Writing Across Borders or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Message in the Text Rather than the Technics Without

Let me express my grievances thus: free of form but full of function. I started this assignment with two questions pasted on a word document, attempting to answer these two in sequence, and separately. This didn't work as well as I would have liked. The original questions where #2 and #4, but I realized that it kind of included #5 and parts of #6. I believe all the points I make below answer in whole (or in part, in the case of #5 and #6) the questions raised, and hence, is not an incomprehensible chimera of cluttered... can't find another “c” word. Enjoy.

To start out: a disclaimer. For the past few weeks that I have started consulting on my own, I'd have to say that about three-quarters or so of my clients have been ESL students, particularly students from Korea. Most, if not all the literature we've read so far concerning teaching ESL students would have me believe that this perceived “cultural” difference overrides the individual personalities of these clients and how they respond in sessions when it comes to their participation, submissive/dominant aspects, and intentions to “sound” a certain way (a native American English-speaker). The tendency in these articles, it seems, is to assign native speakers a role as “less complete” in their understanding of what they want to say in English (a valid point), subjugating non-native speakers as inferior (even though this is not the intention) in their “understanding” of what it means to be a “native” speaker. This, I believe, unfairly pegs them into an inadvertent self-fulfilling prophecy of the “superiority” of sounding “native” and being self-conscious of the linguistic choices that they, as both people AND students make. While these studies have indeed made me aware of certain cultural differences that I may face as a consultant, their observations are base at best, and I have found (in my short time, let's wait and see) more evidence to suggest (and common sense to approve) that these clients are, of course, people first, with their own desires and intentions,and ESL students second. They understand WHAT they want to say, and the intention to sound “native”, while understandable, should not simply be swept aside. Instead, this desire should be taken into consideration when the primary intent of a piece is to send a message, which is the purpose of writing in the first place. The very fact that we peg them ESL students is unfortunate; they are fully capable of expressing their ideas, but WE as readers should pick up part of the burden in understanding the cultural differences. It becomes too easy to avoid the responsibility of not understanding and setting artificial “cultural” boundaries that only get in the way of understanding when we WANT them to. Take THAT, pedagogy juggernauts.

It's tempting for some to think that an ESL student's silence or tacit submission to the consultant's will is an example of pedagogy-gone-wrong. In the literature we've been exposed to so far, there seems to be an attempt to make a blanket statement quick-fix on our part, that we are indeed doing something wrong by occasionally “taking control” of an ESL students work. Merely “noticing” a cultural difference is a quaint idea, one I would liken to last century's myth of scientific “race”; the only reason this “difference” exists is because we would like very much to believe it does exist. By coming to a session with the conception that we should somehow “alter” our understanding of both client and text alters the playing field in our favor, not the client's: we are now playing the very hegemonic academia-centered game we strived to quit in the first place by “understanding” on our terms.

The mere truth is this: sentences are the results of thought; these thoughts the children of ideas in our conscious self, and the conscious self emerges from the assembled energies, hopes, and aspirations of the deeper self that indeed makes a self a “self”. We easily understand the ideas that people raise because we ourselves recognize these ideas as part of our own existence, even when these are not expressed in a “technical” way (i.e., art, music, emotive gestures, etc.). Sentence- and idea-level comprehension, I believe, should not be approached with as much pretense and importance with which we usually approach such things. When among our “peers” (both cultural and academic), the distance can easily be bridged between these technical forms of understanding, and hence, we can more exactly apprehend the “meaning” of a text written because we comprehend these structures. But when it comes to those different than ourselves, it better serves to either ignore or assign these structures a lesser degree of importance, as insisting upon them does little justice to understanding the underlying meaning in the text. However, I assign the blame not to those who claim us to be different in our understanding of the human condition, but rather to those who approach the inter-cultural writing process as some vacuous exercise “preserving 'culture' vs. preserving 'voice' and technics”, as if these are exclusive to the other and cannot exist the the same space.

*Phew*. Such is my manifesto.