SLWIS Newsletter - March 2021 (Plain Text Version)
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REFLECTIONS ON CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC IN A VIETNAMESE CONTEXT Pamela Stacey and Lê Hữu Hoàng Anh, Fulbright University Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Last year, in a workshop series intended to familiarize Vietnamese students at our university with argumentative writing conventions, we asked participants to compare Vietnamese and American essay organization. One American ESL teacher mentioned that if his student’s essay had resembled the sample Vietnamese essay we provided, he would have called it disorganized. This comment mirrors Pamela’s own experiences as a second language writing instructor: Countless times, I told my (largely east Asian) students that their essays, which didn’t follow American thesis-based essay organization, lacked a clear structure. I assumed they had entered my class without preexisting knowledge about writing--that they were “blank slates.” Yet no matter how hard I tried to teach them to place thesis statements at the end of the introduction, they inevitably showed up in the conclusion instead. I felt I was missing something that was preventing me from teaching in a way that my students could understand. My students never told me they had been taught to write differently in their native languages--but then, I never asked (Pamela). Leki (1991) writes, “those who ignore the insights of contrastive rhetoric imply that students come to L2 writing without any previously learned discourse schemata. Yet writing conventions are taught in schools […] writing, for most school children, is nearly always school sponsored […] and reproduces culturally preferred discourse styles” (p. 124). This is reflected in Hoàng Anh’s schooling, in which two distinct discourse styles were taught: Growing up bilingual in post-colonial Ho Chi Minh City, I studied Vietnamese in the morning and English in the afternoon. In Vietnamese classes, I was taught that each sentence must lead harmoniously to the next and the argument should be teased out by the readers. My English classes painted a different picture. Ideas should be explicitly stated to emphasize the author’s position and voice. My perception of myself as a thinker, writer, and human being constantly straddled two different value systems, but I was never asked to think critically about why such differences existed. Since the rules were not presented as negotiable, I came to believe in a false dichotomy: take an authoritative stance, or forfeit arguments altogether for harmony. Unable to reconcile this, I chose the convention I deemed more honest (e.g. better)--English--and discarded the rest. Choosing one meant betraying the other. My identity was in question every time I wrote, and I didn’t even know it. My English writing ability validated me as a student, further dissociating me from my own language. Eighteen years of writing in English was accompanied by a nagging voice in my mind calling me a traitor, and the thought of writing in Vietnamese became unbearable (Hoàng Anh). A turning point came during a rhetoric class utilizing student-faculty partnership as a tool for “localizing” education, in which students took on the role of co-investigators: Pam’s class was framed around one central idea: English rhetorical traditions are simply different from Vietnamese, not superior. In one assignment, I was asked to compare and contrast the two traditions. I decided to go beyond contrastive analysis and find an explanation for these irreconcilable differences (Hoàng Anh). The lens of contrastive rhetoric sheds light on the differing structures of academic English and Vietnamese writing. As Purves (1986) argues, “there exists within each culture or society at least one, if not several ‘rhetorical communities…’” (p. 39). The broad introduction paragraphs Vietnamese students produced could be explained by the “direct vs. indirect” dichotomy - indirect introductions being the style preferred in Vietnamese high school. The absence of a strong argument could result from a rhetorical tradition that upholds collective values over expression of individual opinion. One student even shared that his high school teachers had explicitly taught him to place his personal stance (the thesis statement!) as the first sentence of his conclusion. Land and Whitley (1989) write that American rhetorical conventions value “‘linear’ prose” and “a deductive logical arrangement.” However, “there are many patterns of cohesion, other logics, other myths through which views of the world may be constructed” (pp. 136-7). Ignorance of these other patterns has led many English writing teachers to erroneously call our students’ writing unorganized, when they may actually be “skillfully manipulating patterns of organization that [native English speakers] don’t recognize” (p. 140). The writing features that frustrate teachers again and again are not random--students have been taught to produce them: In her essay, Hoàng Anh revealed a new (to me) structure of writing--that of nghị luận, or discourse. The features of nghị luận were surprisingly familiar to me, since I had been trying to remove them from my students’ writing for a decade. Through