Jenny Cook-Gumperz, Dilemmas of Identity

Dilemmas of Identity:Oral and Written Literacies in the Making of a Basic Writing Student JENNY COOK-GUMPERZ University of California, Santa Barbara

This article is a case study of an African American woman student returning to a basic-skills program in an inner-city community college. The student participates in a one-on-one writing conference in order to prepare a written essay. Duringa life-history telling by the student, the topic of her first paid job emerges. The task of transposing the telling into writing presents issues that are not covered in composition theory but that challenge accepted notions of schooled literacy.

My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-Ameri- can woman in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and to wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and his- torically racialized society.

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Litera y Imagination

Introduction

This article presents an ethnographer's account of one person's attempt to exchange the powerful rhetoric of spoken language for the language of the hegemonic written code that governs the educational process. It seeks to make explicit how school literacy practices are shaped by an ideology of language often at variance with daily language practices and their consequences (Heath 1983). Even though literacy pedagogy has changed over the past decade or so, theinstitutional motivation for school practice remains the promotionand selection of a specific kind of literate talent (Collins 1990). As studies of classroom interaction have documented well, normative constraints on what can be written or said still inform both school talk and school writing and can be at odds with language usage outside the classroom (Cazden 1988). For these reasons, the long history of the relationship of the political purposes of schooling to specific literacy practices generates for many students what could be called an ideologically motivated writer's block. Students, especially adult students, cannot emerge from this condition without not only relearning how to write but also rethinking their relationship to the process of schooling.

Anthropology and Education Quarterly 24(4):336-356. Copyright O 1993, American Anthropological Association.

337 Cook-Gumperz Oral and Wri t ten Literacies

Even the dramatic shifts in literacy pedagogy over the past few years have not succeeded in diminishing the difficulty of the transition from oral to written language for speakers of nondominant languages and dialects (Gee 1991). New theories of writing instruction and educational practices argue that adult basic writers must be treated as separate groups with their own special needs that have to be met before they can enter the educational mainstream. Treating "basic writers" as a group with special pedagogical needs reflects attempts to ease the difficulties encountered by many in making the transition from one set of language conventions to another (Shaughnessy 1977).Yet in spite of changes in pedagogical theory and intent, minority students as writers do not get met on their own terms, either as college students or as speakers of a minority language or of dialects. Rather they become viewed as reentering and underprepared students.

Within this label, the dilemma of the writing teacher, as Bartholomae has described it (1987), is one of whether the teacher should focus on the students or on their text. Recent developments in composition theory and writing instruction have sought to provide a more natural transition between the language of speaking and beginning writers' attempts at written prose composition by focusing on the written narrative of personal experience (Freedman and Dyson 1990). It is assumed that the process of writing becomes eased by discussions in writing conferences in which student and tutor meet together and focus on the students processes of text construction.

The paper examines the process and products of such a writing conference between a returning African American student and her writing tutor. While the text itself narrates a piece of the student's life experience in an acceptable "literary" form, I argue that the linguistic and cognitive processes necessary to produce this text are much more complex than some influential current theories of composition allow and that an understanding of what some of these complexities are will begin to provide an explanation of why adult students fail to learn.

It is against a background of the concerns with the transition from speaking to writing that linguists in the past decade or so have begun to focus attention on the nature of the syntactic and stylistic differences between spoken and written language (Beaman 1984; Chafe 1982; Ford 1991; Tannen 1982). Linguists argue that theoretical traditions tend to focus on either spoken or written language varieties in a mutually exclusive way, so that the linguistic problems that the individual en- counters in making the transition from speaking to writing have not been properly addressed (Lnell 1982). More recently scholars have begun to suggest that the original sharp division is questionable. Both oral and written usage, while building on the same syntactic and semantic resources, form a single continuum with gradations of different stylistic and pragmatic options (Tannen 1989).

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Yet, the linguists' debate over this relationship has not yet provided explanations as to why the transition from spealung to writing is particularly difficult for some people. As Heath has recently pointed out, the role of speech in shaping the expectations of what constitutes good prose style still continues to be only a covert part of language ideology (Heath 1988). If we can accept Tannen's argument that the difference between written and spoken language is a matter of a gradual stylistic shft, then to what extent can we still refer to difficulties in writing as linguistically motivated? Although linguists and sociolinguists have provided useful information on the rhetorical practices of minority speakers, their work so far has not brought about a refocusing of the debate over school literacy expectations. Rather the existing ideologies of language learning still continue to stress the dominance of a written standard as the central experience of schooling. As a result oral practices not only are disvalued but are more often than not seen as interfering with the development of good expository prose style.

For speakers of minority dialects or languages, acceptance of another set of grammatical paradigms, rhetorical practices, and usage conventions is not simply a replacement of some practices by others. It is a process that demands a shft of basic social assumptions which often requires deep emotional commitment and involvement on the part of the language user. In many ways these demands are similar to those of the initial language acquisition process. In both processes what is achieved is not only technical communicative competence but also the construction of a social self inextricably linked to the rhetoric and aesthetic of one's own language practices. However while sociolinguis- tics has been able to encourage educational researchers to explore the social realities of multilingualism and multidialectalism as spoken codes, where written language is concerned research paradigms that are less sensitive to cultural difference continue to be more influential.

