applied linguistics paper

Teaching English as an International Language

In Search of a New Paradigm for Teaching English as an

International Language

SURESH CANAGARAJAH Pennsylvania State University

In the context of more diverse communicative practices and social relations in globalization, scholars are increasingly defin- ing English as constituting socially constructed situational norms in specific contexts of interaction, and not a homoge- neous language or even discrete varieties of English. This shift requires treating pragmatics and not grammar, social context and not cognition, as more significant in accounting for one’s language competence. To address such changes in pedagogical practice, language teachers have to focus more on developing procedural knowledge (i.e., a knowledge of how, or negotiation strategies) rather than propositional knowledge (i.e., a knowl- edge of what, or norms and conventions of a language) in their classrooms. This article illustrates how teachers can cultivate procedural knowledge by developing language awareness, rhetorical sensitivity, and negotiation strategies among their students. doi: 10.1002/tesj.166

In recent times, we have seen radical changes in the way English is viewed as an international language. From treating native speaker varieties as the norm for international usage, and moving on to appreciate the grammaticality of localized varieties in postcolonial countries and studying the possibility of a shared lingua franca norm for all multilinguals (that differs from native speaker norms), we are now open to norms being co-constructed intersubjectively in each situated interaction by interlocutors in global contact zones. These changes have generated a search for new ways of teaching English to multilingual speakers. Such

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developments are often unsettling to teachers as they challenge many of the assumptions that have motivated our teaching practice. However, pedagogical orientations have always changed in relation to new understandings of language and competence. As the contexts of English usage change, together with the conventions and practices relating to its use, our pedagogical approaches also have to change to reflect the values and aspirations of the users. If not, our pedagogy will be out of step with changing social conditions. Changes in pedagogy don’t always mean that teaching practice is made difficult. Teaching can actually become more creative, interesting, and fulfilling, if we only had the patience and tolerance for change. In the discussion below, I first articulate how our understanding of English is changing. Then I outline the changes for pedagogical orientations, and conclude with the implications for my own teaching practice.

DEFINING ENGLISH Thanks to the bold and insightful scholarship of Braj Kachru (1986), and his tireless advocacy, the TESOL community now understands that English is not a homogeneous language with a single norm. Kachru envisioned English as a package of diverse varieties, with local norms in different native and nonnative communities. Teaching thus involved making students aware of the need for local varieties for local contexts (such as Nigerian or Indian English), and shifting to traditional native speaker varieties (e.g., standardized British or American English) for formal, institutional, or contact purposes. Students could be made sensitive to the differing norms of World Englishes, and coached to develop proficiency in a chosen local and/or native speaker variety.

In Kachru’s model of World Englishes (hereafter WE), the status of communities that used English as a foreign language, those whom he labeled expanding circle countries, was controversial. The model posited that these countries (Brazil, China, or Germany, for example) did not have their own varieties of English, as they don’t use English locally as a second language like the postcolonial outer circle communities do. Therefore, it was assumed that they use native speaker varieties and should learn

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those norms for contact purposes. However, globalization has progressed to the point where these communities are not immune from translocal influences through media, technology, travel, and commerce. Not only are they developing local uses of English, they are also increasingly interacting with other multilingual communities. The school of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has demonstrated through its research that speakers in the outer circle communities don’t use native speaker varieties for their purposes when they interact with each other (Seidlhofer, 2001). They develop another norm that deviates from native speaker varieties. According to ELF, teaching English involves making students aware of this multilingual norm. In the early work of this school, it was posited that this was another variety, labeled lingua franca core (LFC), that multilingual students would switch to when they used English for contact purposes (see Seidlhofer, 2001).

Some scholars now argue that we have to move beyond treating international English as a set of preconstructed varieties (as in WE or ELF) and conceive it as a form of practice (see Canagarajah, 2013; Pennycook, 2010). According to WE and ELF, there are well established, stable, and self-structured varieties corresponding to specific countries or communities for speakers sharing that membership. These varieties have their own bounded identities distinct from each other. According to the emerging orientation, multilingual speakers negotiate English according to their values, interests, and language repertoires in each interaction. What accounts for success is not the fact that they share a single norm (whether British English, Nigerian English, or LFC), but that they adopt context- and interaction-specific communicative practices that help them achieve intelligibility. While previous approaches to international English described the communicative challenge in terms of grammar, the new approach presents it as a question of practice. In the emerging understanding, it is not our grammatical proficiency, but our adeptness in negotiating the diversity of grammars in each specific interaction that enables communicative success.

