The Institutional Depths of Monolingualism

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.

Despite these rather depressing discoveries about the depths of monolingualism, Shuck concludes the article by offering as exemplars two strategies she implemented to resolve some of these issues. The first includes “unmarking” L2 students in an administrative sense. Her attempts to do this consist of revising placement practices, making preparatory classes “credit-bearing and requirement-fulfilling” (69), changing the nature of preparatory courses, and adding cross-cultural sections of writing classes. The second strategy involves faculty development, starting with the composition instruction staff. She expands this strategy to other departments by conducting workshops and using a liaison program that dedicates one faculty member in a given department as the L2 point person for that department. She also makes public “the strengths and struggles that multilingual students bring to our classrooms” (72) by publishing multilingual student work and holding a public conference consisting of that work. While these changes do not reverse completely monolingualism, they do illustrate ways writing program administrators may begin to challenge it.