1 Hem Paudel Dr.

Lu Final Paper Making Sense of Alternative Discourses

I recently watched a TedTalk show in which an Indian scholar demonstrates how people of poor and very backward communities in India and later in various other parts of the world do have rich indigenous literacy resources even if they are illiterate in the official or Western sense of literacy. With some minimal instruction, the village people from around the globe (including some south Asian countries and some African countries) become able to transform their rural places into solar villages. The women he shows are capable of producing solar electricity even if they cannot read and write in traditional sense; in many cases, he shows that women speaking completely different languages could also communicate through gestures, laughter, and various contextual cues and accomplish the tremendous job of producing solar electricity using their own local knowledge and resources. They did not require alphabetic literacy to understand and conceptualize; rather, they have their own rich ways of reading and writing (not in literal sense). In other words, they are sign makers and makers of knowledge in Kresss sense; they have rich multimodal forms of literacy practices that the traditional model of literary would call illiteracy. I found this extraordinary case very appropriate to begin the discussion of how Canagarajah and Street approach alternative discourses. Both of them, in one way or the other, speak about the need to make sense of languages/discourse practices/literacy practices that often do not make sense to the dominant order. In other words, I will focus on how these scholars try to understand and interpret alternative discourses or marginalized literacy practices in their writings.

2 We Are All Sign Makers Before moving to the discussion of the two scholars, I want to begin with how Kress and Leeuwen define signs1 and how that can provide a ground for us to discuss three scholars work. First, Kress and Leeuwen emphasize on the point that they are interested in sign makers and the process of sign making rather than mere users of signs, where the persons do not have any role in meaning making, other than merely using autonomous signs. Second, perhaps more fundamental, is their concept of sign, It follows that we see signs as motivatednot as arbitraryconjunctions of signifiers (forms) and signifieds (meanings). In semiology motivation is usually not related to the act of sign making as it is in our approach, but defined in terms of an intrinsic relation between the signifier and the signified (italics mine, 8). The point is that sings are motivated, in other words, carry the interest of the makers of sign instead of being arbitrary. Signs, instead of getting their meaning through merely the conventional coupling of signifier and signified, for Kress and Leeuwen, derive their meaning from the interest of the humans who use them. Thats why Kress and Leeuwen call language users makers of signs. They further assert, In our view signs are never arbitrary, and motivation should be formulated in relation to the sign maker and the context in which the sign is produced . Signmakers use the forms they consider apt for the expression of their meaning, in any medium in which they can make signs (9). Kress and Leeuwen offer an example of a sentence that a threeyear child makes when he is climbing a steep hill to clarify their notion: This is a heavy hill (9). This is how they interpret: Heavy, in heavy hill, is, however, a motivated sign: the child has focused on particular aspects of climbing a hill (it takes a lot of energy; it is exhausting) and uses an available form which he sees as apt for the expression of these meanings (9). There is Based on his notion of signs as motivated, Kress develops his idea of design to talk about creativity in multimodal texts.
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3 another important point Kress and Leeuwen make: Which metaphors carry the day and pass into the semiotic system as conventional, and then as naturalized and then as natural, neutral classification, is governed by social relations of power. Like adults, children are engaged in the construction of metaphors. Unlike adults, they are, on the one hand, less constricted by culture and its already existing and usualy invisible metaphor, but, on the other hand, usually in a position of less power, so that their metaphors are less likely to carry the day (8). The example of the three-year child making a picture of a car (this is another example they provide) and using the available resources to express his meaning through the statement This is a heavy hill can be taken to mean a few very significant things about language and language use. First, though we often consider childrens meanings as random and therefore meaningless, Kress and Leeuwen show that seemingly meaningless or grossly deviant forms of writing/speaking can often contain language users meanings determined by their interest and the context. The same is the case with literacy and knowledge making practices of the women in the opening example where they are considered illiterate even though they have rich resources to make meanings and communicate them. Second, what is recognized or not is a function of power. In other words, what counts as literacy or literacy skill is determined by whether those who practice such literacy are socialized into the mainstream discourse. With this background in mind, I want to consider how Street and Canagarajah theorize difference, especially the difference in language and literacy practices. Street and Canagarajahs Approach to Alternative Literacies/Discourse Practices Street is one of the early scholars who demonstrated how powerful discourses characterize literacies other than the dominant as illiteracies. In this connection, his major contribution lies in