Ideologies of Learning: Composition Theory and the Teaching of Basic Writing

How does one teach order, coherence and the structure of ideas, while respecting the student's experience of his or her thinking and perceiving? . . .

. . .These were classes, not simply in writing, not simply in literature, certainly not just in the correction of sentence fragments or the redemptive power of the semicolon: though we did, and do, work on all these.

Adrienne Rich, "Teaching Language in Open Admissions" (1972) in O n Lies, Secrets and Silence, 1979.

There is a clear parallel between the linguists' concerns with the grammatical form of literary language and the spoken/written contrast, and composition theorists' and writing teachers' focus on clarity of argumentation. The dominant tradition that has governed how written language is taught in schools and colleges has until recently relied on

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theories of composition that have been built up over the past century or so ( Berlin 1987). Clifford points out that the development of a separate discipline for the study of English as a professional enterprise only emerged during the 1920s but that writing instruction at the college level continued to be seen merely as an unacknowledged and transitional remedial enterprise for much longer (Clifford 1989). As a result, educational practice has continued to emphasize normative standards of clarity, lack of ambiguity, and coherent fluency in the construction of written texts.

Yet, by the late 1960s the professional organization of writing instruction itself began to emerge from its neglect, shaped by the demands of a new era of concerns with educational equity and equality of access to educational institutions. New methods of teaclung writing went hand in hand with the needs that had inspired college open admissions (Rch 1987; Shaughnessy 1977). Writing instruction came from a position of having had very little connection to other disciplines to being seen as central to new literacy concerns and as essential for school and college success of all students. At the level of grade-school writing the new methods focused on the "natural way" to write using expressive topics and genres that brought the topic of writing closer to students' own concerns and personal experiences. In other words autobiograplucal accounts came to be seen as useful in motivating a student to write with the necessary commitment (Britton 1982). The student-focused theories of writing came to focus on the transition from expressive to transac- tional writing whch began with the work of Britton and was developed by others in the U.S. (Elbow 1981). These theories stressed the need for students to select topics through which they could become both cognitively and emotionally involved in the writing process and could sustain the writing and revision cycle that these methods required (Freedman and Dyson 1990). While this scheme could be seen to result in a rornan- ticization of the process of self-discovery which underlies the teaching of the writing process, as the new methods are called, it served to bring the student's actual concerns in writing to the fore rather than seeing writing instruction as the mere acquistion of mechanics or disciplinary knowledge (Russell 1991).

At the college level, writing had always been assumed to be part of a humanistic discpline but irrelevant to all others; however by the the late 1960s the new "writing-across-the-curriculum" movement began to shf t concerns towards an explicit awareness of how students' writing made them ready to enter the college community (Russell 1991). Writing instruction looked not only at the construction of prose as the creation of clear and rational argument but also at issues of how college students become members of a disciplinary communities of scholars. By the 1980s the approach to school writing instruction whch began with Britton and became the guiding influence on the national writing project, also began to influence work with college level writers, particularly basic writers.

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This approach led to the development of the idea of writing conferences, between a tutor and a student, taking place on the way to a finished product, as necessary to get to the heart of what the student writer intends and, so, as the best method to teach writing composition to all students but especially to basic writers. However these methods assumed that beginning writers, whether in grade school or in college, had the same intellectual needs.

Thus, college composition theories entered the discourse of 1970s literary theory by treating writing as the creation of a common, shared rhetorical domain through which to construct interpretive and discourse communities (Fish 1980). Bartholomae, in a critical discussion of this development, has suggested that, for college students, writing means adopting the position of a privileged insider and that it is in doing this that students become members of an academic discourse community. Yet the position of someone willing and able to add to the existing knowledge is precisely one that is difficult for beginning students-and even more difficult for basic writers-to assume (Bartholomae 1988). As a composition theorist, Bartholomae points out that what guides the definition of a basic writer is the view that a basic writer is someone unfamiliar with the practices of academic discourse. In fact when writing and composition theorists discuss basic writing, they are more likely to focus on teachers' strategies rather than attempting to see issues from the student's point of view. Bartholomae shows how, within the teacherstudent-text triangle generated by the writing conference, the imperfections of the student's text still seem to blot out all else. The result is that the issue of how students create written text is put to one side, while both the student and teacher focus on the repair of any available text in hand. The difficulties that students have in making the transition from speaking to writing seem less urgent than the need to produce "college- worthy" prose. Yet many times the final text constructed in the conference as a joint production is only a pale version of the student's orignal intentions. Rose more strongly states the argument implied in Bartholomae that, although the intent of composition theorists is to focus on the imperfections of the text, the result is that the focus shifts onto the imperfections of the students (1985).