This move away from a focus on form is significant for many reasons. In the context of globalization, our interactions are becoming highly unpredictable. We interact with speakers from

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diverse backgrounds, with different languages, values, and proficiencies. It is difficult to go prepared for any interaction with a predictable set of grammatical norms. Previous models made our challenge easier by associating different countries and speakers with a specific English variety. We could predict which variety a given interlocutor would use in a given situation. However, this association of a community with a variety is a misleading generalization. The diversity of Englishes people bring with them transcends the established varieties. In fact, scholars have begun to question the notion that there are preconstructed languages or English varieties in the first place. These language labels and the normative grammars they come with are the constructs of linguists and language teachers. These constructs simply make our research and teaching easier. In reality, languages are variable, mobile, mixed. There are no pure languages or language varieties, separated from others. The sociolinguist Jan Blommaert (2010) therefore argues for a shift in our perspectives, from “immobile languages” to “mobile resources” (p. 43). He argues that we consider communication as made possible by resources that we borrow from diverse languages and symbol systems for our purposes. What motivates our choice of resources is not which language they come from, but what objective we are using them for and in what social contexts. This orientation also holds that languages, like people, are always in contact with each other. Therefore, language resources are borrowed, mixed, and reconstructed as people use them for their needs in everyday life. This is known as the translingual orientation (Canagarajah, 2013; Garcia, 2009).

Adopting this perspective doesn’t mean that grammar is not important. It involves seeing grammar as always emergent, not preconstructed. As speakers from two different backgrounds interact in English, they will use resources from their first, second, or diverse other languages from their repertoire. As they collaborate with each other in attaining their communicative objectives, they construct certain norms that make their interaction possible. From this perspective, their shared norm or grammar is an intersubjective achievement. It is relevant for both of them (or the parties involved in that interaction), but may not be

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relevant for others. Others have to construct their own grammars in practice, based on the specific mix of speakers, languages, and interests in their own contexts. Over time, if some of these interactions become routine, the forms shared by these people become stabilized. They become locally shared grammars. However, speakers will still be open to renegotiating and reconfiguring them in context, as global communicative interactions and interlocutors are always unpredictable.

This way of looking at grammar and practice also implies changes for the place of cognition in our understanding of language competence. What accounts for our ability to speak? Scholars of second language acquisition (SLA) have always emphasized one’s cognitive control over grammatical knowledge as the answer. Consider Michael Long’s (1997) understanding of competence: “Most SLA researchers view the object of inquiry as in large part an internal, mental process: the acquisition of new (linguistic) knowledge” (p. 319). However, the scenario I depict above suggests that the linguistic knowledge required for global interactions is unpredictable. How many varieties of English should one master in order to deal with the diverse people one meets in one’s interactions, not to mention the genres of texts, video, or music in diverse Englishes? Beyond English, one has to also know the diverse languages that could be mixed in all these interactions. Such an agenda for learning and knowing languages is unsustainable. We need a different orientation to think about what enables us to communicate.

A useful starting point for redefining competence is the distinction Michael Byram (2008) makes between propositional knowledge and procedural knowledge. The former is the knowledge of the what, the latter the how. What SLA and language teaching have traditionally focused on is propositional knowledge. However, it is the knowledge of the how that might help us deal with the diverse and unpredictable communicative situations of globalization. This kind of knowledge focuses on the resourcefulness of speakers to negotiate diverse codes, values, and identities of the speakers and texts they encounter. It focuses on their creativity to merge their repertoires in the interactions and texts for voice in a manner that achieves intelligibility and communicative success in relation to

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the dominant norms and expectations of specific communicative contexts. It resembles the strategic competence that Canale and Swain (1980) identified as one of the four components of communicative competence. Strategic competence refers to the ability to anticipate and repair potential communication breakdown in contexts of variable grammatical proficiency among interlocutors. But listed as the final component after grammatical, sociolinguistic, and discourse competence, it has not received the attention it deserves in TESOL circles. In fact, among some practitioners, all four communicative competences have been turned into product-oriented norms, resembling propositional knowledge. The shift to procedural knowledge in language competence means that we will refocus from knowledge to practices, from cognition to social context, in our orientation to pedagogy.

PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS How does one develop procedural knowledge among our students to negotiate the diverse Englishes they will meet in global contact zones? What does procedural knowledge consist of? In my teaching, I have identified three components that are critical for developing procedural knowledge. I label them language awareness, rhetorical sensitivity, and negotiation strategies. Let me explain each of them.

Language awareness is different from a knowledge of grammar in each separate language. It is about how grammars generally work in all languages. This may not be an explicit knowledge of grammar, but an intuitive knowledge developed from one’s ongoing experiences with language in everyday life. This kind of awareness has helped successful multilingual users intuit the grammar of the new speakers they interact with, adopt their grammars or borrow their words for their purposes, and find a middle ground between the divergent grammars of both parties in a communicative interaction. Language awareness doesn’t necessarily depend on formal teacher instruction (see Borg, 1994). Everyone is endowed with language awareness, based on our human capacity to communicate, and can develop it socially. Researchers of international English have found that multilinguals

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in everyday contexts negotiate their diverse Englishes very effectively, demonstrating complex language awareness (see business contexts in Firth, 1996; and small traders in Han, 2013). Of course, this language awareness can be cultivated in classrooms, if teachers don’t impose the grammar of specific English varieties as correct and inflexible. Students can be encouraged to look beyond specific grammars to treat them as examples of how grammars in general work in communication.

Rhetorical sensitivity might sound unusual in TESOL circles, as this notion is usually associated with literature or classical studies. However, TESOL professionals are increasingly realizing the importance of features such as creativity, voice, and genre in communication. What language norms to use and how will depend a lot on the specific genres of communication. The type of English that is inappropriate for an academic essay may be appropriate for a blog post or Twitter message—and vice versa. More importantly, we now accept that it is impossible to speak or write without implications for our identity. One cannot adopt an instrumental orientation that communication is simply for conveying messages to generic listeners/readers. Often, the medium is the message. The writer/speaker’s identity and values shape the text, just as the text shapes the identity and values of the interlocutors. Rhetorical sensitivity, therefore, refers to the awareness of genres, conventions, and contexts that motivate one to choose the type of English to be used, but also to subtly change the accepted norms for one’s own voice and interests. The components that communicative competence previously classified as sociolinguistic and discourse competence would be part of this sensitivity. However, while these competences were treated in a normative way in past communicative teaching approaches (i.e., genre x demands code y in context z), rhetorical sensitivity would allow language users to resist, change, and reconfigure these norms as relevant for their voice and interests. Kramsch (2009) labels this ability symbolic competence.

Negotiation strategies facilitate such language and genre transformations in relation to one’s own preferences and dominant norms. They also refer to the practices one adopts to achieve communicative success and intelligibility with interlocutors whose

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norms and values one might not be familiar with. In studies of lingua franca interactions, scholars have found subjects using strategies such as confirmation check, repetition, and clarification requests to repair potential communicative breakdowns due to norm differences (Kaur, 2009; Pitzl, 2010). Two interesting strategies unique to lingua franca English are let-it-pass and make- it-normal (see Firth, 1996). The former refers to interlocutors waiting patiently for more clues for words or features they don’t understand, thus temporarily ignoring the trouble source (i.e., let it pass). As they proceed with the conversation, they get more clues to resolve the problem. Sometimes, the interlocutors may treat as shared a lexical or grammatical feature that may not be normative for native speakers or other interlocutors. They will achieve communicative success through features that they thus make normal for their situated interaction (i.e., make it normal). Such strategies suggest that successful communication among multilinguals in international English involves strategies of collaboration, patience, and solidarity. Teachers have to develop the capacity of students to adopt such creative and collaborative strategies for negotiating diversity and unpredictability in global interactions.

PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE If language competence and acquisition are thus redefined—from grammar to practice, cognition to social context—we can expect that our pedagogical practices will also change. I will illustrate the changes by recounting how I teach English in my own classes. I teach college level literacy and writing. My teaching context differs considerably from those in K–12 contexts or those focusing on conversational fluency. Those who teach in other contexts have to design pedagogical practices relevant to their own contexts, based on the pedagogical shifts outlined above. However, writing pedagogy is not insignificant. Writing holds a controversial place in research on teaching international English. Scholars in the past have assumed that the diversity of English doesn’t affect writing. They have assumed that English writing has a universal norm, and writers of any national or cultural background would use what is called Standard Written English (SWE; see Elbow, 2002). For

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this reason, scholars of ELF have mentioned that teaching and research on the role of international English in writing has suffered greatly (Jenkins, Kogo, & Dewey, 2011). My example below shows how we can make spaces for the Englishes of our students in their writing as well (for a fuller description and syllabus, see Canagarajah, 2014).

I adopt an ecological orientation to teaching English writing. What this means is that I take a step back from being a very interventionist and directive teacher, and allow students to take up the affordances from the learning context I design to develop their procedural knowledge. It is not surprising that teachers have to adopt the role of facilitators of learning and not authorities in the teaching of English. We don’t have a knowledge of all the Englishes out there. We don’t always know the backgrounds students come from and the norms and values they bring with them. We cannot fully prepare them for the unpredictable communicative contexts they will encounter based on our own limited knowledge. More importantly, since dominant SLA and pedagogical orientations have focused on form and cognition in the past, we lack adequate information on what constitutes a practice-based and socially based procedural knowledge that needs to be inculcated. We are compelled to learn its features together with our students as we teach our classes.

The main writing requirement in my courses is a literacy narrative. It has several features that enable the development of procedural knowledge. The literacy narrative usually features the student’s multilingual development and trajectories into literacy in English. As students reflect on this experience, they consider how they can resolve their linguistic and identity tensions. They often engage in a search for a more hybrid identity, and attempt to achieve it in that very essay. Thus, the assignment becomes performative. The students consider how they can demonstrate their repertoires and identities by merging diverse codes in their writing. I have seen essays that merge Chinese or Indian English, or even Arabic, Japanese, and Korean, with SWE in these essays.

The literacy narrative provides a space for this linguistic creativity because it is treated by students as a less formal and regimented genre of writing. In fact, students are initially unsure

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what kind of genre the literacy narrative is. Is it personal or academic? Should it be a narrative or an argument? Though students often start their early drafts as personal narratives, they are influenced by the academic context and the course readings to adopt a more analytical, researched, and polemical orientation as they proceed. This search for a form that suits their story and purposes is a creative process, though initially confusing and unsettling. I advise students that such a negotiated orientation to genres should inform all our writing. We should always inquire how we can reshape the form according to our own values and interests in any academic genre. There is scope for voice in all writing, however high the stakes. Of course, the extent to which one can bring one’s values and repertoires into the text will vary according to the context—and that is exactly what students have to negotiate in each writing.

There are other ecological resources that will both enable and constrain students as they search for the appropriate mix of their own Englishes and dominant norms, or personal voice and formality, in their writing. I provide a mixture of readings from postcolonial writers who use their own Englishes (such as Gloria Anzaldua, Chinua Achebe, and Raja Rao, who often also discuss their rationale for employing their own Englishes in their writing) and textbooks that represent dominant norms of native speaker discourse and conventions. Writing in an institutional context where discourses of normativity are powerful is balanced by my own teacherly nonnative identity that is friendly to international English. Students often position themselves variably in this mix of affordances and constraints, with some leaning on the side of creativity and others towards normativity. My pedagogical role is to allow students to develop a keen rhetorical sensitivity to competing genre and language norms as they position themselves according to their own interests.

