Reflection on September 23 Readings

In their article, Ramanathan and Atkinson discuss the over all umbrella of individualism and the concepts that come under it such as voice, peer review, critical thinking, and textual ownership “plagiarism”. It seems very evident to me that the researchers have divided the whole world into Western and non-Western spheres, so to speak. Even within the Western sphere, the US for example, people are divided into either mainstream or non-mainstream. Many concepts discussed in this article, I believe, need to be defined and clarified. What is an L1 or an L2? What is meant by “mainstream”? What is “native” or “non-native”?

Voice is seen and viewed as tied to the ideology of individualism and at such is related to practices like process writing, peer review, critical thinking as well as textual ownership. A writer’s voice is not necessarily verbal; it can also be non-verbal or non-linguistic. Even “non-verbality”, as it were, can communicate and convey messages. Please note that “silence gives consent” and “no answer is an answer.” Throughout this article, the researchers stress the dichotomy between mainstream and non-mainstream on all the four levels I have just mentioned. This is what I would call and term “academic stereotypes” ( a normative view seeing this or that culture as the norm) Chinese, Japanese and other Eastern Asian are viewed as being “reticent”, “interdependent”, “non-assertive”, “nonverbal” and “resistant” to participate in the classroom communicative interactive process. Mainstreamers are seen as “individualist”, “assertive”, “independent”, “verbal” and “active”. Please see the Japanese two types of training: empathy and conformity vs. US mainstream construction of individualist and autonomous identity ---- or identities.

In her ten-year-long ethnographic study, Heath examines very closely two culturally different and sometimes similar communities. Each community has its own unique way of raising kids, teaching kids how to speak and tell stories and more importantly preparing them for the school culture. The two communities seem to be dichotomous in relation to how time is perceived, how children are expected to behave, how children are taught talking, how children are dealt with and so on. This book is a very detailed description of a decade in the lives of an African American community and a white community.

Voice is a complex concept, “well-nigh impossible” to define, multi-dimensional, situated, written, personal, tied to individualism or non-tied to individualism as Matsuda argues. It is, or even goes beyond, personal style; it is your personal presence as a writer – a presence that “individulates a writer from other writers.
“Your authentic voice is the ………………………………… with many others” (p. 49).
Bowdwn gives three characteristics to the “authentic” view of written voice: a- It is inward-centered –b- it assumes the primacy of oral over written communication –c- It has a distinctively literary flavor. I really like and agree with Lisa Ede (1989) introduction of the concept of “situational voice” (writers have different voices in different occasions) “Just as you dress differently ……………………………………………… formal, public tone” (p. 50).

Based on Bakhtin’s notion of “heteroglossia”, Yancey (1994) suggests that a writer’s voice is multiple and intertextual. For the two researchers, the expression of the self and voice in L2 writing is hindered by: learning practices (rote memorization and imitation)? L2 writers suffer, or enjoy, two or more selfs: schizophrenia, so to speak as in Shen’s case (an English self and a Chinese self). I can also provide this example from Hoffman’s Lost in Translation:
For Eva, past is untranslatable, and the reason is two-fold. First, Polish cannot express her new adventures and newly acquired images and “signifieds”, and second English cannot fully express her past in a feeling way as is the case with the “river” example. English, she says, is the language of the present and should be used to write about the present, and even though it is not the language of her self, she will use it because it will create and invent in her another self, another Eva. “…writing has given me a written self” and “This language is beginning to invent another me” says the-I-don’t-know-which Eva. Her mother tells her she is becoming “English”, and this hurts Eva and associates Englishness with coldness – another stereotypical view.

Peer review is also discussed by Linda Flower especially - a response or review that is socially charged, cognitively charged, or socio-cognitively charged, as it were. The examples she gives on page 743 are an apt summary of the attitudes that Syrian EFL students have towards one another if peer review were to occur (e.g. everything is perfect). Peer response is seen as hazardous to the writing process in this sense that a group can affect the cognition of a group member, and thus affecting the social aspect of writing.

Frus (2000) states that peer response in a writing class is characteristic of the Collaborative Learning Approach. In this type of response, students are encouraged to see intellectual inquiry as an ongoing conversation among one another. In addition, peer response should be seen as interactive and social in the sense it aims at building a learning community – a learning opportunity for all. Students who work in groups on their peers’ drafts, for instance, learn analytical skills they can then apply to course reading as well as they can get involved in a multitude of perspectives. “Being a critical reader I don’t think is a good idea” sheds light on the distinction to be made between critiquing and criticizing (judging).