4 his theory of literacies where literacies do not refer to neutral and universal skills. Rather, he sees literacies as ideological and particular. I shall use the term literacy as a shorthand for the social practices and conceptions of reading and writing. . . . I shall contend that what the particular practices and concepts of reading and writing are for a given society depends upon the context; that they are already embedded in an ideology and cannot be isolated or treated as neutral or merely technical. I shall demonstrate that what practices are taught and how they are imparted depends upon the nature of the social formation. (Literacy in Theory and Practice 1) The central point here is that literacy is not a mechanical skill applicable and equally useful at all places and for all sorts of people; it is a social practice, dependent on context and highly governed by dominant ideology of the specific social formation where it is used. To make the distinction between this new approach to literacy and the traditional one, Street calls the two ideological and autonomous respectively, with very clearly identifiable differences from the names themselves. He developed his ideological model of literacy based on his extensive ethnographic research on literacy practices of the people of some rural places in Iran, Nepal, South Africa, and India. The whole point of his ideological approach is that he subverts the binary between literacy and illiteracy and instead uses literacies for referring to all forms of readings and writings. By doing that he challenges the discourse of literacy that assumes Western forms of literacy as universal and neutral, as a only source for progress and critical awareness (NLNT 22). In other words, he counters what he calls autonomous literacy model that would call all the people of the Indian village, mentioned in the introduction of this paper, illiterate, waiting for a Westerner to come and show them light. Ideological model of literacy, on the other hand,

5 attempts at uncovering the hidden ideology or assumptions behind the universalizing tendency of the model of autonomous literacy. This is how Street distinguishes between the two: In trying to characterize these new approaches to understanding and defining literacy, I have referred to a distinction between an autonomous model and an ideological model of literacy (Street, 1984). The autonomous model of literacy works from the assumption that literacy in itself, autonomously, will have effects on other social and cognitive practices. The autonomous model, I argue, disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it and that can then be presented as though they are neutral and universal. . . imposing western (or urban) conceptions of literacy onto other cultures (Street 2001). . . . The ideological model of literacy offers a more culturally sensitive view of literacy practices as they vary from one context to another. This model starts from different premises than the autonomous model. It posits instead that literacy is a social practice, not simply a technical and neutral skill, and that it is always embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles. (NLNT 22-23) This passage makes it quite clear what the focus of New Literacy Studies is. In its focus on ideological aspects of literacy, it always sees literacy as implicated in power relations rather than simply being pedagogical and cognitive factor. In other words, it tries to account for various relations between the participants in literacy practices, the resources available, and what function do different literacy practices serve to these participants. So, Street offers us a socially situated approach to literacy practices. In his analysis of literacy practices of the people in Iranian villages, Street shows how fruit traders can build on their maktab literacy to negotiate their business with city people

6 practicing commercial literacies. The point is that these village people, despite being ignorant of the western literacy, are capable of fulfilling their business needs utilizing their local forms of literacies. In other words, even though the dominant discourse about literacy would characterize these people as illiterate, and their knowledge as useless, they can use their own local literacy skills to navigate through the dominant literacy practices, often appropriating the dominant and improvising whatever literacy resources they have available, as does the child in Kress and Leeuwens example. Street further says that the villagers were able to navigate through both the commercial and maktab literacies: In the particular circumstances that I am describing, one way which such people were able to hold both positions at once was through their sense that there were different kinds of literacy appropriate to different purposes and contexts. While not, perhaps, representing explicitly, as I have tried to do, the nature of the hidden literacy skills entailed by the practice of commercial literacy, villagers nevertheless had an implicit recognition that what they were doing required learning, was itself skillful and to be valued and that their children, for all their urban education and literacy, could not handle, at least without specific training. The different literacies related to different socialization processes, to different ideologies and to different employment situations. (179) This passage makes it clear that literacy is an ideological construct rather than being a neutral and ahistorical skills. As Street says, the acquisition of literacy is, in fact, a socialization process rather than a technical process (italics mine 180). Similarly, Street sees different literacies being useful for different purposes and different contexts. Street also highlights how