It is hardly surprising that the written text continues to be the center of the schooled literacy experience. As Collins has pointed out, the demands of college-literacy style reflect an institutional shaping of discourse which is dependent on more than factual knowledge of either discipline or writing mechanics, although both together are necessary. College writing must be based on the difficult-to-grasp notion that what the writer knows is not only unique but also in line with others' shared knowledge. Moreover, the construction of classroom communities, while helping to provide a protected space in which learning and thinking can go on, cannot alter the actions and distinctions of the world outside the classroom. Collins suggests that the social realities that exist


outside the classroom cannot be wished away by instructional programs that seek to reshape the individual's consciousness (1990). Basic writers are made by more than errors in writing mechanics, as Mina Shaugh- nessy pointed out almost two decades ago.

Mina Shaughnessy was in large part the founder of the contemporary basic collegewriting movement from the late 1960s into the 1970s; yet her instincts and practices were not exactly those of the modern expressivists. Rather, she built on her experiences as an editor not only to insist on grammatical techniques but also to devise a program that offered the minority writer a reasoned series of strategies to achieve effective prose (Shaughnessy 1977). While her concerns with the nature of basic writing have been fundamental to the new writing movement and the teaching of basic writers, some of her insights on how written text gets constructed have been overlooked in recent theory and practice that has embraced the methods of the expressivists. Her early insight into the implications of the differences between spoken and written language for writing instruction with adults provided grounds for a set of practices that differ from the methods successfully used with grade-school children. Within the teacher-student-text triangle Shaughnessy's methods remain focused on the text for reasons that she explains:

Without a better understanding than we now have of the spoken language of the young men and women who are classified as basic writers and of the differences between written and spoken language, we cannot determine with accuracy what students already know but cannot put into practice because of their stiffness and hesitancy with the medium of writing and what they do not know, or seldom use, and must in some way learn as part of the "dialect" of written formal English. [1977:51]

Shaughnessy continues to explain the differences that speaking and writing make to the nature of text construction:

The differences arise, mainly, from the degree of consolidation each form of expression allows. Speech is more likely .. . to tolerate a high level of redun- dancy and loose coordination. It is perfected in the dynamics of dialogue, not at the point of utterance. Writing, however, withholds utterance in order to perfect it. And "perfecting" in writing has much to do with the ability to consolidate sentences-that is, to subordinate, syntactically, some elements of an idea or statement to others and to conjoin other elements that are clearly of equal semantic weight. [1977:51]

With hindsight we can see that in this passage Shaughnessy foreshad- ows some very important aspects of the syntactic and stylistic differences between spealung and writing. But she also suggests reasons that her own approach continues to be text-based and editorial in method. Her concern was not with why the student had made errors but with what could be done to change the student's interaction with the text. The focus clearly remained on changing the text to reflect what the student


thought, not with changing the student's thought processes so that the text could be reshaped.

We conclude that, while the recent innovations in writing instruction constitute an important advance over earlier normative approaches in focusing attention on the student's concern and motivation, what has not been taken into account is the special problems that adults bring to the learning situation. Adults have already had significant amounts of schooling experience, even if the significance of this experience lies in its disturbed and truncated character. They do not enter an educational encounter without prior knowledge and already developed attitudes to learning.

What follows is an analysis of one such encounter in a basic-writing program between a returning adult student and her writing tutor. The data were tape-recorded in a Bay Area community college's remedial literacy, reading, and writing program that helps to conduct returning adult students into college life, into GED courses, and later on into other two-year college programs.

Telling a Life

The social world tends to identify normality with identity understood as a constancy to oneself as a responsible being that is predictable, or at least intelligible, in the way of a well-constructed history. [Bourdieu 19871

Who is the author of the narratives analyzed here? Wanda is a 30-year- old woman returning to study in an inner-city community-college program for reentry students. From an educator's perspective she is catego- rized as a reentry student needing college preparation work and a typical candidate for a basic-writing program. From her own perspective she is student who has been admitted to a regular college class and has thus overcome an earlier history of school failure. To accomplish this she has undergone many experiences before bringing herself back into a college program that, as she sees it, places her on the pathway to success. As the topic for her autobiographical account, she naturally chooses an episode in which she successfully managed to negotiate and enter the world of teaching, albeit as an assistant in a cluld-care center.

How does Wanda go about telling her life? The Bourdieu quotation isolates a critical issue for anyone: that the telling of a life history is more than a simple recounting of preexisting facts-that it requires the construction of an account that is seen to cohere and, as such, to count as a reasonable account of a normal life. How this coherence is achieved, by selecting from among the many possible events and actions, is crucial to how the teller is evaluated by others. In other words the way the story is told is and is made to hang together counts as a statement about the very identity of the tellers themselves.

