Transformations of Identity, Culture and Genre in Second Language Writing
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Transcript of Transformations of Identity, Culture and Genre in Second Language Writing
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I AM A LETTER I: TRANSFORMATIONS OF IDENTITY, CULTUREAND GENRE IN SECOND LANGUAGE WRITING
MARGARET ANNE CLARKE
The following analysis is based on a selection of works in English,
Spanish and German from a corpus of student-authored texts written for
a literary competition1 held over a period of three years in the School of
Languages and Area Studies, University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom.
The School offers both TESOL and modern European language provision
within a wide range of single and combined honours and applied language
degree programmes to a highly cosmopolitan student cohort consisting in
equal measure of learners from the United Kingdom, Europe and the Far
East.
The project was underpinned by the premise that the students
ability to communicate in a second language would be enhanced through
the development of innate imaginative and creative competences: giving
learners what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has termed permission to
speak by posing them the challenge of creating meaning-making texts,
short narratives, poems and other genres entailing individuation and
personal writing. Whereas the formal teaching of second language writing
may, in some cases, be structured around the initiation of students into
the established genres of formal composition and their appropriate
registers, in this instance, once the basic parameters of word limits and
judges criteria had been set, what actually constituted creative
composition was left as far as possible to the students judgement. Thus
the students were free to construct an autonomous speaking position in
1 The full corpus of works authored by the students are accessible on
http://www.port.ac.uk/creativewriting
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ways they may not have felt able to do in more formal essay type
assignments.
The project was realized within the context of a profound phase of
transition involving the revision of certain key assumptions which have
traditionally underpinned the formal class-based teaching of modern
foreign languages. Degree programmes and majors structured around the
study of national languages and literatures necessarily entail also the
assumption of national, cultural and linguistic differentialism, or what
Pieterse terms the social proclivity to boundary fetishism, essentializing
boundaries (Pieterse, 2004: 4). This in turn has contributed to the
conception of language learning as a cognate, self-contained subject,
defined by, and confined to, the parameters of the particular nation state
where the languages studied originally evolved, and their respective
canons of national literature.
Yet central to the development of a nation-state is the concept of
the imagined community (Anderson, 1983) which unites the diverse
elements of that community and provides it with a transcendent identity,
of which one of the principal components is a common and unified
language. Language, in this context, is bounded by geographical territory,
and within a relationship that holds language, territory and the identity of
the individual citizen to be isomorphic with one another. Thus language is
held to be, and taught as from the earliest stages, as a monoglossic
entity. According to Bakhtin, this is in fact the primary historical stage of a
language, defined by its closure and resistance to derivation from , and
exchange with, other languages; identifying a language presupposes a
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boundary, or opposition to other languages in wider socio-linguistic fields
(Irvine and Gal, 2000: 76).
This means that several dichotomies are at work in the teaching of
modern languages. The most fundamental of these is the situated position
of the language learner, whose identity is often assumed to belong to one
culture and one nation only. The learning of another language, in this
context, is the acquisition of something called the L2, or target language
of another, entirely separate culture, which in turn remains confined to
the boundaries of its own nation-state. There is a possibility, then, that
many practices of language teaching may conform to the dictates of
centripetal forces, which work according to the assumption that language
learners are themselves monoglossic entities, and that the language they
are learning is unitary and homogenous in character. This position not
only leads to what Irvine and Gal term the deculturing of linguistic
phenomena (2000: 78); language learning, in this context, also becomes
either the neutral conduit for the transmission of a specific cultural and
literary tradition in a state of opposition to the external heterogeneity of
other nation-states and cultures. It may also become a fundamentally
transactional process: that is, the accumulation of sufficient linguistic and
grammatical items which will enable the students to acquire sufficient
speech patterns and conversational gambits to ensure at least partial
acceptance by native speakers of the students target language. In this
context, culture also becomes fetishised as content, something the
students learn about, and native speakers and representatives of that
culture equally fetishised as the other.
