Current Academic Haps

I. THESIS
Draft is holding steady at 77 pages, with a penultimate draft being due on 5/2 (this Tuesday), and the final draft due 5/10 (next Thursday). After talking to both my readers, the constructive criticism is: a lot of problems with organization, some problems with analysis -- i.e., there doesn't seem to be any specifically described theoretical analysis, which maybe there really isn't, even though I write about how I interpret the data for about 20 pages, the paper may be too long all together, the introduction lacks clarity and purpose, and the overall tone is not academic enough. All together, it's not a great place to be, even though my adviser is satisfied with my progress (she's sympathetic to the fact that I am taking 4 other classes and trying to "get it done").

II. POP MUSIC & AESTHETICS
I've written over 4,000 words (roughly 14 pages) of notes on this, all of which you can read if you're weird like that.

III. ROCK AND WRITING
Working on developing assignments and hoping I'll be able to turn them into my final project. Due 5/4 at 10 AM.

IV. WALTER ONG
Wrote 11 pages of a 12-20 page paper. Tonight and tomorrow: write my presentation for Tuesday 5/1.

V. CHINESE
Just a test next week, thank goodness.

L1 Comp as Hegemonic Utopia

L1 composition lives in a magical world where the United States is the moral and spiritual center of the universe and everyone speaks English as a first language. Discuss.

Current Thesis page count

ESL Writing and the Concept of Culture: Listening to Student Voices

1. Introduction - 4 pages
2. Review of Literature - 26 pages
3. Method and Findings - 40 pages (still needs some revision and additions, but getting there)
4. Implications - 1 page (goal is 8-10)
5. Works Cited (doesn't count - 4 pages)
6. Appendix (student essays, doesn't count - 6 pages)

CURRENT TOTAL = 70 pages

teachin', rockin'

I haven't mentioned it much here, but it looks like I have a job for the fall. In addition to teaching various English classes there, I've been asked if I can teach an Applied Linguistics class at Yuan Pei College of Shaoxing University. I said "yes please!" Hard to say if it'll really happen, but I'd be thrilled to do it

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Notes on English 560 paper....
title ideas:

Rock Aesthetics: the problem of evaluating process-driven music as product
How Rock Criticism Constructs Rock Music & something about Adorno and Danto.
Disinterest is Impossible: The Social Construction of Rock Music by Critics?

stuff in the paper maybe:
-change from rock mags to blogs as setting trends, deciding what is rock, etc
-rock as process -- the problem of evaluating recordings (static) when rock gets what it is from emergent creativity?
-vocab probs: rock vs pop vs other?
-impossibility of disinterest in rock
-rock - negative or positive?

i gotta long way to go with this one.

notes on ong

Ong + techonology. (note the 'puter behind him!!)

Why Ong's technological focus is helpful to today's writing teachers: understanding the rhetorical situations our students find themselves in, and teaching to those.
-Secondary orality - how our Ss are afloat in a sea of audio/visual media (it's all multimodal of course), tv, radio, music, movies, internet, etc. --understanding the oral basis of this stuff, mediated through literacy...ok, but so what?
-New ways literacy is being transformed by electronic communication -- 3rd round of technologizing of the word?
oral lg --> writing system --> print --> print via computers --> computer-based writing read on computers which is also interactive. The resurrection of audience? The writer's audience is no longer a fiction?

just some thoughts...

PS: This dude is totally rad. He's like a Catholic Derrida or something.

When Linguists are Heroes (and Villians)

I.

A few months ago, I went to see a fundraising pitch disguised as a play. The play is called Sunong, and is put on by a group called Wycliffe Dinner Theater. It tells the story of a Southeast Asian dude who encounters some missionaries. (His country and language are fictionalized, which I think was a huge weakness of the piece -- oh, and also the fact that two of the Asian characters were played by White women speaking "broken" English.) At first, this sounded way ho-hum to me.

But within a few minutes of the beginning of the play, I saw had this revelation: Holy crap, the heroes of this story are applied linguists. And also this one: This is probably the only play I will ever see in which the heroes are applied linguists. They're Bible translators, and we see them struggle with phonemes, culturally appropriate translation, getting funding for PhD programs -- I was kind of in heaven. In the end, the play was almost as much about the necessity of training skilled linguists as it was about evangelism.

II.