7 literacy is linked to socialization process and that is why the Western educated children of the villagers could not handle the trade that the illiterate fruit-croppers were successfully handling. To further complicate his idea of literacies and how they get meaning, Street compares why mountain villagers become successful and whereas the farmers in the plains could not reap the benefits of the economic boom of 1970s. The farmers in the plains did not have the necessary economic infrastructure and institutions to facilitate quick adaptation to the commercial practices of the cities: It is in these terms that the study of the significance of literacy in relation to economic development and change needs to be conducted. In the case of Cheshmeh and the fruitgrowing mountain villages of Iran, this approach leads to the conclusion that it was the combination of specific literacy skills with an economic infrastructure facilitating entrepreneurial activity that enabled the villagers to successfully take advantage of Irans growing wealth in a way that other groups, without those skills and infrastructure, could not (180). What I wanted to highlight here is his focus on the economic infrastructure, the material conditions, and institutional set up that constrain or facilitate the process of adapting to the new literacy practices. The villagers in the plains could perhaps have utilized their own literacies and developed them to negotiate with the brokers in the cities if they had necessary infrastructure and institutional support. Another point that I want to highlight here is Streets idea of the acquisition of literacy as a process of socialization and an adaptation to the ideology that shapes the new literacy practice. His focus on adaptation to seems to ignore the possibility and perhaps the need to transform the dominant literacy practices. This focus on adaptation can also be seen in his discussion of hidden features of academic paper writing. His implicit suggestion is that we need to make the hidden explicit so

8 that students can write accordingly, building on what they have already known. This is where Canagarajah seems to complement Streets approach. Canagarajahs concern is more with the language use in a globalized world than various other kinds of literacy practices. The issue of difference, difference from the norm of standard metropolitan language, becomes central to his intellectual project. He is primarily concerned with how language difference is treated in the US academy and how we can reenvision the relationships between different language practices. In addressing this issue, Canagarajah, similar to what Street does regarding literacy practices, rejects autonomous or decontextualized model of language competence. Canagarajah theorizes competence as practice-based (LFE 925), performative (LFE 937), and situated, therefore, understanding it as emergent rather than as fixed. And his theory is based on the shifts in the way English is used due to the vast change in the demographics of English language users. Drawing on Mary Louis Pratts notion of contact zone (33), he claims:

English is used most often as a contact language by speakers of other languages in the new contexts of transnational communication. Speakers of English as an additional language are greater in number than the traditionally understood NSs5 who use English as their sole or primary language of communication. These developments have impressed upon us the need to understand the character of LFE, a variety that overshadows national dialects-the dominant ones such as British or American English and the recently nativized forms such as a Indian or Singaporean English-both in currency and significance (LFE 925).

9 This background validates what Canagarajah says about the need to rethink about English in terms of contact language, or what he calls, Lingua Franca English (LFE). In LFE situations, which are characterized by the existence of variable forms, conventions, and modalities of communication, competence is always in a state of becoming (LFE 933). Such contingent situations require us to develop strategies of negotiation to recognize and appreciate the difference in meaning making practices of different language users. In the contact situations where diversity [and] indeterminacy are the norm, (LFE 935), competence is not only applying mental rules to situations, but aligning ones resources with situational demands and shaping the environment to match the language resources one brings (LFE 933). A few things are quite important to mark here, especially, his use of the word resources and his bidirectional focus in language competence in his use of the terms like aligning ones resources with situational demands and shaping the environment. The focus on resources breaks his redefinition apart from the norm-based or rule-governed notions of competence whereas his focus on aligning and shaping challenges individual/cognitive basis of competence. We can clearly see these two aspects demonstrated in his later studies. In relation to Streets work concerning his focus on building on the available forms of literacies and adapting to the dominant, Canagarajahs focus on reshaping would make him more focused on transformative rhetoric than Streets rhetoric of adaptation. In his recent works, like Translanguaging, he focuses more on the rhetoric of transformationa way of language use where the focus is as much on adaptation as on shaping the environment and the audience. Canagarajah owes this idea to Lus discussion of writing of a Malaysian student where her focus is on how to educate the mainstream students and teachers to read minority students writing with awareness to difference in meaning. In other words, Lu

