Literacy As Translingual Practice Between Communit... - (15 Writing Across Languages Developing Rhetorical Attunement)

15
WRITING ACROSS LANGUAGES:

DEVELOPING RHETORICAL
ATTUNEMENT
Rebecca Lorimer
Much of the research that has set out to describe multilingual writers’ resources
focuses on writers’ knowledge rather than their literate practices—what their liter-
ate resources are rather than how they are used. For example, sociologist Papas-
tergiadis (2000) argues that “fissures within language and cultural identity” create
a kind of “critical sensibility of innovation and improvisation” (p. 118), while
Canagarajah (2002) suggests that multilingualism fosters “a curiosity towards the
language, the ability to intuit linguistic rules from observation of actual usage, a
metalinguistic awareness of the system behind languages” (p. 134) as well as the
“patience, tolerance, and humility to negotiate the differences of interlocutors”
(Canagarajah, 2006, p. 593). But descriptions of what multilingual writers know—
their awareness that language difference is common, their sense that language can
be improvised—often stop short of showing where these resources come from
or how writers put them to use in specific moments of communication. Further,
Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
this focus can mistakenly suggest that multilingual writers’ resources are fixed and
stable, traveling directly from their home culture and language to the English-
dominant United States as a static, fully formed repertoire of literate skills.
Instead, multilingual writers call on and create literate resources in the process
of making-do, asserting themselves, or communicating on-the-fly in specific situ-
ations. This is a practice-based understanding of literate resources, one that Con-
nor (2008) would call not “contrastive” rhetoric, but “intercultural” rhetoric,
which describes the “cultural, social, and educational factors affecting a writing
situation,” and understands “the processes of writing as well as the historical back-
ground and context that affected the writing and the writer” (p. 304). She and
other scholars (Baca, 2008; Bawarshi, 2010; Canagarajah, 2011; Cenoz & Gorter,
2011; Guerra, 2004; Horner, Lu, Royster, & Trimbur, 2011; Pennycook, 2010)
are in pursuit of the “how” of multilingual writing: how multilingual writers use
Literacy As Translingual Practice : Between Communities and Classrooms, edited by Suresh Canagarajah, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=1143714.
Created from ubc on 2024-01-03 21:37:03.
Writing Across Languages: Developing Rhetorical Attunement 163
their languages to negotiate, create, and connect as they make meaning with oth-
ers in socially and culturally infused situations. This chapter describes the shape
of this experience, investigating not only how writing across languages creates a
certain awareness or sensibility, but also how multilingual writers use this sensibil-
ity to take action with writing in their everyday lives.
The three brief accounts below show that this sensibility is inherently rhe-
torical. As multilingual writers use and create their literate resources in everyday
practice, they develop an ear for difference, a practiced negotiation of meaning
for effect, or what we might call “rhetorical attunement”—a way of acting with
language that assumes linguistic multiplicity and invites the negotiation of mean-
ing to accomplish communicative ends. By virtue of their daily experience with
linguistic difference, the writers below are tuned toward the communicative pre-
dicaments of multilingual interaction. These predicaments are both idiosyncratic
and ordinary, moments in which rhetorical strategies are practiced and often cre-
ated. A rhetorical and practice-based framework shows us that these writers do
not necessarily enter situations with an a priori sensibility that then dictates their
writing activities, but instead come to understand language—become rhetorically
attuned—across a lifetime of communicating across difference. The portraits of
these three subjects derive from a study of 26 qualitative life history interviews
conducted with multilingual immigrants over the course of a year. The interviews
aimed to elicit the lived experiences of immigrants writing their way across lan-
guages by asking participants about their in- and out-of-school literacy memo-
ries, current literacy practices, and opinions about writing and communicating as
multilingual individuals. Participants immigrated from 17 different countries and
spoke 22 different languages, including English. Their class background, educa-
tional and work experience, and citizenship status varied widely: three came as
students, 12 came with or to join their U.S.-employed husbands, one came for
her own job, two were refugees, two immigrated under diversity “lottery” visas,
and five did not share their reasons or status.
Sabohi
Sabohi, a school principal in the United States who speaks English, Urdu, Kashmiri,
and Hindi regards language multiplicity as an unremarkable fact of life. She describes
her former work in Pakistan for a Kashmiri television station with a shrug:
S I would also present, which was not in English though, a program on the
television that was in the native language. So I would do writing for that. I’d
write my own script, what I wanted to say. And I always, it was in Kashmiri,
but I wrote it in English.
R So you wrote it out in English but you were presenting on TV in Kashmiri?
S Yeah, I would jot, I’d note down that and then I would go along and just
change.
164 Rebecca Lorimer
R As you were speaking.

