Bawarshi, Anis; Response: Taking Up Language
Differences in Composition
College English, Vol.
68, No. 6, Cross-Language Relations in Composition (Jul., 2006),pp. 652-656, National
Council of Teachers of English, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25472181 .
In
this article, Anis Bawarshi reviews a number of essays on the topic of language
differences amongst ESL learners and outlines the ‘call to action’ aspects of
each essay, as well as factos that appear to discourage teachers from making
good on that call. These essays references are, in the author’s opinion,
extremely similar in scope and topic to recent determinations in the field of
rhetorical genre theory. In this regard, the author spends a lot of time
commenting on the concept of ‘uptakes’, a sort of reflexive, unconscious
connection between implicit meaning in a genre and actions associated with,
resulting from and related to that genre. “Within speech-act theory, uptake
traditionally refers to how an illocutionary act (saying, for example, "It
is hot in here") gets taken up as a perlocutionary effect (someone
subsequently opening a window) under certain conditions.” (653) Taken out of
the traditional context though, uptakes also exist among language learners that
don’t necessarily correlate to a secondary or tertiary language that they are
learning, and therefore it is up to their teachers to take these uptakes into
account and to react accordingly in their instruction. Bawarshi outlines the
concepts and ideas perpetuated in different essays. The first essay, “An Essay
on the Work of Composition: Composing English against the Order of Fast
Capitalism," by Min Zhan Lu, describes the idea of ‘soundbites’ which are
effectively interpersonal uptakes that are unconsciously connected to regularly
occurring reactions to different genres. Bawarshi interprets the concept of
sound bites as an alternative interpretation of the uptake idea. The second
essay discussed is Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe's "Globalization
and Agency: Designing and Redesigning the Literacies of Cyberspace", in
which the authors described an indepth study of the influence of genres of a
variety of different levels, from globalization to personal motivation, on Lu
Liu and Yi-Huey Guo. In this same essay, Bawarshi also notes that the use of
English in digital media and as a necessity for certain aspects of life are
also identified, reconnecting back to the original idea of differences in
language acquisition. The third essay Bawarshi examines is john Trimbur's
"Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. English", which,
according to the author, delves into the
use of ‘uptakes’ in historical and cultural linguistics. In discussing
this particular essay, the author comments on the negative implications of
uptakes, specifically those associated with underlying assumptions that may not
be obvious to instructors of language. This same commentary asserts that
uptakes are connected directly to memory, and, in fact, in the process of
acquiring and embedding specific uptakes, students actively forget or
discontinue alternative uptakes. The fourth essay Bawarshi connects with, Min-Zhan
Lu's essay "Living-English Work", draws on this idea of uptake
memory, and, according to the author, outlines ways of making positive use of
the ‘forgetting’ and ‘memorizing’ of specific and alternative uptakes. The
fifth and sixth essays Bawarshi discusses, Paul Kei Matsuda's "The Myth of
Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition," and A. Suresh
Canagarajah's "Toward a Writing Pedagogy of Shuttling between Languages:
Learning from Multilingual Writers" are both touched on only
briefly and are used to further support the commentary Bawarshi makes about the
previous four essays. The article in general was relatively easy to read,
compared to similar articles, though I did find the uptake concept rather
vaguely defined at first, and the more information the author provided, the
less I felt I knew about the actual concept itself.