The dialogical classroom relationships I adopt also shape the textual negotiations. As I take a back seat, students have to negotiate the drafts and readings through peer and teacher interactions. They gradually develop the sense that meanings are not given, but collaboratively constructed. As I teach in web-based instructional contexts, this modality facilitates dialogicality in

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important ways. Online discussions provide room for more dynamic interactions between participants in a course. Internet also allows us to post multiple drafts of our writing, share it with others, and receive multiple forms of feedback from the instructor and peers. Dialogicality provides an active, critical, and engaged audience for one’s texts, which helps writing development. Students develop a sharp awareness that their creative uses of local varieties of English have to gain uptake by their peers from both native speaker and multilingual backgrounds. Therefore, they try out different negotiation strategies for meaning making. They anticipate the uses of their local Englishes in the text by preparing the reader ahead of time. They provide sufficient clues in the textual context for readers to guess the meanings of their novel or personal language uses. This sense of negotiation applies to readers also. As they engage with texts that present new varieties of English, readers have to adopt diverse creative strategies for interpretation. They have to look more closely at the context, read between the lines, and infer meanings from available clues.

Another feature of my classroom ecology is its design as a contact zone. Adopting this metaphor from Mary Louise Pratt (1991), I facilitate an engagement with diverse languages and cultures through various ecological resources in the classroom. Contrast this approach with that of teachers who treat the classroom as a site of homogeneous language norms (such as English Only) on the assumption that other language or cultural resources will interfere with the mastery of SWE or “standard English.” I consider the engagement with diverse languages and cultures as contributing to the language awareness and negotiation strategies of the students. Therefore, I see to it that the materials I provide for reading and discussion come from diverse language and cultural backgrounds in order to transform the classroom into a contact zone. Such contact also occurs through the diverse languages students themselves bring to the classroom interactions. Contact also occurs through the mix of native and nonnative English speaking students in the class. I find this engagement valuable for both student groups. It is important for multilingual students to understand the expectations and norms of native speakers. On the other hand, native speaker students often

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recognize their own translingual competence (as they tap into the foreign languages they have learnt in high school, study abroad, or foreign teaching experiences). The practice of placing native and nonnative students together in certain educational contexts doesn’t have to be a hindrance, but a resource for developing language awareness. Such classes resemble the diversity in globalization.

Along with these conditions, I also treat the classroom as a safe space to try out different rhetorical strategies of creativity, resistance, and transformation in their communication. Since my assessment (to be described below) is not product-oriented, there is space for students to develop their competence through protracted stages and demonstrate their evolving proficiency. What is more important is that I find students bringing in certain negotiation strategies from outside the classroom to navigate the mix of languages and cultures within. When the classroom is treated as a controlled environment for institutional discourses and norms, censoring diversity, such strategies are also kept out. However, students are already engaging with diverse Englishes and multilingualism in social media sites. They are exposed to them in world music and popular culture. They are therefore adopting creative strategies to interpret diverse language resources and, sometimes, to communicate with flair through multilingual codes in these sites. More importantly, students are learning new negotiation strategies by trial and error. They are learning how to navigate the norms or expectations of their interlocutors with their own resources and agendas to achieve their interests. They are also teaching each other new tricks, strategies, and resources for translingual communication. It is in this sense that I find that teachers have a lot to learn from their students.

How do I assess the literacy development of students in a class that is so process-oriented and collaborative? Assessment is not a necessary evil that spoils the fun of learning. It can have positive washback on the learning experience throughout the course. I announce in my syllabus that grades are based on students’ trajectories of development, especially the development of the three dimensions of procedural competence I outlined earlier: that is, language awareness, rhetorical sensitivity, and negotiation strategies. This mode of assessment is admittedly subjective.

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However, the diverse course components help me in making a balanced assessment. The pedagogy features constant feedback and review throughout the course, in the fashion of formative assessment. I give them surveys and questionnaires at various stages of the course to reflect on their own development of writing and literacy proficiency. The students produce a portfolio of their course performance, together with a cover letter on their orientation to their learning trajectory. The portfolio and surveys generate a remarkable reflexivity among the students, as they develop an understanding of their own understanding. In the end, it is not the final product of the literacy narrative that counts. It may have been produced with varying levels of grammatical and structural mastery. What is more important for me is the trajectory it displays. I focus on the extent to which it and other course products display the growing language, rhetorical, and strategic awareness of the student. It gets displayed in the types of experimentation, creativity, balance, and adeptness accompanying the negotiation of one’s values against the dominant norms of academic institutions in one’s writing.