In t h s activity Wanda must necessarily encounter complications. The need to make a coherent narrative of events that may not have an


apparent causality requires the teller to create a linkage between events that, until that moment, may not have seemed part of a clear chronology. Taken together, the events chosen and discussed then become tokens of the person as a public being. Events must be chosen so as to situate the teller in a public domain. One common way tellers manage to define this domain in life-history accounts is by locating their own actions in relation to major public events that both speaker and hearer can remem- ber (e.g., the Kennedy assassination), thus constructing what Giddens calls a life-event calendar (Giddens 1991). The telling of a life is therefore not just a straightforward recounting of temporally ordered happenings, but the construction of a personal identity in which tellers must assess themselves, reflexively, as persons whose lives are worthy of the telling. This is not a simple matter, and it goes to the heart of the issue of language use as an expression of social identity.

In her ownattempts at telling a life, Wanda is confronted with at least two different issues: first, to provide a coherent sequence of events that can be understood by a stranger; second, to do so in a grammatical form that approximates a clear, explicit, coherent account that can then be transferred into a written text. This is a task in which Wanda is not alone. At another level many other writers before her have grappled with this issue of taking their own vernacular experience and words into a public sphere.

Wanda is unlikely to have had much opportunity to become familiar with other such writers-particularly with the recent highly successful African American women writers who have begun to speak in their own voices-and with their writing techniques. From a range of autobiographical works to Toni Morrison's lecture series at Harvard (1992), African American women are examining their stance vis-A-vis the literary world and are making their contributions in styles of their own creation. Their search for the grammatical and rhetorical strategies that enable them to realize their own social identity within the specific context of their own dialects and to create a written literary style that presents their point of view is still in progress.

Wanda is trapped at a much, much earlier stage in her development as a beginning writer and reentry student, where her excursions in writing and storytelling are constrained not only by her own inexperi- ence but also by the school curriculum from the earliest grades on. Her performance will be judged accordingly. That is to say, her narrative prose will have to correspond to a written standard of school literacy and to certain specific stylistic conventions and expectations about correct school writing. So for her, telling a life has two possibly contra- dictory purposes: first, to provide a coherent sequence of actions that justifies her recent actions in the eyes of a stranger; second, to do so in a grammatical form that approximates a clear, explicit, coherent account that can then be transferred into a written text.

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Recent theories of writing instruction suggest that the autobiographical sketch is the most useful way of generating commitment and involvement on the part of beginning writers. While this is one of the most common tasks set for students in basic-writing classes, it is perhaps the hardest of all. The telling of one's own life presents many difficulties that are not immediately apparent. Not least is the fact that, as Bourdieu indicates, the need to make an intelligible and coherent account of a personal life presents not only compositional problems but also issues of the selection of facts that can make a life be seen as a coherent whole. What any prospective teller must do is connect both cognitively and grammatically, as part of the act of telling, and rely on selected events to represent personal attitudes and feelings. Labov and Waletsky, in their original exploration of narrative strategies, argue that all storytelling requires the teller both to link together consequences from past actions and to evaluate the import of those actions using grammatical devices such as tense and aspect to structure the narrative (Labov and Waletsky 1967). Yet more recently other linguists suggest that problems of narrative structuring are dealt with differently by speakers of minority languages and dialects who have their own distinct narrative traditions. As a result, the specific stylistic choices may not seem to provide the necessary coherence to the narrative account (Gee 1985).

What is more, the matter of acquiring or demonstrating knowledge of narrative structure is not what is at issue here. Michaels, in working with fourth graders, has shown how minority dialect speakers attempt to provide complex narrative structure in both spoken and written accounts. Faced with the dual problem of their own narrative tradition and of the teachers' simpler canonical structuring of their story, young students often give up and provide in a limited form what the teacher wants rather than struggle to make their own understandings part of what is expressed on the page (Michaels 1991).

Wanda, in the passage to be examined here, faces some of these issues of well-intentioned misunderstanding even though on the surface the interaction seems to proceed fairly smoothly and pleasantly for both student and tutor. The interaction follows the usual pattern of writing conferences; the tutor and student first discuss informally what events could be the focus of the narrative, and then the tutor suggests that Wanda choose one of the topics she had mentioned, "how she came to get her first paid job," to be the theme of her written narrative account. In collaboration with her tutor, she then constructs a temporally ordered account of this particular event in her life.

The transcript reveals that Wanda tells her story three times, each time placing emphasis on the two aspects of the story that most concern her: (a)the acquisition of a paid job and (b) the change in attitude which being paid means for her. It is clear at the outset that Wanda knows the kinds of things she wants to convey in her account. The tutor, however, has quite a different agenda, which she reveals in saying, "I'm trying to focus

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on the one [the job] you actually got paid for," and then repeating in measured tone, "your first paid teaching job." The use of the measured tone here serves "to name" an activity. By this the tutor thinks of herself as giving the student a frame for what is expected to be a specific, clearly defined story that can later become the written text. Following this, she repeats the topic as if it were a title to a piece of prose text in such a way as to suggest a certain genre of writing that specifies the manner in which the student is to complete the written task: "You could use those things in your study about your first paid job."