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As an authentic representation of the language learner and her real
experience of culture and language, this educational schema leaves a
great deal to be desired. To begin with, the students are being educated
within a context of the acceleration of contacts and interchange across
national, cultural and linguistic boundaries, a result in part of the
phenomenon of globalization: the increasing integration of economies
and societies on a world-wide scale. While both the nature and the effects
of globalization have been hotly debated over the past two decades, it is,
nonetheless, widely agreed that the intensification of migration and
contacts across boundaries have greatly deepened and intensified the
complexity of cultural identities.
The consequences of globalization have also been defined by Homi
Bhabha as fundamentally dual in nature: a double process entailing the
homogenisation of culture across national borders and, at the same time,
the formation of new cultural hybridities, or broader concepts of human
interaction which are essentially hybrid forms. Globalization also entails a
trend towards human integration, unfolding across many different fields
(Pieterse, 2004: 24), of which the diaspora of Central European and Far
Eastern students to the U.K. for study, travel and employment purposes is
but one example.
One consequence of these myriad processes is to render the
typical profile of the modern languages student at post-secondary level
extremely problematic; quite apart from the mixed nationalities which
make up an increasingly diverse student cohort, language learners may
also be individuals who have lived abroad for short to long periods,
returning with bicultural and multicultural experience; they may be
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children of first or second generation immigrants, or with parents of mixed
nationalities who have already acquired some oral competence in their
target language; or professional people and mature students who have
worked in cross-cultural milieus.
All of this has implications for the way we conceptualize and teach
language. If we accept that language, as a social semiotic is central to
the way that cultural reality is shaped and represented by human beings,
then we also have to acknowledge that language itself must be as
heterogeneous and heteroglossic as the new forms of cultural reality
themselves. Heteroglossia is defined by Bakhtin as a complex synthesis of
world views and languages that is always dialogised: that is, each
language is viewed from the perspective of other languages. The inherent
property of any language, then, is one of constant mutation and
transformation, another outcome of hybridization (Zappen, 2000: 4).
Bakhtin terms this dynamic state of flux and interchange as dialogised
heteroglossia: within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, a
mixing of various languages co-existing within the boundaries of a
single national language Bakhtin, 1981: 358 59).
Within these plurilingual and multilingual contexts, then, languages
cannot be solely confined to discrete boundaries within the consciousness
of speaking subjects, nor can they be a homogenized and monolithic
entity representing the official language of one nation state. There has
therefore been a call by intercultural practitioners and theorists to
transcend the national and monolingual focus of foreign and second
language by not only fostering multilingual or plurilingual awareness of
the whole ecology of languages (Risager, 2005: 187), but effecting also a
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reunion of the traditional schism between language and culture. The
concept of languaculture has come to the fore, first developed by Michael
Agar, it is the cultural knowledge inherent in language, in a state of
continual evolution within the personal and life histories of language users
themselves, and carried by them through different cultural contexts and
different speech communities, refracting, adapting and integrating along
the way (Risager, 2005: 192). All second language learners possess,
whether they realize it or not, a high degree of plurilingual competence,
and a store of interlanguage which enables them to translate and
interpret, to switch their semiotic codes according to their positions in
different social and cultural contexts, negotiating and renegotiating their
hybrid identities. According to Christopher Brumfit:
Every element in our cultural experience, however complex, can be
drawn into our linguistic repertoire to produce allusions of immense
complexity and depththe range of associations which may be
acquired by any specific symbol available to us is immense it is
important to emphasize the variety of our linguistic and cultural
associations, because there is a strong tendency to see both
language and culture as relatively solid and unegotiable, and the
relations between them as fixed.
(Brumfit, 2001: 9 10).
