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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.