S As I was speaking, yeah.
R That is very brave.
S Yeah, that is very brave. [shrug]
On live TV, she was perfectly comfortable translating from what she had writ-
ten in English on her script into Kashmiri in the moment she was speaking into
the camera. She explains that, occasionally, she asked her co-presenter for vocab-
ulary help in Kashmiri, which is her third language and not the one in which
she feels most comfortable writing. She would note a rare Kashmiri word on the
script, but for the most part, what she read in English she fluently delivered in
Kashmiri into the camera.
Sabohi says this movement between languages was essential to her workplace,
and part of her everyday life in Pakistan. She explains, “You know that no, there
are other things, there are other people. You learn that early on in your life.” She
says growing up she realized “okay this is Punjabi … this is Gujarathi, and this is
Hindi and this is this. And you try to communicate and you see, okay it’s differ-
ent.” Because of this norm of multiplicity and difference, Sabohi knows that the
negotiation of meaning across multiple languages is not only a given, but a neces-
sity in order to win over listening or reading audiences:
When it comes to writing in mass communication, I have seen that in some

newspapers, it is being done and it has been even effective to use different
languages. Like when you are in India, it will definitely help you if you are
communicating to the masses, what you are trying to get across to them
if you use some Hindi words in there. And if you kept their culture, their
beliefs, their traditions in mind, when you wrote that piece that you want
to communicate them to, it will definitely help you to get across your point
clearer than if you stick to, okay, literary Shakespearean English? No. I
mean maybe few people have done masters in English or something they’ll
understand you, what about others? If you want to write to the masses you
have to use the language they use, right? I mean even if that means there’s
mixing of a few, in school newsletter for example, I don’t mind. … If you
are able to add a few words, change a few words and still you are able to
communicate, so what is the harm? So what if you don’t protect it the way
it is just because that is part of your identity and part of your culture you
don’t want it to be, um, contaminated, right?
Sabohi shows how she has carried a specific literacy practice—writing for a pub-
lic audience—with her from Pakistan to her current job as a school principal in the
United States She slides between these settings as she makes her point, thinking
first of her writing experiences in Pakistan and ending with her school newsletter
writing in the United States As she describes the effect of this practice in both set-
tings, she reveals her developed sense of audience awareness, keeping an audience’s
“culture, their beliefs, their traditions in mind” to achieve a certain effect. In fact,
Sabohi considers her audience at length, and it is this resource that she draws on to
describe the rhetorical effectiveness of negotiation. She describes communicating
to an audience for whom reading in only one language would not only be unnatu-
ral, but detrimental to communication. She knows that “mixing of a few” words
from various languages is a way to extend a communicative hand to one’s audience
and show a willingness to work toward meaning-making together. From her lived
experience writing across four languages in Pakistan and now writing to an audi-
ence in a school where at least seven or eight languages are spoken, Sabohi uses
her discursive resources to improvise communication across varied traditions and
values, and cultivate a distinct rhetorical attunement toward language multiplicity.
Further, Sabohi is attuned to the relationship of language and power. When
she asks, “So what if you don’t protect it the way it is just because that is part
of your identity and part of your culture you don’t want it to be contaminated,
right?” she was extending an earlier thought about why individuals or institutions
resist language mixing. Canagarajah (2002) notes that writing as a multilingual
can “provide a critical detachment from dominant discourses” and Sabohi uses
that detachment to recognize that there are high stakes in language maintenance,
as well (p. 134). She cites India’s move to revert cities back to their pre-colonial
names, a move she says she understands as “people wanting to protect an identity
and not keeping up altogether with the times.” In other words, her attunement
to “the times” is one of inevitable language change and an almost dismissive
attitude toward colonial remnants of language practice. In other words, Sabohi’s
attunement is complex: in various turns she adapts to a widely diverse audience,
dismisses the harm of language mixing, embraces language change, and recognizes
a larger discursive system in which this communication plays out.
Yolanda
Yolanda, a Colombian veterinarian who now works in the United States as a