Only after several prompts does Wanda take up the tutor's sugges- tion. She now begins to recognize that she is being asked to give an oral account of what she intends to write and in a form that can be transposed into a written text.

(1)I am writing about my first paid, my **first **paid **job, [hits pencil on paper] tha:t I : ever: ha:d. [Laughs.] My first paid job that I had ever had since I been born, [speaks faster] which it was, my first payin' job.'

Altogether she has made three attempts to tell her story. At each telling she adds additional comments and brings in new facts about the event. But what remains constant throughout the three tellings is her emphasis on the two points: how differently she felt about being paid for her activities, and how much more responsible and accountable she felt for her performance in the job once she was being paid. The repetition of the main theme, how having started as a volunteer she achieved a paid position, remains in each retelling, but it becomes clear that her own feelings as a young, African American woman in a position of responsi- bility are the important part of the story for her.

Now consider some further extracts from the tutor-student conference. In the oral telling of the account of her first paid job, she uses several stylistic strategies to present the key elements of her story as she herself sees them:

(2i) I asked can I take on a job I asked them, as far as, you know, *working, did they think I can get a job working there getting paid a few hours.

(2ii) She asked me why I wanted to come back. I told her 'cuz I enjoyed working there when I was working there volunteer, and I had got attached to some of the little kids, and I really wanted to work **there, and I really wanted to **someday be-**come a teacher, so . . .

In both the above examples, Wanda sets up an opposition between volunteering and working at a job. In the first example she orally accents the terms "working" and "becoming a teacher" to draw a contrast between working for pay and doing volunteer work or, to use her own words, "working volunteer." Obviously, what she wants to imply is not merely that she was being paid but that paid work is responsible work and that she now felt part of a regular working world.

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Her intent becomes clearer in example three:

(3) . ..my first paid, my **first **paid **job [hits pencil on paper rhythmically] that I ever had. [Laughs.]My first paid job that I ever had since I been *born, which it was, my first paid job.

Here she relies on a somewhat different oral strategy, combining strate- gic accent placement and rhythmic stress with repetition of the stressed idea in different word combinations. This is a common African Ameri- can English strategy that resembles what Smitherman has called testifying talk (Smitherman 1986).

In the next example from the second telling of her story, Wanda shifts in the middle of her speaking turn to a marked African American style.

(4) I was on the paylist, **the:en, so I had to make everything perfect, I be perfect I be "*better than what I *"was.. .

Note that the "then" here is lengthened, indicating the temporal use of the word, as if to convey "since I was put on the paylist, I now had to be at my best." The intent of her strategy in t h s passage is once more to emphasize the difference between what it feels like to be a volunteer with what it feels like to have a regular job.

These are not isolated examples; rather, the entire interview is marked by code-switchng between an unmarked style and a marked African American style. Because of their positioning at critical points in the narrative at which the teller is concerned with conveying her own feelings and involvement in what she is describing, these switches are definitely not grammatical lapses. She is in her own way rhetorically playing with language to find a means of emphasizing her feelings of commitment in telling the story.

The examples illustrate the central thesis of this article: that Wanda has set for herself a composing task that is much more difficult than either she, the tutor, or the composition theorist really expect. In order to "tell a story" in writing that in any way reproduces the implications and details conveyed in the oral account, she would at best need a professional writer's slull of integrating dialect into a narrative. Or at least, she would need a great deal more time thanan ordinary basic-slulls writing conference can g v e in order to explore and find alternative ways of lexicalizing her oral strateges to convey her real feelings. In the present context, if neither happens, the issue is not one of lack of commitment or limited verbal slulls on the part of the participants. Rather the problem lies in the extreme difficulty of transposing a story in which part of the message is conveyed by unlexicalized, prosodic, and other oral strateges that lack available grammatical counterparts. To deal with this requires new ways of representing speech or spoken information in writing which, given the logc of the oral narrative structuring, differ from the demands of written narratives. Most likely,

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the resulting prose narrative will at best only approximate the oral account.

However, tlus issue, although important to the task of telling and then writing down a story told by an African American woman, is not the main one with which Wanda's activities are concerned in this article. Rather, the key issue for Wanda is the creationof a written narrative that, while keeping to the account as she told it, has the characteristics of a formal, written, schooled prose account. In explaining the differences between speech styles and college writing, Shaughnessy points out that written prose calls for consolidated language, that is, specific sets of syntactic and grammatical choices that require the writer to subordinate or conjoin sentence elements into denser sentence units. Such a task makes it necessary for the writer, among other things, to evaluate the semantic loading of what is to be conveyed at the sentence level and decide whether information is to be placed in main, subordinate, or coordinate clauses.

