect in the sense here of a
language variety, whether pure or mixed, all-purpose or special-purpose)
that can be thought about in terms of registers and genres. (Register in
the sense above is a selection of language resources for a particular
activity; genre is a whole-text level discourse pattern associated with
some activity and some community; if used together, register tends to index
lexico-grammatical choices and genre to index whole-text organizational
structure choices.)
>Often, the hitch in arranging such an articulation comes from the general
>education requirements -- especially English comp -- of the articulating
>institution.
>The issue can be seen as competing views of what constitutes a text. The
>texts that apprentices learn to read include multi-dimensional diagrams and
>multi-level indexes, for example. Expand this to occupationl/technical
>programs generally and we get texts that look like what Jay posted -- weather
>reports for flight plans, for exmaple, and blueprints, codes of various sorts
>(this relates to why I was so happy to see Peter Smagorinsky's broad sweep of
>what constituted a text).
The competing views of what constitutes a text, especially a 'good text',
one that demonstrates a writer's proficiency at writing, arise from the
register and genre norms of historically distinct (not isolated, but
somewhat mutually excluding) literacy communities -- those of technical
specialists and those of literature specialists. For the former, word and
grammar choices follow functions (both communicative and political, i.e.
rhetorical) that are connected to the activities of technical specialist
communities (e.g. describing quantitatively, describing so as to allow
step-by-step re-tracing of evidentiary justifications for each descriptive
element, describing according to strictly standardized conventions), and
here the genre conventions normally include multiple media and meanings
made only jointly between two or more media. The paradigmatic examples of
texts for literature specialists, even for minimally 'artistic' texts,
reflect activities in which writing is aimed to wide audiences rather than
narrow specialist ones, in which quantitative description and especially
quantification of relationships is relatively rare, in which evidentiary
appeal is to common knowledge and common experience rather than to unique
evidence trails or specialist knowledge, and where language is expected to
make complete meanings on its own, without necessary support from other media.
But in the technical institute as in the Welsh bilingual school, we again
find the normal case of 'mixing' of discourse traditions with historically
distinct antecedents, and we again face the problem of how to
reconceptualize the literacy reality of this community now in such a way
that we see it as its students see it: a place where all these resources
are available and you can mobilize whatever is available and seems to work
for your activity. But also these are places where larger-scale forces are
pursuing their own political agendas of separation and purification, where
you are judged in your writing or your talk not just by what you make
language do for your present purposes, but by whether you conform to the
conventions of long-standing (and perhaps obsolescent, but still powerful)
larger-scale communities that have an interest in purity and separation for
its own sake.
So what finally are the political issues here? the rights of students to
diverge from the historical discourse norms of their
antecedent communities? the need to include in our analysis, and in our
teaching, not just the here-and-now community visible to students, but also
reference to the activities, history, culture, values, and interests of
larger-scale and longer-term institutions? and their conflicts?
Perhaps in Wales today these issues are explicit for teachers and students,
though I suspect a couple generations ago they would not have been. How
explicit are they in the technical institute, among the teachers/judges of
composition and the teachers of technical subjects, as well as the
students? Why DON'T we more often and more fully reveal to students what we
know about the political forces that they are subject to? Is it because we
suspect their response will be to rebel against unjustified control of
their choices? because we wish to save them the pain of rebellion? or save
ourselves that pain?
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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