REVISITING, REFLECTING, AND RELOCALIZING

Keeping in my mind the idea that language users “relocalize established conventions in light of users’ spatiotemporal contexts,” I have revisited the feedback that I provided for one student’s draft.  Since I started to draft this article, I mulled over whose drafts I was going to revisit to critique my feedback on them.  I had three candidates from my 9-credit ELL and ENG accelerated learning community courses from the past four semesters in my mind (see Akai-Dennis, Grehan, Paul & Valdez, this issue, to learn more about the ELL-ENG learning community).  All three students brought in their perspectives to the classes and applied their critical lens and angles through which they explored issues we discussed.  At the same time, I recalled spending more time reading and commenting on drafts written by two of the three.   I also recalled that I even felt frustrated with one of the two students’ drafts mostly because of their unique syntax.  I’ve decided to revisit this student’s draft (See the appendix) and my feedback with this perspective on language users’ practices of relocalizing forms and meanings, or translanguaging. 

Before I reflect on the feedback, let me explain the essay assignment (see Akai-Dennis, Grehan, Paul & Valdez, this issue, to learn more about this assignment).  This assignment is an oral history project in which the students conduct an interview with a person whose experiences in terms of coming-of-age are interesting to them and then students must “place the individual’s experiences and/or perspective within a larger historical or social context” (The Writing Center UNC, 2020).   This assignment is in one of the three units of a 9-credit cluster with a “coming-of-age” theme.  They set up and carry out this oral history project after they read a scholarly article which discusses different aspects of coming-of-age and tell their stories about their coming-of-age experiences in Unit 1.  This student was not able to conduct an interview with the person he originally planned to meet, so his classmate volunteered to be a participant of his project.  This student asked his classmate about his experiences of coming-of-age in the country where he comes from. 

This revisiting struck me.  In my memory only in one-on-one conferences did I explain how standardized grammar works to my students.  So, I was surprised at the fact that I had commented on some grammatical errors and surprised at those comments as well.  Revisiting the student’s draft, I find that there are three patterns of grammar mistakes that he made, which I am not quite sure if I was aware of at the time when I gave feedback.  Neither am I sure if I consciously made different comments on them according to a pattern of those errors.  One of the comments that I repeatedly made was “Delete this” without even telling him why.  Students cannot be expected to learn any standardized grammatical rules[1] unless the comment focuses on one recurrent error with explanations.  I corrected another kind of grammar error, again, without any explanations.  I also wrote “This does not make sense,” “Can you explain more?”, comments which I used to receive from some professors and honestly just recycled without giving so much thought about the possible effects of these comments. 

The worst comment on the syntax is “This is just a series of words.”   These are horrible comments to make as someone, like myself, who knows from experiences as a speaker of other languages that all the words, phrases, and sentences made sense to her.  “The series of words” do not follow the set of rules that govern the structure of the standardized English but reflect the set of rules of the language(s) this student most comfortably orients himself with.                                

I made these comments because the student’s uses of words are cacophonic to my ears, my “systems of hearing.”  And these are the three sentences from three different paragraphs that were cacophony to my ears: 

1) In my interview illustrates how education important for human being as making healthy and educated environment make person grow up and recognize his feelings, emotions, thoughts that come through approved experiences by human mind and what is benefits of boarding school.

2) Parent factor is important because before children are going deep lacking of knowledge the parents should to be friend during teen age years when teen agers just start to figure out themselves, their martial status, feelings, hesitations about bunch of matter such as most of the time judgement parents or teachers or siblings whoever involving in their life.

3) This is time that parents or professional maybe teachers or psychologist should  attempt to explain for being teenagers assumed about life an then it is going be easy to avoid to charge brain onward wrong directed uncontrolled  compelling thoughts such as to be lazy, to be part of gangs or to be enemy to other people.

My “system of hearing” can handle the first two thirds of each sentence but starts to have a problem with the rest of it (the underlined parts).  My “system of hearing” made me stumble, going back and forth among these words.  And so, I said “This is a series of words, and so doesn’t make sense.”   

This language user once told me that he doesn’t know which language is his native language.  He had already been translingual, and now does translanguaging with English quite organically.  These underlined parts that my “system of hearing” couldn’t catch and I commented on as “a series of words” are an apple pie this translingual student baked with different apples (McCall, 2016), while I as a teacher looked for the apple that was most available to me and so tasted savory to my senses.  