the details that Hoàng Anh described, another system of organization became visible. This knowledge had a profound effect on how I understood my responsibilities as a writing teacher (Pamela). Purves (1986) writes that rhetorical “conventions are created by humans with all their wisdom and folly. As conventions, those that the United States espouses are no better or worse than those espoused in other cultures” (p. 50). Most English writing teachers would deny any belief that American rhetorical conventions are inherently superior. Yet, our pedagogy may hold the unconscious assumption that the writing features we teach are better (e.g. “more organized, more logical”) than those of students’ native rhetorical communities. Silva (1997) argues that teachers of second language writing “should explicitly recognize students as intelligent human beings [...] not as blank slates for teachers to inscribe their opinions on” (p. 361). The challenge for English writing teachers is first, to admit that we may unintentionally have been doing the latter, then, to decolonize our pedagogy and help students put down their “colonial baggage”: The results of my analysis told me that my convictions against Vietnamese rhetoric were not as sound as I had once thought - nor were my positive impressions of English rhetoric. The suspension of perceived superiority alleviated the weight of my emotional judgments towards Vietnamese writing, disentangling my emotions of guilt and betrayal (Hoàng Anh). What does this look like in practice? Land and Whitley (1989) suggest that “teachers with ESL students should become familiar with rhetorical traditions their students bring with them” (p. 141). If teachers are not fluent in students’ languages, or if information about a rhetorical community is not readily available, we argue that inviting students to be co-investigators can increase their awareness of their own assumptions about writing, while simultaneously allowing teachers to gain insight into an unfamiliar writing tradition. Another approach from Land and Whitley (1989) is for native English readers to “allow themselves to be lost for a while, for readers who suspend judgment and thus become accustomed to recognizing a wider variety of rhetorical modes, will begin to alter their expectations, to widen them...” (p. 140). As teachers with piles of papers to grade, the pressure to quickly give feedback is real. Yet if we resist immediately labelling students’ writing as “unorganized,” we might notice alternative ways of organizing information. In the end, if we want to keep our jobs, most of us will still have to teach thesis statements, topic sentences, and linear arguments. But we need not devalue our students’ native rhetorical knowledge in the process. As Canagarajah (2013) argues, “rules of communication” are not “innocent or indisputable.” As writing teachers, we have the opportunity to raise our students’ awareness of the rules while at the same time encouraging them to ask: “How did these rules come into being? Whom do these rules favor?” (p. 20). In doing so, we can refuse to perpetuate “composition as colonization” (Land and Whitley, 1989, p. 140) and give students tools to negotiate their own forms of expression: These insights enabled me to contribute meaningfully to the rhetorical community that I previously deemed inaccessible to myself. The dilemma that confronts me as an English speaker caught in post-colonial undercurrents lessened in its weight. I no longer view my writing identity as antithetical to Vietnamese values. My writing approach shifted in two ways: as the stigma surrounding Vietnamese writing dissipates, I am inclined to engage with Vietnamese texts constructively; as for English writing, I can venture outside of the familiar argumentative structures and adapt different writing styles to my advantage. But perhaps the most significant outcome of all is my new-found capacity to write without feeling ashamed of the roots that have a hand in shaping my identity as a writer (Hoàng Anh). References Canagarajah, A. S. (2013). Critical academic writing and multilingual students. University of Michigan Press. Land, R. E., & Whitley, C. (1989). Evaluating second language essays in regular composition classes: Toward a pluralistic US rhetoric. Negotiating academic literacies: Teaching and learning across languages and cultures, 135-144. Leki, I. (1991). Twenty-five years of contrastive rhetoric: Text analysis and writing pedagogies. TESOL Quarterly, 25(1), 123-143. Purves, A. C. (1986). Rhetorical communities, the international student, and basic writing. Journal of Basic Writing, 5(1), 38-51. Silva, T. (1997). On the ethical treatment of ESL writers. TESOL Quarterly, 31(2), 359-363.
Pamela Stacey currently serves as Learning Support Director and founding faculty at Fulbright University Vietnam. She has taught English academic writing for 12 years in various contexts. Her research focuses on student empowerment and academic writing development. Lê Hữu Hoàng Anh is a sophomore student and writing mentor at Fulbright University Vietnam. She is pursuing her interests in the arts and neuroscience, with specific focus on language and art in post-colonialist settings.
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