If Wanda is to tell her story as a college writer, she must follow the stylistic pathway to "consolidated language." To do tlus she has to wrestle with two quite separate issues. First, there is her ability to produce in her own speech style a life story that will provide a testimony to her identity and experiences as an African American. As has been suggested, the stylistic character of her oral account has resonances of "testifying talk," a recognized rhetorical tradition for presenting a fictionalized self. This style generates a narrative that requires special techniques to transpose it into written text and is much more difficult to realize than a simple factual account. Second, her need to show that she is a writer who has been taught to write in school and so is now a college-student writer requires her to tell a written-prose narrative that deviates in many significant ways from the spoken account. If she is to follow the rhetorical conventions that create a fictionalized self-identity, the second part of Wanda's task becomes more difficult. How Wanda deals with this dilemma is the subject of the final section.

Writing a Life

Today, [with] the growing ethnic-feminist consciousness . . . the [women writer] will sooner or later find herself driven into situations where she is made to feel she must choose from among three conflicting identities. Writer of color? Woman writer? Or woman of color? Which comes first? Where does she place her loyalties? . . . Thus, it become impossible for her to take up her pen without at the same time questioning her relationship to the material that defines her and her creative work. [Minh-ha 1989:6]

Trinh Minh-ha's triple bind shapes the contemporary dilemma of many minority women writers: that is, their search for ways of fiction- alizing self and yet still generating text suitable for consumption by both others and self. In other words, the common writer's problem of how to


involve the audience is deepened for minority women writers. They must find ways to acheve a meaningful self-identity for public presentation, whle at the same time being aware that the audience will not necessarily empathize with or understand their dilemma. If this is a problem for skilled writers, it is a much more critical one for a minority beginning-writing student. Even in the apparently simple task of giving an account of a significant life event in a college basic-writing class, unforeseen difficulties arise. In college writing the issue of audience involvement is usually taken for granted since by virtue of college membership the writers and audiences are part of the same process of knowledge sharing.

In basic and remedial writing classes students are acutely aware of having to prove their participation in this process. The issue of audience becomes a matter of writing in a style that can be recognized as suitable for presentation to a college audience. Wanda has no difficulty knowing the discourse community of which she hopes to be a member; after all, from her perspective she has returned to schooling at the college level. She is a college student. When she begins to write, it is her "college worthiness" that she wants to demonstrate. If to be a member of this particular community requires, as David Bartholomae suggests (1987), taking the perspective of the privileged insider, Wanda is unlikely to succeed. From the outset her perspective is not that of an insider.

The very fact that written prose constitutes a dominant discourse gives rise, as Collins discusses in his study of basic writing (1990), to a hegemonic prescriptivism of standard language. This situation ensures Wanda's initial marginalization in the taskof being a college writer, even apart from other writing problems likely to happen with basic-writing students. But a question most composition theorists and teachers are less likely to ask is what discourse community Wanda wants to belong to. Her sense of belonging is part of her language skills as an African American women. At its widest her discourse community includes many poets and writers, including the recently appointed poet laureate. Wanda's ownstyle includes many rhetorical strategies withorigins deep in traditions of speaking in voices and in testifying talk (Smitherman 1986). To present those rhetorical strategies as a written-prose text in a form suitable for nonmembers to be able to appreciate requires expert control of writing techniques. To suggest through written text the quali- ties of speech, with its rhythms and cadences, is difficult even for professional writers (Traugott 1981). Yet Wanda's writing is not concerned with these issues of membership directly but with demonstrating that she has understood her composition lessons in school, that she is a "schooled and literate" writer.

In the following analysis two issues will be explored: (1)what strategies Wanda uses to show her understanding of what is required in a college text and what uses she makes of school writing strategies; and (2)how she finds ways of weaving her own personal voice into the text


constructed with a public audience in mind while staying within the stylistic and syntactic constraints of formal written prose.

Initially, if we consider the writing conference and its written product as a joint construction of text, we are confronted with the question of which story is being told, the one that Wanda wants to tell or the version the tutor wants her to write with its simple story line characteristic of a three- or fiveparagraph school theme. We begin by asking, what is Wanda's experience of text? In what way does the text as finished product represent Wanda's view of college writing? Does it represent a rewording of Wanda's orally told story, or is there a stage missing between Wanda's telling and Wanda's written textual product, which was changed during her interaction with her coach/tutor? And if so, is the missing stage important? My analysis will suggest that, in shaping the narrative, the student's voice and ideas, which can be heard in the telling and retelling of her oral story, become transformed. Her individual voice becomes shaped to fit a public arena: that of the writing class and the requirements of a simple school-prose theme.

But what if for Wanda there is more than one written voice? Tlus is the issue that makes her situation different from that of the fourth-grade writer described by Michaels (1991). Wanda knows that she has a public audience, but she also has what one could call an "inner audience" of her own discourse community. What is more, she has not only a public self as a beginning college student writing for a college audience, but also a private self, albeit in the background, that needs to be heard. It is precisely the complexity of her situation as a writer which finds expression in her written account, even if in an awkward way.