Transforming identities and languages
The focus, therefore, is no longer on the learning by students
abouta separate language and culture located on the other side of a
national frontier, but on the heteroglossic third space emerging within the
consciousness of the language learners themselves. Language learners are
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addressed, not as deficient monoglossic enunciators but as potentially
heteroglossic narrators (Kramsch, 1997) who engage in critical cross-
cultural literacies. The conscious and explicit study and use of a second
language by the learner is also an initiation into the practices of a speech
community which is, and always has been positioned at multiple
boundaries between societies, cultures and languages. Seen from this
perspective, the language learner, when composing in another language,
is actively participating in her chosen speech community, and actively
contributing to the transformation of language within that community.
This also implies the confrontation with what Peter Abbs (1998: 117)
terms the essential historicity of the self, manifested in discourse which, in
the process of traversing another linguistic and cultural contexts, must
necessarily itself evolve, develop and transform. The construction of a new
linguistic artefact by students in their second language also detaches the
students from their usual frames of reference and forces them to confront
directly the formal features of speech and writing. As the poem below,
written by a Far Eastern Masters student in Translation Studies illustrates,
this process also sensitises the students to what cognitive scientists term
content space: that is, the constellation of beliefs which the learner must
rework and renegotiate through writing, and also rhetorical space: the
conceptualisation of their experience in new linguistic forms.
I am a letter I
I am a letter I, I, I,Always asking why, why, why.
Why cant I fly?(Because you dont have wings to fly.)
Why cant I cry?
(Because you dont have tears to cry.)Why cant I dye?
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(Because you dont have hairs to dye.)
Anyway, I still want to try, try, try.____________________________
Since I was young Ive got a dream:
Serving people to have a sip of cream.But how can I fulfil this without hearing them scream?
Well, let me continue to dream, dream, dream.__________________________
In the dream I met Mr. Peter.He is, no doubt, my sincere teacher.(What you need is a pool of water)
Why? I wondered and asked Peter.(You can fulfil your dream by diving into a pool of
water)
Guess what? Less than a minute later,I became a great waiter!
Siu Ping LamMA Translation Studies
The poem illustrates the concept of language seen by the learner as
a fluid and negotiable system to be performed. It is also an apprenticeship
in the development of Bakhtins second voice, the double-edged
discourse which Bakhtin attributes to the author. The working within a
language, while at the same time regarding it with a certain irony, and
maintaining a distance from the language in order to perform the linguistic
acrobatics illustrated above, is also the actualisation of consciousness, and
is, for the author, a process of cultural reflection on her complex and
potentially disorientating position between languages and cultures. The
author, when exposing herself to the discontinuities, fragments and
synchronic networks she traverses, may also reflect critically on her
transforming identity, and the crystallizing of that identity into new
constellations. The student structures a humorous reflection on her own
identity as an enquiring subject in a stage of flux between contexts and
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cultures, using such devices as phonological variation: I am a letter I, I,
I/Always asking why, why, why; syntactic form: Why cant I fly?
(because you dont have wings to fly) and semantic categories: in the
dream I met Mr Peter/He is, no doubt, my sincere teacher. This open
country, the between-place or borderland where the expansions of the
authors selves and consciousness and their second language meet is
defined by Bhabha as the third space, described as unrepresentable in
itself, a place where the meaning and symbols of culture have no
primordial fixity or unity and where the same signs can be appropriated,
translated, re-historicized and red anew (Bhabha, 1994: 37 38). To use
language, then, is to change language itself, and to fuse the diverse
meaning systems of language through the process of composition is to
change the constellations, patterns and networks of the learners own
identity. It is from this point that the students may make their
presencing felt in another linguistic or cultural environment.
Rapprochements between languages and cultures
Moreover, the act of writing in a second language may also cause
the student to reflect, to step out of the maelstrom of their emerging or
expanding selves, or beyond their situated position altogether. Through
imaginative use of the second language, the learners are permitted to
reposition themselves in different spaces or different chronological eras,
including canons and social structures from which they might formerly
have assumed themselves to be excluded. The construction of a poem or
the narrative is the process through which the students are permitted to
articulate national or cultural conflicts, and to effect rapprochements. Thus
the act of second language writing becomes what Bhabha (1994:4) terms
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the process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue which prevents
primordial polarities or the intersticial passsage between fixed
identifications (Bhabha, 1994: 4). This sense, evident in many of the
students submissions, of going beyond chronological time, situated
identities, or geographical spaces, also points up assumed conflicts or
frontiers in society established by history. Revisions take place, as
illustrated in this native British students imaginative reconstruction of the
plight of a German soldier in the trenches in World War I.