10 urges us to understand minority students language use as motivated and purposeful rather than taking the deviation as an error. Canagarajah draws on this idea in his study of Buthainas deliberate use of code meshing in her writing. Canagarajahs detailed and thorough case study of Buthainahs writing practices gives us a clear picture of what Canagarajah means by codemeshing. Unlike in many of US composition classes, Canagarajah does not only allow her to use her translingual resources, but also helps her develop several negotiation strategies that she can use to construct meanings with her instructor and her classmates. Canagarajah describes his pedagogy thus: The course thus adopted a practice-based, collaborative, and dialogical pedagogy. Students leant about writing by engaging in writing themselves, teaching writing, and revising their drafts in relation to readings on writing, instructor feedback, and peer criticism (Code-meshing 6). As these students have various repertoires of language codes, what they should try to learn and improve primarily is how they can find the best way to negotiate with the others, both align with and shape their meanings/knowledge. In other words, Canagarajah emphasizes on rhetorical effectiveness and discourse in achieving competence specifically in writing. The primary focus of teaching should be on building critical awareness in students so that they can shuttle between discourses and have a metalinguistic and metacognitive awareness (Code-meshing 4). For such purpose, Canagarajah offers four strategies: 1. Recontextualization strategies: gauging the congeniality of the context for codemeshing, and shaping ecology to favor ones multilingual practices; 2. Voice strategies: basing communication on ones own positionality and making textual spaces for ones linguistic strengths and resources; 3. Interactional strategies: negotiating meaning on an equal footing with readers and helping them negotiate

11 effectively; and 4. Textualization strategies: orientating to the text as a multimodal social practice and adopting process-oriented composing strategies for effective text development. (Code-meshing 8) The above strategies are quite different from what are normally used in writing pedagogy still largely based on monolingual assumptions and the notions of unidirectional rhetorical effectiveness. What Canagarajah says about Buthainahs recontextualization strategies is very important to discuss how multilinguals make use of difference in their writing and how Buthainahs response seems to have changed Canagarajahs claims in earlier studies about the natural ability of multilinguals to codemesh: The first type also constitutes strategies that are some of the earliest temporally. Buthainah gauges the communicative context to figure out if she can codemesh in this writing project. When I gave the impression in DFT that multilinguals always codemesh in their spoken and written activity, Buthainah corrected me. She observed: It is important for me to point out that what you see in my literacy autobiography is not how I commonly write. I may have written something similar to it beforebut it is by no means how I write my academic papers because if I did that, then my writing would not be welcomed as it would be seen by some as informal, uneducated, and simply bad writing. It is when I get a green light from a professor, that I would write in the way I presented my autobiography. (9)

12 This quotation makes a few important points. First, what Buthainah does is very rhetorically well-informed choice and that was made possible by many things, including the facts that the instructor was friendly to the activity of translanguaging, and encouraging and friendly peers. As Street discusses the ability of Fruit croppers to negotiate between maktab literacy and commercial literacy due to the various support networks, Buthainahs codemeshing is also made possible by various contextual factors. But in case of Canagarajahs study, we still do not know a lot about Buthainah, except that she is an Arabic student. And Canagarajahs disinterest (?) to delve into her various support networks, economic condition, her familial and social position back in her home country and in the US, the type of education she received back home seems to lie on his inherent belief on the romantic notion of multilingual/plurilingual competence: It is important for students to realize that translanguaging is a rhetorical choice. It is not a mechanical activity independent of the specific communicative situation. One has to carefully assess the extent to which one can codemesh in a given context. This ability to assess the situation and frame ones language accordingly is part of a multilinguals rhetorical awareness and communicative proficiency (9). I may agree with the first point that codemeshing is a rhetorical choice to the extent that the codemesher has an education and the context to make them critically aware of their language use. But I find it difficult to believe that the ability to assess the situation and frame ones language accordingly is part of a multilinguals rhetorical awareness and communicative proficiency. It is not Buthainahs natural awareness (naturalized by her multilingual experience) that led her to codemesh, its rather Canagarajah as the instructors support and explicit discussion of codemeshing (he gives models of such texts, like Smithermans and his own) that is at least one major factor leading her acts of codemeshing.

