Shuck, Gail. “Combating Monolingualism: A Novice Administrator’s Challenge.” WPA 30.1-2 (2006): 59-82. Print.
Shuck’s article begins by recognizing that the increase in numbers of L2 students in universities has led to the hiring of more second-language experts in universities. Yet beneath an apparent understanding of the needs of L2 students, monolingualism—or the notion of “the ideal speaker is [. . .] a monolingual native speaker of a prestige variety of English” (59)—is still pervasive and deeply engrained in the university structures and curriculum. Moreover, she claims that even the structures that seem to support and advance linguistic diversity play a part in perpetuating monolingualism.
To illustrate this, she examines the nature of her own position at Boise State University. She was hired to run the English program that supports L2 students. What she discovered was an L2 system that practiced Matsuda’s “linguistic containment” and isolated L2 students for a few classes and then thrust them into mainstream courses with the assumption that those few preparatory classes had “remediated” all of their “problems.” Placement in these preparatory courses was largely determined by placement exams. Often, academic assessment staff told students who had any hint of an accent to take the ESL placement tests regardless of their own sense of their English skills. And these exams were rated by staff that had little to no training in any form of writing assessment, let alone L2 writing assessment. She further discovered that her very presence on campus seemed to remove from other faculty the sense of responsibility to assist L2 students’ language development. Since she was the “ESL person,” some faculty felt she shouldered the responsibility for these students and their language development. In addition, because she was attached to the English department, faculty viewed L2 language development as the English department’s purview.
No comments:
Post a Comment