Die Gedanken eines Soldaten
Meine Brust platzt. Ich kann nicht atmen. Mein Kopf hmmert nur so. Ich
wil aufschreien aber das wage ich nicht. Ich brauche Zeit zum
Nachdenken. Was ist geschehen? Wo sind meine Kameraden? Wo ist
Tommy? Ich werde wahsinning. Ich bin am Ende. Rei dich zusammen!
Du lebst noch. Denk doch mal! Ich erinnere mich an den Pfiff. Der
Feldwebel hat uns angeschrien. Wir sind die Maschinengewehr sofort
gehrt. Klaus ist gleich gefallen. Krger wurde zerfetzt. Ich bin gelaufen.
Man konnte das Cordit riechen. Ich bin blind gelaufen. Man hat Mnner
schreien gehrt. Man hat dauernd das Maschinengewehr gehrt. Es hat
eine Lcke im Stacheldraht gegeben. Ich bin dadurch gelaufen. Ich habe
nach links gesehen niemand. Ich habe nach rechts gesehen niemand.
Ich war allein. Ich konnte die Gesichter der britischen Soldaten sehen.
Dann ein blendendes Aufblitzen und ich bin gefallen.
Das war vor zehn Minuten. Jetzt bin ich hier in einem gewaltigen
Granattrichter. Ichschaudere. Ich habe schereckliche Angst. Ich sehe mich
um. Es gibt Leichen. Sie leigen mit dem Gesicht nach unten im Schlamm.
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Es gibt Stcke von Leichen Arme, Beine. Bei meinen Fen gibt es einen
Kopf der Helm noch daran. Hier ist es die reine Hlle. Ich bin allein. Ich
bergebe mich. Ich kann Tommy spechen hren. Ich bin in der Nhe von
den britischen Schtzengrben. Sie plaudern und lachen. Der Angriff muss
keinen Erfolg gehabt haben. Was soll ich tun? Ich kann mich nicht
bewegen. Ich habe keine Wahl. Hier mus ich bleiben und auf die
Dunkelheit warten. Vielleicht werde ich in der Dunkelheit durch das
Niemandsland wegkriechen knnen. Es sind noch einige Stunden bis zur
Dunkelheit.
Sei geduldig! Mit etwas Glck kannst du berleben. Was kann ich
anders tun als warten? Warten und denken. Ich denke an den
Kriegsausbruch. Wir waren alle so begeistert. Wirwaren stolz darauf, die
deutsche Uniform zu tragen, fr die Freiheit zu kmpfen und das
Vaterland zu schtzen. Wir waren so idealistich! Wir waren so scarf
darauf, in den Krieg zu ziehen. Wir haben niemals an die Wirklichkeit
gedacht Das war eine andere Welt, eine andere Zeit, ein anderes Leben.
Jetzt bin ich hier. Hier ist die Wirklichkeit. Die Leichen, das Blut, der
Schlamm, die Scheie, der Krach, die Angst und ich. Hier ist mein Leben,
in diesem Granattrichter, von Leichen umgeben. Meine Kamaraden sagen,
dass sie fchten, hier zu sterben. Ich frchte hier in dieser Hlle zu leben.
Ich versuche an meine Familie zu denken: meine Frau, meine Kinder,
meine Mutter. Was machen sie in diesem Augenblick? Vielleicht denken sie
an mich. Ich bete zu Got, das ich Es gibt einen seltsamen Nebel, einen
beienden Geruch
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Im April 1915 verwendete die dutsche Armee zum ersten mal/ Senfgas in
Ypres.
