Rethinking Basic Writing

Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in interaction

Laura Gray-Rosendale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781135664176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

This book surveys the history of basic writing scholarship, suggesting that we cannot adequately theorize the situations of basic writers unless we examine how they construct their own conceptions of their identities, their constructions of their relationships to social forces, and their representations of their relationships to written work. Using a cross-disciplinary analytic model, Gray-Rosendale offers a detailed examination of the oral conversations that take place within one basic writing peer revision group. She explains the ways in which the students' own conversational structures impact and shape their written products. Gray-Rosendale then draws out the potentials of her work for basic writing administrators, curricula builders, and teachers.

1
What Basic Writers Do: A New Analytic Model for Social Construction in Context

People are constructed by the discoursal resources on which they are drawing, construct their own “discoursal identity” in relation to their immediate social context, and contribute to constructing a new configuration of discoursal resources for the future.

—Roz Ivanic (1998, p. 345)

Given the overview of Basic Writing scholarship outlined in the introduction, chapter 1 contends that a new analytic model should be designed to cultivate a fuller conception of social relations among Basic Writers. Such an analytic, which yields both a macro- and microlevel analysis of Basic Writing students’ written and spoken interactions, might allow teachers and scholars the opportunity to explore how students constitute their identities and knowledges in greater detail. Moreover, it might afford both teachers and students the chance to better understand connections between students’ written and oral literacy choices. The question of how exactly oral interaction shapes students’ writing choices becomes clear when we begin to look at these students’ interactions in action.¹

This chapter begins with an examination of how literacy and orality have been conceived and some of the puzzles and possibilities these interpretations hold for Basic Writing students. Next the chapter inspects how some of the same problems and potentialities are inherent within the theoretical models of social construction that now dominate our theoretical landscape. I contend that, to best support our Basic Writing students, these models must be expanded by several interdisciplinary methods for discourse analysis.

These interdisciplinary trends are then investigated in some detail. First, I research how theories within conversation analysis can contribute a heurmeneutical, microlevel perspective on how Basic Writers utilize rhetorical techniques in speech. I demonstrate the history of its terminologies in the work of sociologist Harold Garfinkel and conversation analyst Harvey Sacks. Second, I inquire briefly into how the macrolevel notion of framing can lend insight to this microlevel perspective, glancing at the work of sociologist and anthropologist, Erving Goffman (1959, 1969, 1981, 1982, 1986).

Third, I turn specifically to other contemporary, rhetorically informed research on conversation provided by speech communications scholar, Richard Buttny, as well as archaeologist and anthropologist, Penelope Brown, and linguist, Stephen C.Levinson. Such work contributes a clearer sense of the details of students’ language choices. Finally, drawing on trends within contemporary Basic Writing theory (poststructuralism and cultural materialism) as well as the earlier modes, I advance the critical tenets of a new model for discourse analysis. This new framework for investigation enhances current accounts of social constructionism, combining poststructuralist conceptions of social relations, conversation analysis, and dramaturgical perspectives.

This new analytic perspective exhibits the ways in which a Basic Writer’s presentation of self and identity can indeed further a student’s liberatory race, class, and gender identity. Such fashioned self-presentations surely provide a critical intervention within our scholarship, which has often constructed the Basic Writer as lacking, different, or othered. However, in addition, this analytic significantly discloses that the varied identity-producing activities that Basic Writers construct for themselves may indeed have little to do with such allegiances at different moments. Such identity-producing activities may have much more to do with using rhetorical concepts on a microlevel germane to the specific context of conversation but equally applicable to the writing situation: audience (establishing common ground, creating group identity markers, utilizing positive and negative politeness strategies), ethos (calling others to account in ways that utilize or disrupt reflexivity, oral sequences that are reflexive or nonreflexive of an actor’s positioning toward another group member’s justification, excuse, blame, or assessment for her or his actions), and rhetorical constraints (changing the frame of an activity or keying a preexistent frame, attributing motivations to each other, characterizing the scene). This new analytic account recommends that a focus on monistic principles of human action alone is insufficient. It is just as crucial to pay closer attention to the multiple identities, frames, beliefs, norms, and ideologies that are ever-shifting and altering within Basic Writers’ everyday interactions.