However, aligning these three passages side by side makes me realize that all of them refer to challenging times that the participant in the student’s oral history project shared with him as the participant’s coming-of-age experiences.  This participant shared his experiences about how he brought his adolescent fight for independence, or freedom, too far, ended up in a boarding school, and appreciated the discipline the school provided him.  Coming from one of the former Soviet Republics, this language user in his narrative essay vehemently talked about the meaning of freedom as one of the reasons he immigrated to the U.S.  He also criticized the educational system in the country in terms of how harshly children are disciplined.  The student’s reflection on his own teenage days in a very different milieu, and his cultural, familial, economic, and other background experiences might make it difficult for him to comprehend the participant’s experience that might be so foreign to him and his knowledge based on these experiences.  Facing what is unfamiliar with the student, he might “question his [their] own positionality” (Sohan, 2014, p. 202) to the given topic, coming-of-age, and probably the knowledge that he gleaned from his experiences in his narrative essay.  

As Sohan (2014) argues, when language users question their own positionality to texts and/or contexts, they might employ a meshing of some sort in order to understand texts and/or contexts.  The readers with the monolingual mind and the system of hearing on will most likely consider the meshing “deviations from the standard.”   But, these passages are a reflection of not just the shifting natures of multiple languages that this language user meandered but also this student’s shaking positionalities toward the participant’s experiences, the topic, coming-of-age, and his own experiences and thoughts on them.  Although teachers/readers cannot know the nature of the students' multiple languages, I think we could be attentive to the meshing of meanings by looking into the student’s shaking positionalities.   

The language user’s ambivalent position to the presence of an authoritative figure in growing up can be seen in the phrase “recognize his feelings, emotions, thoughts that come through approved experiences by human mind.”  Let me share the sentence again here:

1) In my interview illustrates how education important for human being as making healthy and educated environment make person grow up and recognize his feelings, emotions, thoughts that come through approved experiences by human mind and what is benefits of boarding school.

I, of course, understand what it is meant by “recognize his feelings,” but I stumbled upon the phrase “thoughts that come through approved experiences.”   Knowing a little bit about this student’s cultural background and his experiences of totalitarianism, I wonder if he meant that there are some experiences that were “approved” and so were not approved by someone. If so, who or what does he think can legitimize or approve someone’s experiences?  Another question of mine is that given his statement that “thoughts [that] come through experiences,” if he reckons experiences as a source of knowledge.  What further complicates this question of mine is this adverb phrase “by human mind” that comes after “approved experiences.”  This adverb phrase seems to answer the first question that I posited earlier.  If this language user perceives the human mind as something universal beyond spatiotemporal contexts, then he might believe that some experiences can be sanctioned by the universalized mind of human beings.  If not, as I questioned, who did he think can approve of someone else’s experiences?  All those questions lead me to temporarily surmise that the writer might shuffle around his musing on some authority that might have approved or not approved of his experiences, his reshaping of the understanding of the theme, coming-of-age, and his understanding of the participant’s experiences and probably his experiences as well. 

How do you listen to this?  Is there any other way to read this?  What makes you read that way?

This theme of authority in coming-of-age is recurrent in these passages.  After the student discussed the importance of the role of education in coming-of-age and “thoughts that come through approved experiences by human mind,” he talked about the role of parents in sentence 2:  

2) Parent factor is important because before children are going deep lacking of knowledge the parents should to be friend during teen age years when teen agers just start to figure out themselves, their martial status, feelings, hesitations about bunch of matter such as most of the time judgement parents or teachers or siblings whoever involving in their life.

What was cacophonic to me in this sentence was the phrase “hesitations about bunch of matter such as most of the time judgments.”  However, this language user’s other diction such as “approve,” “recognize,” or “fastening chain” make me speculate that these “hesitations about judgments” address the feeling that teenagers can’t respect judgement from parents, teachers, or siblings.  Or an alternative interpretation could be that the word “hesitation” might possibly refer to his participant’s[2] rebellious actions or thinking, providing that the student also talked about the participant’s coming-of-age, which was rough in terms of ways to develop independence.  For sure, hesitation is different from rebellion.  However, I do understand, as someone who acquired this language, that this word “hesitation” could be registered as “rebellion” for the language user, because definitions of words are almost always shifted slightly when they are registered by translation.  Here, the readers could have a moment of semiodiversity, since this word “hesitation” takes on new meanings.  On the other hand, the writer argues that parents should be friends with their teenage children a little earlier.  In this sentence, his two views of parents bump up against each other: parents as friends and parents as authority.  As “hesitations” about judgements from parents could hold two meanings, so parents could hold ambivalent meanings for him. 