The thoughts of a soldier.
My chest is bursting. I cannot breathe. My head is pounding. I want to
scream but I dare not. I need time to think. What happened? Where are
my comrades? Where is Tommy?2 I am going insane. I am done for. Pull
yourself together. You are still alive. Think!
I remember the whistle. The sergeant-major had shouted at us. We
climbed the ladders. We climbed out of our trenches. One could instantly
hear the machine gun. Klaus fell straight off. Krueger was ripped to
pieces.
I ran. One could smell the cordite. I ran blind. One could hear the men
scream. The incessant sound of the machine gun. There was a gap in the
barbed wire. I ran through it. I looked left no one. I looked right no
one. I was alone. I could see the faces of the British soldiers. Then a
blinding flash and I fell.
That was ten minutes ago. Now I am here, in a huge blast crater. I am
shuddering. I am terribly afraid. I look around me. There are corpses.
They are lying face down in the mud. There are bits of corpses arms,
legs. At my feet there is a head still wearing a helmet. This is sheer hell.
I am alone. I throw up.
I can hear Tommy speak. I am close to the British trenches. They chat
and laugh. The attack cant have been successful. What shall I do? I
cannot move. I have no choice. This is where I must stay and wait for the
2 German slang for a Brisith soldier. It should be rendered here in the plural.
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darkness. Perhaps I can crawl through nomansland under the cover of
darkness. There are still a few hours until darkness.
Be patient. With a bit of luck you can survive.
What else can I do but wait? Wait and ponder. I am thinking of the
outbreak of war. We were all so enthusiastic. We were proud to wear the
German uniform, to fight for freedom and protect the fatherland. We were
so idealistic! We were keen to march to war. We never thought of the
reality. That was a different world, a different time, a different life. Now I
am here. This is reality. The corpses, the blood, the mud, the shit, the
noise, the fear and me. This is my life, in this blast crater, surrounded by
corpses. My comrades tell me they are afraid to die in this place. I am
afraid of living in this hell.
I try to think of my family: my wife, my kids, my mother. What are they
doing at this very moment? Perhaps they are thinking of me. I pray to
God that I there is a strange haze, a stinging smell
On April 15th the German army first used mustard gas in Ypres.
Jeff PedersenB.A. Hons Applied Languages
Perspectives and symbols in the borderlands
Thus, according to Claire Kramsch (1997), the borderlands between
societies, cultures and languages do not exist exclusively as events in
time or places in geographical space; the borderlands also exist in the
learners own minds, positioning them at the intersection of many roles,
places and differing chronologies. Moreover, while the student authors
considered here are of different nationalities, and may identify themselves
as originating from another nation and another speech community, their
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language learning is taking, or often has taken place, in the country of its
origin, and while they are undergoing a process of acculturating to their
new environment. Language learning, then also involves reaching out to
an ideal, not of the imitation of an alien native speaker, but of
participating fully within a number of roles and of contributing to the
students chosen speech community (Paulenko and Lantolf: 2000). This
also renders language acquisition, above all else, a question of personal
agency and choice (Paulenko: 1998). Students add to and construct new
subjectivities while they purposefully and intentionally interact with their
new surroundings, and engaging in the long and often painful process of
self-translation into another language and another culture (Paulenko and
Lantolf: 2000) while at the same time coming to terms with their status as
legitimate but marginal members of a community (Cole and Engerstrom
1993:9). The students pass through frontiers and pick out, or select
symbols which enable them to traverse the frontiers: a middle place,
composed of inter-actions and inter-views, the frontier is a sort of void, a
narrative sym-bol of exchanges and encounters.(Certeau, 1984: 127).