But it is the influence of evangelism (or simply Evangelicalism) that is beginning to be noticed, and consequently critiqued, by another branch of linguistics -- the applied variety, and specifically English Language Teaching. From Pennycook's "Teaching English as a Missionary Language" to Varghese and Johnston's recent "Evangelical Christians and English language teaching" in TESOL Quarterly, people are starting to take notice of the fact that Christians are (still) using English teaching as a missionary endeavor, whether the teaching is a "front" or a genuine form of service. Questions of cultural and linguistic imperialism (not to mention professional and personal ethics) abound, of course, but it's encouraging to see that a civil discussion is beginning. One hopes that the Christian organizations who use ELT will see that it's in their interest to take part in this dialogue.

III.

Given all this, it's interesting that the man at the center of one of the most talked-about controversies in the cultural anthropology/applied linguistics/language orbit is an ex-Christian, former missionary who was once affiliated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (an organization afilliated with the abovementioned Wycliffe). His recent work on the Piraha, an isolated tribe in the Amazon, makes some pretty serious claims about their culture and language that seem to fly in the face of Chomskian linguistics (e.g., Universal Grammar)and the general assumption that all languages are 'created equal,' to use a loaded term.

I was intrigued by the brief bit in the New Yorker piece that mentioned Everett's ex-wife, who is still a missionary: she seemed less interested in explaining the Piraha's language, and more in learning about their songs. 

Nearing Full Scale Freakout

I've totally hit a wall at 32 pgs.
Nothing makes sense any more...I have 3 important sections that are totally underdeveloped.
I NEED to turn whatever I have in tomorrow by 1 pm, so I figure if I can turn these sections into something coherent in about 3 more pages, that'll be fine for now. If I have to flesh things out later I can and will.

I really didn't analyze the data enough before I started writing.

I'm learning - I hope.

Maybe this isn't the best time to mention that I've decided to apply for an 08-09 Fullbright. Anyway, that's after the End of the World (aka May 10).

62% done with 50% of the project

"Main Chunk" count: 25 pgs.
Tomorrow I have about 7-8 hours to write 15 pages. No problem.

progress

the (mostly finished) lit review is 26 pages.

what i've been calling the 'main chunk' of the project currently stands at 20 pages. by Tuesday morning it needs to be 40.

after i turn that in i want to do another 10 for 'discussion/implications'

i have a 4 page intro i wrote ages ago sitting here waiting to be revised in the next few weeks, too.

if you're counting along at home, that puts the final page count at somewhere around 80. Not 3 figures. that is OK.

less may not be more but it is BETTER in many ways.

happy easter, jh

"I am not really American people."

J= me, S = a student, ____ = reference to student's home country and/or nationality.

J: when (Teacher) gives an assignment when she says write about your culture, your country…when she says write about your culture, do you think of _____?
S: Yeah.

J: let’s say it’s 5 years from now and you’ve lived in the US for 7 years. Do you think when someone says my culture you would say the US is my culture?
S: maybe not.

J: why not?
S: I think because I am not really American people. And I was born in _____ and my parents is ____ people so I am ____. And in ____, the teacher give us information is different from here. It’s more like how to …uh…how to be good, be nice with another people. Something like that, like with your family, with old people. But in America it’s like free, free mind. So it’s very different.

J: So is that one reason why you would say US is not my country, because you don’t like that?
S: No, I like the United States but, I feel I am ____, so maybe never change.

J: Just to keep going…let’s say it’s thirty years from now. You’ve been in the US for thirty years, now are you an American?
S: I’m not sure, but I think I would say the same thing.

It is Ong!

I'm so gonna Ong it up for my English 618 (Linguistic and Rhetorical Approaches to Writing) paper. He is way venerable and awesome. Rhetoric, orality vs. literacy, grammar, fightin' with words -- to the death! Also he's a Jesuit. Sweet. I'm gonna write on links between orality and literacy and how we can teach writing with 'em!



Ong links @ delicious
The Walter J. Ong Collection

Walter Jackson Ong, S.J. (1912-2003) was a professor of English at Saint Louis University for over thirty years. Over the course of his career, Ong wrote a number of groundbreaking studies in the fields of orality and literacy studies. Some of these works include Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, The Presence of the Word, and Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue.

HYPER

I'm not sure if this thing - HYPERresearch - is necessary for me at this stage of the game, but it's free and I've been playing around with it.

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Transcription takes forever.

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Two emergent themes:
1. Choosing to represent certain aspects of culture because they are "easy" to write about, even if the writer doesn't really care that much about them. This is maybe is related to: a) crunch time - the Ss don't have much time to develop their essays, b) the teacher says to only write 2 or 3 paragraphs, so that's all they do.
2. Unconcern with cultural topics for class - Ss don't seem to care what they write about, as long as they are getting practice in English writing.

TESOL etc.