How do you listen to this?  Is there any other way to read this?  What makes you read that way?

Sentence 2 also brings me back to the phrase “approved experiences by human mind” in sentence 1.  Sentence 2 almost makes me settle on an interpretation of sentence 1 that the student had developed his thinking from his experiences, but his parents, teachers, or siblings did not approve of the thinking or the experiences. 

Although sentence 3 that comes right after sentence 2 was the most cacophonic to my ears, the traffic of meanings that this language user attempted to make in sentences 1 and 2 helps me re-tune my “systems of hearing.”  Let me share sentence 3 again here:

3) This is time that parents or professional maybe teachers or psychologist should  attempt to explain for being teenagers assumed about life an then it is going be easy to avoid to charge brain onward  wrong directed uncontrolled  compelling thoughts such as to be lazy, to be part of gangs or to be enemy to other people.

In particular, the underlined part did not fall in the radar of my systems of hearing in terms of semantic nexus among words such as “wrong directed uncontrolled compelling thoughts.”  However, this student’s equivocal positions about authoritative figures that I discern in sentences 1 and 2 prompt me to find connections among this series of words.  The connection that I’ve found is that some attitudes and behaviors of youngsters such as being lazy or getting involved with gangs are improperly directed and uncontrolled but can be compelling for some of them.  In turn, this possible connection could make clearer the student’s position toward parents or authority.  If the student thinks, as I interpret, that those behaviors are improperly directed, it makes sense that he argues that parents or teachers need to direct youngsters and be friends.   It seems that in sentence 3 this language user landed on a conclusion about parents as authority and youngsters’ rebellious behaviors. 

This student’s narrative essay about his coming-of-age effectuates this relocalized listening.  Now studying at BHCC and living in the U.S., where freedom is supposedly available to everyone, he was revisiting and trying to make sense of the idea of freedom in the narrative essay.  It seems to me that in this oral history project, he revisited the idea of freedom and discipline from this participant’s perspective about disciplining as opposed to freedom.  It seems to me that this language user needed to relocalize some language forms in the process of making the meaning of his experiences of gaining freedom juxtaposed with the participant’s.  The phrases that I simply described as “a series of words” parade his “sweaty fight for, meaning and response-ability” (Morrison, p. xiii) through relocalization of language and its concurrent diversification of meanings so that he could understand his participant’s experiences and also reshape his positions about those and other concurrent themes such as freedom and discipline. 

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How do you listen to this?  Is there any other way to read this?  What makes you read that way?

My experiments of “relocalized listening” to the draft is never an ending, much less an exemplary feedback that “works,” but rather a starting point of reading, responding to, and reenvisioning it.  I also want to add that this relocalized listening to the student’ use of language(s) is my apple pie, a product of making sense and meaning of this student’s texts (Schwartz, 2020).  My spatiotemporal context also might influence this way of making meaning of the words that were channeled through his body and mind immersed into his other languages. This is why I added the short intermission, again, to ask the reader “How do you listen to this?  Is there any other way to read this?  What makes you read that way?”  Yet, this experimental relocalized listening highlights to teachers and professors, including myself, who read students’ translingually oriented texts, that reading, writing, and revisioning of the texts are “alinear, dynamic, and interconnected processes” (Sohan, 2014, p. 193).  These processes require us to be attentive to the traffic of meanings within the students’ texts and spatiotemporal contexts, such as topics, assignments, prompts, class dynamics, etc.

I’d start to explore what is unfamiliar or cacophonic to me in translingually produced texts by finding the meshing of meanings and multiple meanings of one word or phrase in them.  I would bring to the language users my apple pie that I produce from their apple pies, not as feedback as a decoder.  Sohan (2014) contends that we ask “which of these potential interpretations they are invested in” (p. 202).  But this question will not allow the students to have agency over their products.  Rather, I would share my readings as ways to open a discussion with the students. 

[1] That said, I do not argue that comments or feedback on grammatical errors should not be made.  What I could have done better is the language.

 [2] Interestingly, this student continuously uses the pronoun “they,” instead of a singular pronoun to refer to the participant. It seems apparent to me that the student infuses his own experiences into the delineation of the participant’s experiences.