The acquisition and use of language is thus inseparable from the
students everyday negotiations with their chosen speech community, its
physical surroundings, its symbols, landmarks and artefacts. A typical
example here is the following meditation produced by a central European
student on the scene at the waterfront of Portsmouth itself, a maritime
island city. The student attempts to create an environment that looks
towards the future with anticipation, from differing perspectives and
differing chronologies, but, in the process, locates this within the common
memory and activity of the native people of the city. Indeed, the
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recounting of this experience at the boundary makes the author acutely
aware of the paramount importance of the manipulation of contextual
frames and perspectives as in the transposition of the students
authorial voice to that of a seagull, positioned as author and observer, and
a narrative voice with which to learn, absorb and reflect:
The Ferry
Every day he was there, sitting on his wooden bollard.Every day he was watching the people who were spilled out of the ferry.He liked the ferry with its huge smoke pipes. They were painted in redand blue.He liked red and blue, red like the sunset, and blue like the sea.
It was a big ferry and every day dozens of cars and hundreds of peoplewere coming out;Only some were looking at him sitting on his wooden bollard.Every day he wondered what the people might be up to.He supposed they were busy. They all seemed to be very hectic.He liked to have something to do; and every day there was something.But every day he took his time on his wooden bollard.His work could wait for a while; later he would return to it.It was windy here at the harbour, but he liked to be at the waterfront.He liked the wind; it made him feel alive.Every day the wind brought new scents with the arrival of the ferry, new
scents from afar away over the sea.The wind is good, he thought, watching the hustle and bustle down at theharbour.The wind is stirring the air, and fresh air is always very clean.For him fresh air was like the airiness in spring, when everything isblossoming after the gloomy frostiness of the winter.Wind is a good sign, there is always something new with a refreshinggust.Like the people on the ferry, he thought, every day there are new peoplecoming, everyone with a new story to tell.He liked everything new.
New things are good; they are like footmarks in the sand on the beach,changing the structure of the present.He would like to hear their new stories, interested in the smaller andbigger events on earth, but no-one would ever tell him about them.In fact, they all seemed to overlook him.When he was younger, he had tried to get closer and he had asked themabout their tasks, but most of the time they had shooed him away as if hewas an unpleasant thing.After a while he had given up and decided to watch them silently from hiswooden bollard.Over time he had made up his mind. And he was happy with it.
He was happy watching them sitting on his wooden bollard.
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For him watching the ferry spilling out the people had a bit of familiarityand yet something new and unknown every day.As soon as the ferry was empty he left his bollard returning to his childrenso that his wife, a grand seagull, could stretch her wings for a while.
Sybille KubitzaBA (Hons) Combined Modern Languages
The student seeks to build bridge for her displacement by creating
symbols (such as a seagull in this instance) seek to build bridges for their
displacement, reaching out for some unifying vision between her private
self and the public arena of which she does not yet feel quite a part. In
that displacement, the borders between home and world become
confused, and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each
other (Bhabha, 1994: 9), in a profound desire for social solidarity. In
many of the poems produced by the students, the marks and signs left by
the people on the physical environment, such as footprints on the beach
in this particular example, are read by the student authors and
incorporated into the space of their texts. The student attempts to read
the world and the signs in their sensory experience. Inherent in
language learning, then, is the possibility of transcendence through
synthesis. The potential transcendence of the learners situation between
languages and cultures is highlighted in her concrete metaphors which
weave across the incremental rhythms of her prose, emphasising the
rhythms of everyday working life and human activity, juxtaposed against
the life-giving wind which brings hope for the future, and the climax of the
bird flying back to his domestic environment.
Tactics and bricolage in second language writing
Another notable feature of these narratives and poems is the scant
regard they show for generic convention. The purpose of the narrative or
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poetic composition is evidently to provide the students with a fixed base, a
site from where they are able to combine heterogeneous elements.