Let me illustrate from a recent course I taught for undergraduate and graduate students on teaching second language writing. To be effective teachers of English as an international language, I envison that teachers have to develop such procedural knowledge themselves. The course consisted of both native and non-native speaker students. The literacy narrative was an important writing activity in this course, as I wanted students to develop a reflective awareness of their own language development. Though most students wrote a straightforward personal narrative for the first draft, many experimented with making spaces for their voice in subsequent drafts. Rita1 (a native speaker student) was the first to depart from the narrative structure. She started with a passage read to her by her parents when she was young, and interspersed other such texts within the narration of her own literacy development. She adopted different fonts to quote these texts and then shift to her personal voice for

1These are pseudonyms. I have permission from students and IRB approval to quote from their drafts and statements.

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her narrative. Mark (another native speaker student) identified this use of different fonts as a useful strategy to merge diverse voices in his own subsequent drafts. He wrote in his journal: “The way some other students (maybe Rita or Chrissie?) used different fonts to really show different voices is something I’m going to try.” He took this strategy further by incorporating Korean (a language he had learnt during his teaching stint in Korea) in relevant places in his English narrative. The shift in fonts signaled to readers that he was using Korean for specific rhetorical purposes. Buthainah and Fawzia, two students from Saudi Arabia, took this strategy further in their subsequent drafts and incorporated emoticons, images, and graphics (to serve as cultural motifs) in addition to Arabic and Arabized English in their narratives. In Mark’s words, this switch of languages helped all of them with the performative function of “showing instead of telling” their multilingual and multicultural background. Over time, this practice of shifting fonts became a shared strategy to incorporate other languages and voices in students’ English narrative.

The strategy also facilitated certain interpretive strategies for readers, as they recognized the shift in fonts as a rhetorical move to bring something extra into the text, and adopted special negotiation strategies to make sense of languages they often did not know (such as Korean or Arabic). In most cases, students learned to read the new codes and fonts in context to guess the meaning. Rita found Fawzia’s multimodal resources helpful to decode her Arabic. She said: “Fawzia, You write so beautifully and with such awareness of your audience! Every time I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, there was a footnote, some colorful text, or quote in a sidebar that offered more information.” Others appreciated the aesthetic effect and ethos constructed by these diverse Englishes for the narratives of the authors. Mark responded to Buthainah’s Arabic thus: “To me, a non-Arabic speaker, this quote is a beautiful collection of alien writing, fascinating but incomprehensible. . . . It is a move that distances me from Buthainah but also leaves me intrigued and interest[ed] in reading more.” Some responded to the orality of the texts. Chang adopted an auditory reading to Buthainah’s Arabic and personal voice: “When I was reading your autobiography, it felt like you

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were talking directly to me in person. . . . all make your story flow vividly into my ears. Well . . .maybe more like I was talking to you on MSN since it’s all text.” Thus he drew from reading experiences on chat forums (i.e., MSN) to decode the fonts, languages, and visuals in these essays. In more extreme cases of unintelligibility, students assumed that their participation in classroom interactions, interviews, and peer critique were part of the social negotiation of meaning. For example, after raising some questions about Buthainah’s untranslated Arabic verse, Tim wrote, “I think discussing this with you and hearing your thoughts would be more helpful. Hopefully we can do this on Wednesday.” Tim was counting on a face-to-face conversation to unpack the meaning of the Arabic. These strategies show students employing their rhetorical and language awareness to interpret the voices of their multilingual peers.