While for Wanda the speaker and beginning student, the presence of the tutor does make real and concrete the idea of audience (that is, the tutor provides an audience), for Wanda the writer, the tutor provides an awareness of a particular audiencethe audience of the college class and discourse community-which for her is essentially a social abstraction. The presence of another person eliciting text response provides Wanda with a reminder of the discourse style she was taught at school. In writing for the self and for self-information, her audience is self-pre jected as an amorphous abstraction-that is, an Other like myself. This Other provides a benign presence, but the presence of the tutor gives a continuous reminder that the writing is intended for a public arena and not only for others like the Self. How does Wanda's text reveal the resulting dilemma?

When Wanda begins to produce her final written product, she actually verbalizes her problem in saying, "I can talk to you about it better than I can start out writing," but as was shown above, her oral telling and retelling is marked by her own voice, adding, embellishing, and changing each version. When she produces her written narrative, the story emphasis shifts. The written product uses both her own voice and a public voice, that of the child-care teacher, school counselor, and writing


tutor. In the oral telling as described above, Wanda relies on preaching style techniques to distance herself and place her understanding of the task as an act of testifying; for example, she elongates the vowel in "ha:d," and she repeatedly refers to her "first paid job." However, as a result of repeated retellings, Wanda is cast back into gving an even lengthier account in which her sense of self is reflected in a slightly different ways. When she says, "I knew the difference between being a volunteer and student there and worlun' there and getting paid there," she is talking in past tense, recalling events, and reflecting on them. She goes on two turns later to add yet more detail again in the storytelling mode.

The final written text is presented below with different public and private voices highlighted in transcript. It is immediately clear that the written text, whether solely through Wanda's own choice or by efforts of her tutor, follows a strict temporal organization that is not found in the oral versions. In the following transcript of Wanda's writtenversion, the different stylistic voices are indicated by different typefaces.'

My First Job pay Exp.

Writing Class

I got my very first paying job when I was 16 1/2 years old. It was working with kids between the ages of 2 thru 6 year old. I[tl was at a child care center hear in Oakland. I first got the job doing volunteer work at the center after my school hour was completed doing [=during] the day, I liked the volunteer work so much and I loved being around the kidls] and teacherls], that I went to my councal [=counselor] at the school that I was attending and ask her could I got a pay job working there.

She told me that I would have to fill out another app. [=application] and that she would look it over and sent [=send] it to the city of Oakland Youth Program. but in the meantime I may cont. [=continue] t o work a t the center as a volunteer student. I worked at the center for about a week before I could hear anything from my councal, But then 1finally hear! from my coun- rill and the news was good. She told me that during the next few days the dir [=director] of the center would be contacting me about continuing to work there.

Two weeks later I start working as a pay student, insent [=instead] of volunteer studnet, and I really fe[l]t the different [=difference] between being pay and just working for class credit. for school. The different was being on you j-o-b being on time doing what the teachers and asst [=assistant] teachers ask me to do. Being there went [=when] the kids needs me. The most wonderful part about my first pay job is that it was people whom depending on me. It make me feel good and nice about knowing that I had job that pay me a little money that I came [=can1 use for myself later on in life.

I really did enjoy working at the child care center. It was a big experience for me, knowing that one day I may become a teacher or at least work in somekind of child center or school working with children. I happu [=happy] to said that I had work[ed] at as my first Pay Exp. [=experience].


In the written text the public voice is the dominant one. It can be seen as clearly marked both by the definite temporal organization and by the use of nominal qualifying phrases or clauses used to add and increase referential specificity, as in the underlined passages in the text.

Another main characteristic that emerges in several passages is the shift to the voice of the public Other (teacher, counselor, and general comments on the action) which I have called the voice of moral concern in the text. Wanda's private voice, whch reflects her own personal feeling, is mostly found in subordinate clauses and comments.

Evidence that Wanda shifts to a school voice is most immediately apparent in the way in which she seems to be aware of the need to add more details in relative clause position. Although the underlined phrases and clauses do not seem to add any significant new information, they provide an aura of specificity:

(5) It was working with kids between the apes of 2 thru 6 vears old. It was at a childcare center here in Oakland. (6)Then I went to my counselor at the school that I was attending.

It can be argued that it is through her use of a public voice that Wanda demonstrates her understanding that there is a school-literate style that follows the dictates of Shaughnessy's "consolidated language of formal written prose" (1977).

In another section of the text, the public voice of the child-care center's director emerges powerfully through Wanda's surprising use of the subjunctive, as in the following example in whch she makes her fictional self into the subject of the quoted rendition of the child-care director's statement:

(7) But in the meantime, I mav continue to work in the center as a volunteer student.

The theme that was most strongly highlighted in the oral tellings through repetition and accenting becomes a single sentence in the written version:

(8) The difference was being on your j-o-b, being on time, doing what the teachers and assistant teachers ask me to do.

Wanda's previous concerns about conveying her sense of what it is like to be a paid professional do not get into the text; rather, the activity is rendered by the relatively neutral expressions of "being on time" and "doing what the teacher and assistant teacher asked."