Although the second language learners must necessarily operate within
an established linguistic field, and within the codes, mastered at various
levels, of the vocabulary and syntax of their second language, the
students may still appropriate, or reappropriate, a present relative to a
time and place, within a network of places and relations (Certeau, 1984:
xiii). The learners, then, effect, or create, innumerable and infinitesimal
transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy. They
insinuate their own viewpoints and modes of usage into the dominant
linguistic order. Unrecognised producers, poets of their own acts, silent
discoverers, the students works trace wandering lines and unexpected
trajectories, obeying their own logic (Certeau, 1984: xviii). The learners,
existing often on the margins of language, or the named nation or society
within which the language is located and structured, employ whatever
tactics they can muster within the overarching structure of the language
and its spatial or locational institution. Thus the construction of the
students own narrative space is accomplished through a sort of bricolage
of different registers acquired from the different components of their life in
the UK or abroad and other resources poached from media outlets, idiom
picked up other native speakers they have come into contact with, and so
on.
Although the learners remain dependent on the possibilities offered by the
pre-established linguistic system, the transverse tactics the employ do not
obey the law of the place, or of the genre, or other conventions, for they
are not defined or identified by them; odd features from the second
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An example of the use of bricolage in second language writing can
be found in the poem below by another British national writing in Spanish.
The poem recounts a personal protest against what was evidently a highly
distressing incident at the hands of a peeping tom. The peculiarly Spanish
feature of double interrogative and exclamation marks to express both
the students outrage and to confront her attacker is used to the following
effect:
Lvabos Pblicos Hasta qu punto?
Esperabas afuera hasta que lleg.Tu asegurabas de que no hubiese nadie msComo um ladrn, esperando para robar.Entraste y me robaste.
Ladrn! - has invadido mi espao personal Quien te has creido?
Me has visto vulnerableY te has aprovechado. Quien te has creido?
Ladrn! - Me has robado la intimidad.Me has quitado la seguridad.Tus ojos mironesmirando lo que no debian. Quien te has dado el derecho?
Ladrn! - Tienes la carnet que te da libre aceso.Tienes el poder y lo has abusadoSeleccionando de reojo a tus vctimas inocentesY ca yo en tu trampa cebada.
Ladrn! - Sin saberlo has escogido a una mas fuerte.Yo te he visto - Ladrn!Y s lo que hacesY ademsYo s quien eres! OJO! Ladrn Voy a por ti.
Public toilets to what point?
You were waiting outside until I arrived.You were making sure no-one else was around.Like a thief, waiting to rob someone.You came in and you stole from me.
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Thief! - Youve violated my personal space
Who did you think you were kidding?Youve seen me vulnerable
And you took advantage.
Who did you think you were kidding?
Thief! - Youve robbed me of my privacy.Youve stolen my confidence.Your peeping eyes peeping at what they shouldnt.Who gave you the right?
Thief! - Youve got the key that gives you free access.Youve got the power and you abused it.Eyeing sidelong your innocent victimsAnd I fell into your nasty little trap.
Thief! - You dont know it but youve picked on someone stronger thanyou.
Ive seen you - Thief!I know what youre up toAnd whats more I know who you are!HEY! Thief! Im going to get you.
Lesley HookBA Hons. Spanish Studies
Conclusion
This article has proposed the possibility of creating and analysing a
potentially large and diverse field in second language writing, not
contradicting, but complementing established and certified modes of
language learning, teaching and practice; and also other forms of second
language writing at all levels, from primary to post-secondary education.
It has also suggested some tentative methodologies drawn from the fields
of creative writing and intercultural studies, by which the imaginative
pieces of students, created largely from their own agencies and using the
linguistic resources that they have at their disposal, can be placed in wider
contexts and within already established disciplinary fields. In a globalized
world characterised by integration of nations and peoples on the one
hand, and diasporas across many cultures, nations and fields with the
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hybridities that these create on the other, and through networks and
modes of communication in diverse media, a practice and theory of
second language writing founded on the students own agency, creativity,
language use and practice, may play a valuable part in evolving new
forms of language learning practice appropriate for the times, creating
rapprochements, playing their own unique part in the transformation and
growth of languages and cultures, and effecting positive and fruitful
contact between boundaries, frontiers and nations.
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