Back from 5 days of TESOL insanity. I had a fantastic time. Among other speakers (a lot), I saw Bonny Norton, Patricia Duff, Diane Larsen-Freeman, Jun Liu, Doug Brown, Dwight Atkinson, and Ryuko Kubota. These are people I've read, so that's cool.

Too many highlights to list, really, but I'm dying to do some kind of information download. Lowlights were Canagarajah canceling (I missed him at CELT) and being tired all the time because I had to get up early every day.

Really great panel caled "Is Culture Really Dead in TESOL?" on the last day. Loved it.

The next 2 weeks need to be insane writing weeks. Like, more utterly insane than any amount of writing I've done before. The next two weeks will make or break this damn project.

PS: really amazing corpus-related website I learned about at the conference: http://www.lextutor.ca/

"Progress" = Lit review draft #1 turned in

My computer clock reads 11:59, which means I've just met my self-imposed deadline for turning in a draft of my literature review (I gave myself an extension on the original self-imposed deadline of last Thursday). I'm aware that there may be some omissions (glaring or not) , but I'm fairly happy with the ways things are laid out (except that the second half may be a bit haphazard in its arrangement).

Regarding data collection, what I've done:

- Obtained (and read, many times) at least two writing samples from each of my four subjects
- Interviewed each student twice, for an average of about one and a half hours of tape per student (haven't transcribed yet)
- Interviewed the teacher twice
- Obtained a copy of the textbook from which the teacher drew the assignment(s) I've chosen to focus on
- Thought about what I should focus on in my analysis of the data
- Given the students a survey about their educational background and opinion on course content (gotten two of four back)

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Calculated that starting tomorrow I'll have approx. 42 hours this month to work on ye olde thesis. I'm hoping to write somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 pages in that time.

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I haven't even transcribed the freakin' interviews...Lord knows that takes time.
Not to mention I've got a 20-pager on Aesthetics, a 12 to 20-pager on Rhetoric, and a 20-ish-pager on intertextual analysis of student writing due in early May. MOST WRITING EVER!

progress report

Lit review currently at 18 pages.
Goal for tonight: get up to between 20-22 pages.
Poss. goal for this weekend, or after comments from profs: get as high as 30 pages.

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two more interviews with students, one tomorrow, one next tuesday.
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observing the class tomorrow and monday, interviewing the teacher on monday.
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this weekend i need to develop a survey/info sheet for the students to fill out, partly inspired by Prodroumo's (1992) survey of a couple hundred Greek EFL students re: what they want as far as cultural content. obviously mine will be on a way small scale. I'm hoping to gather a little more basic info that hasn't come up in our conversations and give them a chance to tell me anything else they might want. I'm hoping email will be useful for this as well, though some are more likely than others to want to continue the conversation. I'm trying to emphasize that they are welcome to respond in their own languages if they want but only one student has really taken me up on it in the interviews (a language i kinda speak, obv.).
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one student who i'd originally hoped to include in the study hasn't been able to meet with me, and I'm disappointed that I won't be able to talk to her. I have a whole set of essays she wrote for a class last year and I'd love to do something with them, but my whole method kind of depends on interviews, so I'm not sure where to go.
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Dwight Atkinson's Six Principles of Culture (1999)

1. All humans are individuals.

2. Individuality is also cultural.

3. Social group membership and identity are multiple, contradictory, and dynamic.

4. Social group membership is consequential.

5. Methods of studying cultural knowledge and behavior are unlikely to fit a positivist paradigm.

6. Language (learning and teaching) and culture are mutually implicated, but culture is multiple and complex.

Here is a picture of me eating dinner with Dwight Atkinson, or perhaps more accurately, me eating dinner (while eyeing the camera suspiciously) next to Dwight Atkinson, who is barely aware of my presence:

This comes from the JSLW Symposium 2006, which I promised to write about on this website but as yet have not.

Early thoughts: lit review, study subjects

number of articles on my computer for possible inclusion in lit review: 43
number of paper articles floating around the apartment for poss. inclusion: between 10 and 15
current number of articles summarized in my lit review: 8
goal for number of articles to be summarized in my lit review: around 20
due date for first draft of lit review: this thursday
have completely lost all sense of the meaning of the word: "culture"

I'm not sure how much general ESL stuff I want to include as opposed to L2-writing-specific stuff.
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re: the above: how not to.