INTERSUBJECTIVE COMPOSITIONS: CONNECTIONS BETWEEN LITERACY AND ORALITY

Written and spoken discourse have often been relegated to separate domains within language research. Written language has been perceived as more structurally complex, elaborate, and explicit (DeVito, 1967; Gumperz, 1984; Tannen, 1982a); more detached, decontextualized, and autonomous and therefore less dependent on shared information or background knowledge (Kay, 1977; Ong, 1982); less personally involved and therefore more abstract than speech (Blankenship, 1974; Chafe, 1982; Chafe & Danielewicz, 1986); and more deliberately organized and planned than speech and therefore often containing a higher concentration of new information than speech (Gumperz, 1984; Ochs, 1979; Stubbs, 1980). In contrast, speech is often determined to be contextdependent and therefore involving participants more directly in the construction of meaning (Tannen 1982a, 1982b, and 1982c; 1984). Although there are general differences within theories, the “perception that speech maximally depends on a shared situation and background while writing does not depend on such a shared context” (Biber, 1988, p. 48) has dominated research in this vein. Scholars of late have contested this view of absolute differences between writing and speech, remarking that written and spoken language have a dialogic relationship to each other, both being molded by the values and practices of the culture within which they are embedded (Barton, 1994; Gee, 1990; Ivanic, 1998; Romy, 1997; Rubin, 1995). As Brandt (1990) maintained, literate language, the combination of written and spoken discourse, should not be seen as the

medium for private contemplation and reflection, in which formal language overwhelms consciousness and becomes an independent locus of meaning. In this view, literate language does not so much convey or share a message as it objectifies it. (p. 3)

Although written discourse may appear less immediate than spoken discourse, largely because of the contexts in which these activities take place, especially academic discourse, such scholars insist that dichotomizing language use in this way is flawed. This description of the written and spoken as separate is premised largely, they explain, on a view of context solely as physical surrounds outside interaction (historical circumstances, cultural occasions, etc.), rather than social purposes and relationships as well. Context, they contend, is not exclusively outside interaction shaping the interactions of participants solely. Although participants certainly distinguish some things as givens and therefore as external context, participants also clearly construct and deconstruct contexts through their interactions. In this particular way, written and spoken discourse operate similarly. As Duranti and Goodwin (1992) proposed, we need to embrace a more active conception of written and spoken language that regards writing, talk, and context as possessing mutually reflexive relationships to each other, “with talk, and the interpretive work it generates, shaping context as much as context shapes talk” (p. 31).

The written and spoken are both grounded within social contexts; they both entail the minute-by-minute arbitration of competing social norms and conventions as well as cultural and institutional practices. However, written texts and oral conversations share not only the construction of context; additionally, they both contribute exchanges of meaning within which social identities and personal relations are constructed. In the cases of both written and spoken discourse, greater literacy is attained through shared knowledge of conceptions about context, shared perceptions about roles, shared communicative purposes, shared judgments about texts’ formal features, shared registers, shared cultural values, and shared attentiveness to intertextuality (Johns, 1997). Greater literacy acquisition, then, emerges through students’ awareness of the “interaction of roles, texts, and contexts in academic communities” (p. 57) and therefore through comprehending the same issues in their own spoken discourse and regarding the connections between them.

Although scholars in linguistics and communications have argued for links between written and conversational discourse, a number of rhetoric and composition scholars have taken a similar avenue. Literacy has been newly established as an inherently intersubjective experience in which literacy and orality, as well as text and context, repeatedly mutually establish each other. For instance, Zeni’s (1994) “Oral Collaboration, Computers, and Revision” disclosed the importance of speech in occasioning students to become more aware of how their composing processes function. She advised that collaborative talk may be consequential on three distinct levels:

1) talking to oneself to clarify one’s own thinking, 2) talking to a peer or teacher to communicate plans, judgments, and calls for help; 3) talking taped by a researcher as a window on writers’ problem solving. (p. 217)

Zeni’s research shows that, although computer processing is beneficial to the revision process, it is collaboration—in all its various forms, both written and oral—that actually enables significant revisions.