bilingual science teacher, also assumes a norm of multiplicity and considers lan-
guage negotiation a skill to be cultivated. In describing the language-mixing prac-
tices of her own multilingual students, Yolanda explains that she encouraged
improvisation, negotiation, and cooperation in a manner that assumed language
struggle would be present and normal:
Sometimes I asked the kids when we’re reading something scientific, “How
do you think you say this?” And they say, “I don’t know.” … They know I
don’t know how to say it, so I ask them, “How do you think? How would
you say it?” And they find a way to say it, and I say “let’s use it.” And then
I ask one of the kids that I know dad’s a biology teacher or something:
“Ask your dad and tell us the right way because we’re using this way but
166 Rebecca Lorimer
we don’t know if it’s right.” [laughing] It would be nice to use the right
way. Like me, hello I’m teaching biology and I don’t know how to say the
words we’re writing. I mean, that’s negative, but the thing is that I make
it a comedy. It becomes a comedy for all of us, and then okay let’s move
on. … And for kids that speak other languages you know, I have an accent,
but look at me, I can do it, so go ahead. “But what if it’s wrong?” Doesn’t
matter, look at me! You can say it wrong, you know. So I think I help the
kids sometimes with that.
Yolanda carried this literacy practice—reading science writing in English—with

her from the Colombian university where she had been trained as a veterinarian.
Yolanda explains that at her college they rarely had access to Spanish-language
translations of the scientific scholarly journal articles that were required reading.
She had to work with classmates in groups to translate their reading into Spanish,
or occasionally hire outside translators. Yolanda calls on these resources—col-
laborative meaning-making and accessing outside experts—in a new context in
which she is not the student, but the teacher. As a teacher, she taps into her stu-
dents’ native-speaker knowledge and consults outside experts, as when she asked
a student to consult his biologist dad on pronunciation. As a teacher, Yolanda
continues to put into practice these linguistic resources to get through a text and,
as she says, “use the words the right way.”
The communicative event that invited Yolanda to call on these resources also
allowed her to create resources for her students in that moment, showing them
that language is up for negotiation. She models for her students a norm of lan-
guage difference, fine tuning their ability to hear and understand accent. She
has them laugh with her at the occasional comedy of reading and writing across
languages and helps them, as she says, “move on” from certainty in a manner that
evokes Firth’s (1996) let-it-pass principle. Further, Yolanda practices negotiation
in the specific rhetorical situation of her bilingual science classroom, encouraging
students to use a provisional pronunciation—“let’s use it”—and modeling how
to negotiate these meanings until they get it right. Yolanda not only reveals her
own attunement toward language in this context, but also attunes her students to
the normalcy of language uncertainty: “‘But what if it’s wrong?’ Doesn’t matter,
look at me!” Yolanda’s linguistic and discursive resources prove to be particularly
complex, indexing a quiet resistance to common classroom practices that treat
multiple languages as separate and standard. Yolanda teaches her students the
multilingual practices she has cultivated over a lifetime, continuing to foster her
own as well as her students’ rhetorical attunement.
Tashi
While Sabohi and Yolanda’s experiences show how rhetorical attunement is cul-
tivated in communicative exchanges of writer and reader or speaker and listener,
Tashi, a 24-year-old Tibetan nursing student from India, becomes attuned by

