Abstract
The essays gathered in this special issue of College English participate in an emerging movement within composition studies representing, and responding to, changes in, and changing perceptions of, language(s), English(es), students, and the relations of all these to one another. This movement critiques the tacit policy of “English Only” dominating composition scholarship and pursues teaching and research that resist that policy. It draws attention to the fact that within much composition teaching and scholarship, both the context of writing and writing itself are imaged to be monolingual: the “norm” assumed, in other words, is a monolingual, native-English-speaking writer writing only in English to an audience of English-only readers (Horner and Trimbur). This tacit policy of monolingualism manifests itself in other ways as well: the institutional divides separating most composition programs and courses from ESL programs and courses, including courses in “ESL composition,” and separating composition courses from courses that involve students in writing in any language other than English; the nearly complete absence in composition textbook “readers” of writings by anyone other than North American and British writers whose first language is English (even translations of texts written in languages other than English are rare); the insistence in composition textbooks on standardizing students’ English, and their neglect of competing standards and definitions of English; and the neglect in histories of composition of writing in languages other than English. Such practices define composition as composing in, and only in, an English that has a fixed standard that students
- Journal
- College English
- Published
- 2006-07-01
- DOI
- 10.58680/ce20065037
- CompPile
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- Open Access
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Citation Context
Cited by in this index (2)
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Kang (2015)Literacy in Composition Studies
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Donahue (2008)Pedagogy
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