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Did another interview today with a student who is leaving to be with her husband in the midwest. really glad i met her and included her in the study - she has had so much to say about culture and the writing process. she often used the phrase "it's a cultural thing" in her answers to my questions and today in one response she said "it's a multicultural thing," which i liked and thought was somewhat telling - although the idea of constructing a multicultural identity doesn't appear anywhere in her essays, it's definitely there when I talk to her; does this suggest that maybe the "Traditional" assignment about culture doesn't leave much room for writers to identify themselves as multicultural or to situate themselves within multiple cultures? maybe.

she speaks about taking the "best" from American culture but not the bad parts as she sees them. Her essay on culture seemed somewhat deterministic, so I asked her a little about how/whether she sees herself as having a unique identity or 'self.' She quickly mentioned she often wanted to do things seen as "strange" or "odd" by her peers/cultural norms. I asked her where she thought that came from and she said "maybe from God." I liked that a lot.

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i don't have any "gen 1.5" students in the study, but they do have a wide variety of reasons for being here and plans to stay or not. one is married to an American and plans to stay "forever," one has parents who own a business in the US and he says he wants to stay in the US "maybe forever," one has a BA from a university in her home country but is going for another in a US university. Only one of the students plans to head straight back after his studies - i think because he has a job to go back to.

conventional wisdom suggests that it's those who immigrated as young children whom we have to be careful about when it comes to inappropriate cultural orientations (Harklau 1999) - treating them as newcomers and all but forcing them to write about countries that aren't "theirs" in any meaningful sense - but there is as much variation in relationship to the target culture, I think, among "traditional" ESL students. they may be relative newcomers, but they are actively "learning culture" and developing hybridized cultural identities.

maybe too broad - research questions

How do ESL writers write about their own culture?

Why do they decide to represent their own culture(s) in the ways they do?

What do ESL writers think about the concept of culture?

Do students in ESL writing classes think cultural topics are appropriate content for their texts? Which ones? If not, what do they want?

How do the students’ conceptions of culture evidenced in their writing and through interviews, work with or against (or partly both) the conceptions of culture presented by the teacher, other students, and the textbook?

How does culture "work" as content in an ESL writing course?

"That is not true"

Yesterday during an interview for my masters project, one of the students I'm interviewing said something about writing in a second language that kind of blew my mind:

Me: If I write in English, I can feel very confident that I am really expressing myself, that this is me, this is who I am. But if I try to write in Spanish, I almost feel like this isn't really...
Her: It's not true. That is not true. You don't feel that is true.
...
Me: when you turn in your assignment to (your teacher), it's almost like, are you turning in something that...
Her: it's not true for me.

Identity & Culture

As I begin researching & writing my thesis, I'm trying to clarify a few things for myself. I've decided to write about ESL writing, because a) my MA program is a teaching writing program, b) I'm interested in teaching/researching ESL, and c) I've done a lot of reading about ESL writing so I have at least a decent grasp on the field. Here are a few scattered thoughts on what I'm doing right now.

- A few main themes of the project, at least what's been percolating in my brain:
- Reconciling the pragmatism of ESL writing (let's teach Ss how to succeed at academic writing in English in a U.S. (or wherever) context) with the myriad cultural/social issues surrounding it (why teach that, how much is culture involved in how people write, what is culture anyway, how do students actually feel about being involved in the system that demands that they write a certain way in a certain languages, and on and on)
- Looking at how L2 writers construct their identities/voice in writing, and how is that different from writing in an L1.
- Looking at what culture is and how students and teachers conceive of it, and how that affects the way L2 writing is taught, learned and practiced.
- How and what contrastive rhetoric (CR) is and where it fits on the pragmatically academic vs. pragmatically social/justice continuum.
- The rough abstract talks about a move from CR view of culturally situated/determined writing practices to a view of L2 writing that recognizes the construction of individual identity based on multiple language/social/cultural affiliations, but that might be apples and oranges. If this sort of distinction is to be made, it should probably be subtler.
- Somehow I want to bring up the notions of "language ego" and the creation of an "L2 identity" which I think I've read about in some second language acquisition books. This is brought up in a linguistic context but probably is equally relevant in a rhetorical context. I never progressed far enough in studying a foreign language to get to the point of acquiring, say, a "Spanish-speaking Self" in writing, but I'm interested in the idea*.

- I don't want this project to get too bogged down in metaissues, which I fear it easily could. There's a ton of writing from almost all angles, mostly sociocultural ones which are increasingly popular, that deals with why we teach ESL, how, who it privileges, and so on. That's all interesting, but I would rather dig into what actually goes on with students -- how and why they do what they do and how that can help teachers. I often joke that I'm going to have made my way through two years of grad school in a "Teaching Writing" program without ever learning how to teach writing. So although this project will pretty much have a sociocultural focus, I don't want it to spin off into an ultra-theoretical, head-in-the-clouds examination of culture and identity.

* "The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition" by Fan Shen is a really good article that talks about this and a few other related issues.