13 We can see this romanticizing tendency in some of his other works too. In his Lingua Franca English, Plurilingual Tradition, and Multilingual Strategies he highlights the competence of multilingual speakers/writers. The tendency to romanticize in Canagarajah seems to be based on the works of LFE scholars that he cites from, e.g., Meierkord, House, and Planken. First, these LFE scholars often study English where all the participants speak nonstandard variety of English, leading them to have comparable linguistic situations. That is why they claim that these participants operate on equal footing, leaving their culture and native language separate from their conversations. Canagarajah brings their discussion thus: She [Planken] noted that the interlocutors do some preparatory work through opening comments to create a third spacea no-mans-land between their primary languages and culturesto negotiate LFE on equal terms (LFE 926). But even in those situations, the participants do not have equal footing; they are bound or supported by various economic and social positions. For instance, all multilinguals themselves do not have same kinds and levels of linguistic and socioeconomic resources. This makes it very difficult to envision no-mans-land. Similarly, as language learning is, as Street would say, a process of socialization, detaching oneself from ones linguistic history and socio-political background is an unrealistic assumption. Furthermore, when Canagarajah brings this concept of contact zone as a no-mans-land to the situation of US composition and emphasizes on the natural proficiency of multilinguals, it becomes even more problematic. In case of writing situations in US classroom, the problem is compounded by the fact that there are very few non-native writers among most of the native English speaking teachers and students with strong monolingual assumption about English, and more so in terms of writing. That is why many of the ESL scholars in the US talk about the problems of

14 mainstreaming2 multilingual students as these students often cannot successfully shuttle between languages (Silva, Leki, etc.). Furthermore, we should not overlook the possibility that non-native teachers also can have similar assumptions due to their socialization into the discourse of English monolingualism. And these assumptions are often so deep-rooted that many may merely pay lip service to ideas of translanguaging/multilingualism or may find it difficult to practice it. To bring Street and Canagarajah together, we can see how both can benefit from each others perspectives. Both of them regard autonomous model as problematic and consider the role of context vital. However, their concepts of context are different. I see Street evoking a highly rich and complex notion of context when he situates literacy practices of Iranian villagers in both the broader and local political, economic, social, and infrastructural settings. This way, he not only shows how literacy practices were ideological, but also shows that we need to see beyond the ideological and consider real material conditions and resources available to the people. Canagarajah also takes competence as context-based and emergent, but his account distills the possible exploration of the richness of context into some highly dematerialized markers like Arabic or Srilankan or women etc. This problem (?) appears even in Streets later studies, e.g., his discussion of kids playing video games and his account of Jades tattooing and.

I do agree with them that multilingual students often are faced with difficult situations due to the multilingual assumptions of mainstream teachers and students. But I dont buy into their argument of separating these students from the mainstream students. The most important thing is that our perspective should change; that the approach of mainstreaming itself is problematic because it assumes that multilinguals have to take standard language as their target. The purpose of integrating should be to encourage dialog rather than merely mainstreaming.
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15 Street draws an example from James Gees description of video game Rise of Nations as offering affinity spaces (NLNT 31). This is what Street cites from Gee: The social aspects of Rise of Nations (RoN) and games in general, makes RoN and other games the focus of what I call affinity spaces. An affinity space is a place or set of places where people can affiliate with others based primarily on shared activities, interests, and goals, not shared race, class, culture, ethnicity. . . Distributed and dispersed knowledge that is available just in time and on demand is, then, yet another learning principle built into a game like RoN. Too often in schools knowledge is not shared across the students, is not distributed so that different students, adults, and technologies offer, different bits and pieces of it as needed, and is not garnered from dispersed sites outside the classroom. RoN has no such problem. (NLNT 31) What Street seems to be highlighting in citing Gee is the idea that the kids in these affinity spaces of video games engage in meaning making practices based largely on the shared activities, interests, and goals, not race, class, culture, ethnicity , indicating the politically and economically neutral space of digital technologies. But in this case, unlike in his Iran example, what enables the shared meaning making practice and whether that space can be accessed by groups of particular economic class is not explored. Contrarily, the space provided by digital technology has been touted as an ideologically neutral space where knowledge is constructed just in time through dialog. Its a shared knowledge. And it suggests that the schools do not often encourage such practice. This seems to be an ideal case that we need to try to emulate. But what is missing is how much is the neutrality of this technological space already ideologically mediated through character building, resources available for actions and

