English Instruction in the YMCA Lance Cummings, Spring 2014

Language Origins and the Construction of the Immigrant Learner

Thank You

Background

Translingualism

Tacit Language Policies

Unidirectional Monolingualism

Territorialization of language studies

Notions of standard English

Location of writers in sequence of development

Horner and Trimbur, “English Only in U.S College Composition”

Folk-LinguisticsReligion, Mythology, FolklorePopular BeliefsLanguage Relationships

Brueghel, Tower of Babel, Wikimedia Commons

“Comparison as a Mode of Inquiry,”Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and

Globalization

Sedimentation“Drawn from geological vocabulary, sedimentation represents the movement and repetition of matter (or structured performances) within the fluidity of time (or history). These movements often settle into a more permanent state through habit, giving shape to the ecologies (or conditions and contexts) around us through institutions, rituals, and discourse.”

–Rebecca Dingo, Networking Arguments

“A transnational feminist analysis does not simply recover lost voices nor does it ask who suffers more and how two (or more) groups are similar; instead, transnational feminism illustrates a matrix of connections between people, nations, economies, and textual practices present in, for example, public policies and popular culture” (12).

Triangle Trade, Wikimedia Commons

Sedimentary Rock, Wikimedia Commons

Hokciu YMCA, Wikimedia Commons

Buxton, IA YMCA, Wikimedia Commons

joelsp, Flickr

Monolingual ideologies adhered to belletristic rhetorics through acts of comparison based on Language Origin Theory, allowing these discourses to travel into diverse American contexts.

Language Origins

John Locke

Rousseau

Condillac

Joseph Priestley

Lord Burnett (Monboddo)

Adam Smith

Of Standards of Taste, David Hume

Taste“It is impossible to continue in the practice of contemplating any order of beauty, without being frequently obliged to form comparisons between the several species and degrees of excellence, and estimating their proportion to each other.”

“Even in the deserts of America, where human nature shows itself in its most uncultivated state, the savages have their own ornament of dress, their war and death songs, their harangues and their orators.”

Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

“German Definite Article Declensions,” Wikipedia

“Prepositions,” beidaenglish.com

Helico, Flickr

More words

Less Agreeable to the ear

Less flexibility in structure

Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belle Lettres

Style

“Style became more precise, and, of course, more simple. Imagination too, in proportion as Society advanced, had less influence over mankind.…In place of poets, Philosophers became the instructors of men; and in the reasonings on all different subjects, introduced that plainer and simpler style of composition, which we now call Prose. (62)

Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

Grammar and the Mind“. . . the defect of style can . . . be traced back to his indistinct conception of the subject: so close is the connexion between thoughts, and the words in which they are clothed.”

“an exact index of the state of [each nation’s] mind” (864).

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1771

HFC, Flickr

pasa47, Flikr

YMCA and Immigration Work

12th Street YMCA Gym, Wikimedia Commons

–Original Boston Constitution, 1851

“[The YMCA] shall meet the young stranger as he enters our city, take him by the hand, direct him to a boarding house where he may find a quiet home pervaded with Christian influences…”

1820-192035 Million Immigrants

“…likely to become a public charge.”

–Theodore Roosevelt, True Americanism (1897)

“The mighty tide of immigration to our shores has brought in its train much of good and much of evil; and whether the good or the evil shall predominate depends mainly on whether these new-comers do or do not throw themselves heartily into our national life, cease to be European, and become Americans like the rest of us.”

Statements and Recommendations . . .

Dr. Peter RobertsAmericanization of the foreigner will never take place until he knows the English language. The speech of a people is the best conveyer of its civilization and ideals, and the immigrants ought to have the best possible privilege to learn our speech as soon as they settle in the land (85).

T.G. Rooper, Object-Teaching: or Words and Things (1894)

Object Learning

Without words we can look at objects and know them as animals do, but we can have little or no science. (14)

Pioneer Kitchen, Wikimedia Commons

–“Universal Grammar,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1771

“With this in view, therefore, let us suppose a reasonable being, devoid of every prepossession whatever, placed upon this globe…”

Fracois Gouin,The Art of Teaching and Studying Language

Child Acquisition Instruments of Logic

Succession or Contiguity in Time

Relation of means to an end

–Peter Roberts, English for Coming Americans

“Yes, it is the voice of parental love, acting upon nature’s wonderful mechanism—the ear, that elicits the response of affection in the soul of its offspring. And the coming of thousands of foreign-speaking men and women to our country each year affords us opportunity to perform this miracle in thousands of instances if we trust the ear and speak to these men in accents of sympathy and affection. (11-12)”

–Peter Roberts, English for Coming Americans

“Let the classroom be a microcosm, and the pupils will be better able to play their part in the macrocosm wherein they move and act. (27)”

M. Bakhtin

Authoritarian Discourse

Another's discourse performs here no longer as information directions, rules, models and so forth—but strives rather to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behavior …

Readers For Coming Americans

Wikimedia Commons

Peter Roberts, The Problem of Americanizaiton

Nature

With a gun and a good knife, they sought adventure, and were able to defend themselves in a way dreamed of by few boys to-day, cooped, as they are, in factories and mills.

Battle of New Orleans, Wikicommons

1893 Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria Replicas, Wikipedia

“Without an understanding of the history, we may continue to use pedagogical strategies that are no longer appropriate for the changing student population or dismiss some useful ideas or practices for the wrong reasons.”Paul Matsuda, Exploring Composition

Studies

Implications and Further Questions

How have language ideologies continued to adhere past pre-disciplinary work of the YMCA?

How do these language ideologies shape online and digital writing environments?

How do students and writers contest, reshape, or remix elements of language ideology?

Q&A