Similarly, Villanueva’s (1994) “On Writing Groups, Class, and Culture: Studying Oral and Literate Language Features in Writing” investigated the specific oral facilities that Basic Writers from different cultures and classes tend to possess. Tracing individual Basic Writers’ oral interactions, Villanueva emphasized that class rather than culture is the overriding difference in determining such students’ speech codes. Rather than relying on their oral facilities, he noticed that the Basic Writing students in his study denied their competencies within oral discourse when attempting to master foreign discourse patterns within their writing. Instead of Basic Writers’ problems being rooted in an “inordinate reliance on oral strategies,” as is too often asserted, Villanueva argued that their “problems came from their inordinate denial of the oral” (p. 135). Villanueva charged that uninterrogated class differences often drive Basic Writers as well as researchers to make far too much of literate/oral distinctions. Focusing our research on the productive fertilizations between writing and speech, we can learn a great deal about Basic Writers and perhaps teach them more effectively as well. According to Villanueva (1994), then, successful Basic Writing courses in the future will “encourage basic writers to develop and to trust their oral and literate ways while continuing to communicate the struggles entailed in being other-cultural and outside the middle class” (p. 138).

Finally, Coleman’s (1995) “Negotiating Literacies: Profiles of Two African-American Students” asserted literacies’ social construction and interdependence, necessarily blending features of literacy and orality as well as home languages and academic conventions. Fostering this interconnection, Coleman argued, is of certain value to Basic Writers.

Still other rhetoric and composition scholars, including Deborah Brandt and Tom Fox, have not stopped at disputing the traditional literate-oral distinctions. Drawing from research in linguistics and communication, they have retooled our conceptions of social construction as well. They maintained that we need to identify social structure as it emanates from the practical accomplishments of people’s situated reasoning. Such a view of social construction might enable us to examine minutely the interpretive procedures people manifest as they conduct and interpret various communication activities. Looking specifically at a highly literate graduate student’s practical reasoning techniques, Brandt (1986a) drew on conversation analysis to contribute critical implications for rhetoric and composition studies. For Brandt, a dialectical relationship exists between social relationships within the written word and oral communication. Writer and reader, like two conversants, are “at any moment, at the same ‘place’ in a text, a right-here, right-now social reality of their mutual making” (p. 31).

Brandt (1990) also contended that highlighting the ways in which oral exchanges parallel the dynamic contexts of written composition can better help writing students to ascertain that “textual language refers not merely to an ostensible text world under construction but to a writer’s here-and-now working context, including his awareness of the presence of the other” (p. 31). Inquiring into how students approach the curricularly prescribed issues of race, class, and gender within an interactive classroom, Fox (1990b) also used conversation analysis principles to define social categories not as sociological facts but more in terms of students’ own use and interpretation of them. In doing so, both Brandt and Fox’s texts remove the barricades from the literate-oral distinction and rethink how social relations may occur among students.

CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST MODELS: PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES

Poststructuralist Paradigms

Although scholars such as Brandt and Fox have offered alternatives, social constructionist and cultural materialist (influenced by theories of poststructuralism, marxism, feminism, and postcolonialism, among others) views of identity and sociocultural context still distinctly dominate the research on Basic Writers.² In this view, language is the site within which subjectivity is constructed and where “actual and possible forms of social organization and their likely social and political consequences are defined and contested” (Weedon, 1987, p. 21). Because the self is constructed through language in this framework, the notion of a fixed and unified identity is held suspect. Social discourses and the meanings associated with them are also perceived as inherently unstable because they are constructed between people and institutions. These people and institutions are situated differently in relation to the social groups within which the discourses operate. Scholars employing these approaches generally understand reality, knowledge, thoughts, facts, texts, selves, and community to function as symbolic entities that are mutable and serve to define the communities that generate them.³

Identity, whether understood as political, institutional, or context dependent, is never the product of the individual’s intentions alone. Instead, identity is often determined by larger social forces or discursive practices, behaving as a “constellation of characteristics and performances that manifest the self in meaningful action” (Anderson & Schoening, 1996, p. 207).

Discursive practices function as a way of being in the world that synthesize words, acts, beliefs, and social identities. They impact and form how people think, act, write, and speak. Discursive practices also afford ways in which people form social groupings according to similarities to each other and differences from others in thinking, feeling, believing, and behaving. Often identity as culturally constructed according to race, class, and gender differences is marked by oppressive boundaries. To break free from such oppression, indivi...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Questioning the Question, Who Is the Basic Writer?
• 1 What Basic Writers Do: A New Analytic Model for Social Construction in Context
• 2 Interactions in Action: Beyond Basic Writing
• 3 Basic Writing’s New Horizons: The Challenges We Face
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Appendix
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Author