constructing meaning on her own. During her years at an English-medium Indian
boarding school for Tibetan orphans, she studied English-language newspapers
and books in a self-sponsored practice of language analysis and exploration. She
was motivated to begin such study when she realized that “Whatever you have
in your brain can’t be seen by other people. You just have to write it down and
show them what you know.” She explains that in Indian schools, “It’s not like
here, not like multiple choice, over there everything in essay. So you really need
to express OUT all your brain.” She felt that her grades were suffering because
she couldn’t express what she knew through writing in English. So she set out to
learn how this was done. Tashi says she would collect books and newspapers and
analyze “how they write … how they go about it.”
I just marked all the vocabularies and like and I point out the phrase, how
they use it. And then I note how they uh … play with the words. And in
contrast, and in literal meaning and in applied meaning. All those. This
makes me know how to play around with the words and get the things
done. And play around with the sentences. So yeah, then I really learned
the skill of how to play around with the words and I really don’t have to
have a strict rule doing English.
If Tashi had been simply copying out grammatical patterns and mimicking
them, or noting the organization of newspaper stories and following that struc-
ture herself, she would not seem to be negotiating meaning as she acquired more
advanced levels of written English. But in fact she was specifically looking for
how these writers “used” the vocabulary and phrases she marked, how these were
used to make “literal” or “applied meanings,” and how one might “play around”
with sentences and words in English to “get the things done.” Tashi’s repeated
use of “play” shows her acknowledgment that meaning is not fixed or static, but
is up for negotiation. This is why she doesn’t have “a strict rule doing English.”
This practice of looking to textual models for the negotiation of meaning is

one that Tashi continues in the United States She explains that, after entering
nursing school in the United States, she continued this practice with her science
textbooks in order to understand how science was composed differently. She also
attempted to pass on this multilingual practice to a friend who was frustrated with
her slow acquisition of written English:
Then I was telling her, “You just have to take an essay and analyze how it is
done. … And whenever you see a piece you wouldn’t read for the content
you will read for … how it’s played around.” So I was telling her. And once
you get grip hold of it you can manipulate whatever you want to with the
language … and you know how things going around and then you under-
stand for yourself how it works.
168 Rebecca Lorimer
Tashi’s ability to access this resource and pass it on in the United States allows
her to continue to play with and negotiate meaning in English, even after she has
become a very proficient speaker and writer. Tashi exhibits what some scholars
call “common multilingual traits,” showing “a curiosity toward the language,
[and] the ability to intuit linguistic rules from observation of actual usage” (Cana-
garajah, 2002, p. 134). Now that she feels she has a “grip” on English, she delights
in manipulating it to accomplish “whatever [she] wants to with the language.”
But her willingness to work with language, to read for the playfulness of language
at the word, sentence, or discourse level, shows how deeply Tashi is tuned to the
natural negotiation of communicating across multiple languages.
Cultivating Rhetorical Attunement

These brief communicative moments from Sabohi, Yolanda, and Tashi’s lives
show how their literate resources developed over time, from ordinary, unpredict-
able, political, or emotional communicative experiences. While Sabohi, Yolanda,
and Tashi share a common attunement toward difference and negotiation, they
do so in specific ways informed by their own histories and changing life situations.
In this way, their multilingual resources are in-process and situationally specific,
what Blommaert (2010) calls the “truncated repertoires” that are “grounded in
people’s biographies and in the wider histories of the places where they were
composed” (p. 24). Looking for moments of rhetorical attunement is one way
to resist treating literate resources as stable and easily accessed knowledge, and
instead account for the ongoing and often unstable practices that comprise mul-
tilingual writing.
And if we consider multilingual resources to be not discrete skills but practices
informed by personal and cultural histories, then we need to rethink how to
cultivate and assess these practices. If multilingual writers can nimbly negotiate
language difference or create provisional meanings for the sake of communica-
tion, we need to focus less on naming and measuring what these writers know
and instead investigate and facilitate what they already do. We might define pro-
ficiency not as a level of acquisition but as a stage in attunement, teaching for
and assessing the relative success of language negotiation and play with specific
audiences in certain situations. Fundamentally, we need to account for the depth
and complexity of everyday multilingual practices and better understand how all
writers act with multiple languages to navigate a larger discursive system.
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Cross-language relations in composition (pp. 196–203). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois

University Press.
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versity Press.
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University of Michigan Press.
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15

WRITING ACROSS LANGUAGES:

R As you were speaking.

When it comes to writing in mass communication, I have seen that in some

Yolanda, a Colombian veterinarian who now works in the United States as a

Yolanda carried this literacy practice—reading science writing in English—with

Tashi, a 24-year-old Tibetan nursing student from India, becomes attuned by

This practice of looking to textual models for the negotiation of meaning is

Cultivating Rhetorical Attunement

Cross-language relations in composition (pp. 196–203). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois

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