16 dialog, etc. How much is the characterization of technological space as neutral similar to the characterization of traditional literacy as neutral? In other words, how are literacy practices in the affinity space of RoN related to the social practices in the economic, political, and other domains? He clearly says that we may have to take into account not only the modality, in Kresss terms, the relationship between visual and written modes, but also the deeper social and cultural meanings associated with such production (NLNT 35). However, we do not see such deeper social and cultural meanings being excavated in many of his examples in his later works. This leaves us with a question: what happens when we transport a theory from one domain (e.g. RoN) to another (such as K-12 classrooms)? The case of Jade in Three Optics is also similar. Here, Street, Rowsell, and Kress are trying to make sense of the multimodal forms of meaning making, especially Jades tattooing. These three writers offer us an insight into how tattoos carry the life history of Jade, her identities, and attachments. They also bring some social issues when they relate her intentions behind making and remaking her tattoos as they talk about her position in terms of her relation to her mother, her friend, and her husbands. But, we cannot see the kind of rich, thick social context that we see in his earlier study of Iranian village. We do not get to know how do the global and the local interact and how various economic and social ideologies work through tattooing practices. In other words, it seems that the sense of the social and cultural is largely abstracted from the very concrete/solid accounts of Jades context, the social formation, the dominant economic ideology, and many other such things operating locally in interaction with various localized global forces. To wrap up, both Canagarajah and Street take a situated approach to address the issue of alternative discourses or difference in language/literacy practices. In other words, they would

17 want to take minority peoples language use or literacy practices as shaped by their ideological underpinnings and would highlight the need to recognize these differences. As in case of the childs statement in Kress and Leeuwens example, both Canagarajah and Street would take writers/speakers/users of alternative discourses as designers of meaning. However, they seem to diverse in two things: their use of context and their focus either on adaptation or on reshaping. Canagarajahs translanguaging approach can be more meaningful when taking more materially situated approach where as Canagarajahs focus on shaping the environment can take Streets approach one step further in challenging the hegemony of the dominant discourse.

18 Works Cited Bunker Roy: Learning from a Barefoot Movement. TED. Oct 2011. Web. Oct 15, 2011. Canagarajah, Suresh. Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging. Modern Language Journal, forthcoming. ---. Lingua Franca English, Multilingual Communities, and Language Acquisition. The Modern Language Journal 91 (2007): 923-39. ---. The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued. College Composition and Communication 57.4 (June 2006): 586-619. ---. The Plurilingual Tradition and the English Language in South Asia. AILA Review (2009): 5-22. ---. Translanguaging in the Classroom: Emerging Issues for Research and Pedagogy.Applied Linguistics Review,(forthcoming). ---. Multilingual Strategies of Negotiating English: From Conversation to Writing. JAC 29.1-2 (2009): 711-743. ---. Toward a Writing Pedagogy of Shuttling between Languages: Learning from Multilingual Writers. College English 68.6 (July 2006): 589-604. Kress, Gunther, and Theo Van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Lu, Min-Zhan. Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone. College Composition and Communication 45.4 (Dec 1994): 442-458. Pratt, Mary Louis. The Art of the Contact Zone. Profession 91 (1991): 33-40. Rowsell, Jennifer, Gunther Kress, and Brian Street. Visual Optics: Interpreting Body Art, Three Ways. Forthcoming.

19 Street, Brian. Literacy in Theory and Practice. New York: CUP, 1984. - - -. New Literacies, New Times: How Do We Describe and Teach the Forms of Literacy Knowledge, Skills, and Values People Need for New Times? National Reading Conference Yearbook. 2006: 21-42. - - -. Hidden Features of Academic Paper Writing. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 24.1 (2009): 1-17.