The penultimate and last paragraphs contain statements that function as evaluations in a coda or conclusion. These suggest further student-tutor interaction and elicitation since they do not have parallels in her original oral telling. The fictionalized Wanda's "voice" becomes reflec- tive, particularly in the references to her own feelings and to opinions

352 Anthropology G. Education Quarterly Volume 24,1993

that seem to be echoing a public moral concern. This concern is expressed formulaically rather than by means of her own independent evaluation:

(8)W e me feel good and nice about knowing that I had a job that pay me . .a little money that I came use for myself later on in llfe.

This sentence is composed of three nested relative clauses and a deictic subject. At several points (marked by bold typeface) in the written text, Wanda, rather than making herself the nominalized subject of the sentence, expresses her own knowledge or feelings by means of an imper- sonal construction, as in:

(9)Being there when the kids needs me. The most wonderful part about my first pay job is that was people whom depending on me.

This last construction effectively places the real personal subject, the "fictional Wanda," as the object of the first sentence and as the unex- pressed subject of the second relative clause. Throughout, her tendency is to place herself in the position of a predicate to an absent subject. In this way Wanda foregrounds the public account and places herself, albeit as a fictional self, in a subordinate position.

The private voice echoes more faintly throughout the written text: evaluations of actions or events appear as clausal codas conjoined to longer segments:

(10i). . .and I loved being around the kid(s) and teacher(s) . . .

(IOii) And the news was good.

Her need to find a way of expressing her private voice, not only in the sense of her personal views on what was happening to her as subject, but also as speaking subject, presents other challenges.

Wanda even resorts to using grapluc devices of punctuation to make up for the modulations of tone, pitch, and rhythm of the speaking voice that carry so much additional information in the text.

(l l i) But then I finally hear! And the news was good.

(llii) The difference was being on you j-o-b . . .

The need to provide highlighting and stress on her pleasure at being chosen for a "real job necessitates her using other devices than grammatical forms to provide the emphasis she needs.

As Shaughnessy has argued (1977), these stylistic choices are not random decisions, for even though the resulting prose has an awkward


flow, there are clear reasons for the choices. The choices have the effect of foregrounding the "public" voice and backgrounding the personal. At the conclusion of the narrative Wanda provides a final coda by moving her fictional self into a foregrounded position. Although her written words are still those of somewhat formulaic public sentiments that have not been mentioned in the previous oral telling, she makes herself the subject of these comments. In its self-evaluation of motives, Wanda's writing continues to echo the public voice of approval which begins in the penultimate paragraph and continues through the last paragraph.

(12)I really did enjoy working at the child-care center. It was a big experience for me. . .1 [am] happy to say that I had work[ed] at my first Pay Exp.

Conclusion

Initially I posed what seemed to be a simple question--one that is implicit in most work with remedial and underprepared writers: How can adults who are beginning writers become adult writers, and how can adults reentering college become college writers? It could be argued that this question seems premature for adults, many of whom not only lack high-school graduating requirements but also come back to college with low entry-test scores that place them in the fifth- to sixth-grade range or lower. Bridging the hypothesized educational gap between being considered a college-level writer and a sixth-grade-level writer seems like a daunting task; yet t h s is in some way what is expected of returning students to college courses, even remedial ones. What this article shows is that, in the case of one writer, her designation as an underprepared beginner, while correct in regard to her slulls in writing mechanics, does not really cover all that is at issue. On the evidence of this and other such writing examples, it would be easy to say that Wanda is scarcely literate beyond an early-grade level. But I hope this analysis, by going beyond the surface of what she has written to look at what she really intended to communicate, can begin to show how any description of literacy, as it applies to the real literacy products of real adults, needs to be expanded beyond what is traditionally seen as schooled literacy.

Jenny Cook-Gumpen is a professor of education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is editor of The Social Construction of Literacy, published by Cambridge University Press (2nd edition, late 19941, and is also the author of Social Control and Socialization, Routledge and Kegan Paul (1974), and, with William Corsaro and Jurgen Streeck, of Children's Worlds and Children's Language, Mouton de Gruyter (1985).

Anthropology 6 Education Quarterly Volume 24,1993

Notes

Acknowledgments. An earlier version of these materials was in "Final Report to the Center for Writing and literacy: Literacy for the Workplace, University of California, Berkeley," (1989). The writing conference material and Wanda's essay were provided by Dr. Marteena (Smokey) Wilson, to whom many thanks are due.

1. In the transcription of the spoken examples, a single asterisk (*) or double asterisks (**) indicate strong and extra strong accent, respectively. A colon (:) indicates vowel or consonant lengthening. Square brackets [...I are used to mark transcriber's comments.

2. Regular (roman) typeface indicates the student's public voice. When this voice reports itself through specificity clauses, underlining is used; when this voice reports what the counselor/teacher, bold italics is used; when the voice evaluates itself (as a voice of moral concern), bold is used.

Italic typeface indicates the student's private voice.

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Jenny Cook-Gumperz, Dilemmas of Identity

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