How can we assess a course on awareness development? Since the objectives of the course highlighted the practice-based dimensions of developing strategies and awarenesses, I assessed students on the quality of awareness, extent of reflexivity, and trajectories of learning displayed, and not on products alone. Through the journals, drafts, peer feedback, and end-of-semester surveys and portfolio, I had the opportunity to see how students grew in the awarenesses required for translingual writing. While some students (especially native speakers like Cissy and Tim) produced well edited final products, they failed to display sufficient reflective awareness or striking learning trajectories. On the other hand, multilingual students like Buthainah, Fawzia, and Kyoko failed to achieve advanced control over grammar, but displayed a promising learning trajectory that assured further development. Kyoko (an international student from Japan) began the course feeling “like being in the middle of nowhere when I write in English,” a phrase she often repeated about her in- between status in languages. However, in the context of teacher and peer feedback, she began to engage more with writing. Reading the literacy narrative of a published Finnish scholar on shifting fully to American values and discourses, Kyoko reflected that she did not “want to deny my history nor become a mini American.” She went on to identify a hybrid position for herself

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that merges her Japanese resources with English, which she called a “transposition” approach, borrowing a metaphor from one of the textbooks. Her final submission was remarkably different from her chronologically structured early drafts. Her literacy narrative concludes thus: “Perhaps, I am in the middle of the shifting process of thinking in English from personal to objective, or from emotional to logical. And I don’t know how long it will take for me to master it.” The shift from “middle of nowhere” to “middle of a shifting process” is telling. She not only develops clarity about her trajectory, but composes a layered text that merges different discourses. Though she herself acknowledges that her mastery is not complete, I gave her credit for finding her footing in the conflicting languages, merging them to compose a hybrid text, charting her own trajectory for voice, and displaying reflexivity on her evolving awareness.

CONCLUSION There are many causes of concern for teachers with a course of this nature. If the focus is on developing procedural knowledge for negotiating linguistic diversity, what are the implications for standardized norms and conventions prescribed in institutional and policy mandates (such as the Common Core Standards or No Child Left Behind)? Wouldn’t these students fail in formal and institutional contexts where “standard English” is expected? My expectation is that students who develop a complex language awareness, rhetorical sensitivity, and negotiation strategies will not only recognize the contexts where they can be creative but also the contexts where they have to be observant of established norms. It is a student who is not rhetorically sensitive who will try to communicate the same way everywhere. That is foolhardy. Communicative contexts are different, with different norms and expectations. While one has more scope for voice in certain contexts, we have to be wary of linguistic biases and penalties in others. Many students may still wish to make a space for their own language resources even in censored contexts; but they will do this more strategically, gaining from their awareness of negotiation strategies. Procedural knowledge, therefore, helps

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students recognize standard varieties and normative usage and adjust their language practice accordingly.

A second concern is whether there are some students who are not proficient enough to engage with such a creative and process- oriented pedagogy. Are some students linguistically so deficient that they have to be taught the basics of English (i.e., “standard English”) before they can be expected to find their voice in this language? Some teachers do focus on the deficiencies of multilingual students, motivated by good intentions of helping them better. However, we have to focus on the resources these students bring as well. For a lot of teachers, the multilingual resources students bring, together with their language awareness, rhetorical sensitivity, and negotiation strategies they have developed in their multilingual life, give hope that these students can master one more code (SWE or “standard English”) effectively. Besides, a teacher-led product-oriented pedagogy is not guaranteed to facilitate a mastery of dominant standards.

This type of pedagogy might be unnerving for teachers who have been trained to be more directive in achieving measurable outcomes. The pedagogy I adopt achieves more indirect outcomes. The proficiency achieved may not be immediately visible. My pedagogy is designed to make my students lifelong learners. I am more patient to see the fruits of my labor later in time. However, this pedagogy affects the authority and certitude teachers are supposed to display. It is this certitude and authority on what students are supposed to know that accounts for the more directive and product-oriented pedagogies designed to develop propositional knowledge. We have to adopt a different disposition when we teach students for the unpredictable contexts of globalization. We have to become learners with our students— learning new varieties of English, new genres of communication, and new modes of negotiating language diversity. As we shift to preparing students to negotiate the ever changing Englishes of globalization by being resourceful themselves, the pedagogy of procedural knowledge would also encourage our students to become lifelong learners. This is the pedagogically honest way of preparing our students for the diversity of globalization, not leaving them with the false hope that they will succeed in the

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communicative challenges out there if they master the forms and texts we drill into them in our classrooms for 4 to 12 months in a course.

THE AUTHOR Suresh Canagarajah is the Erle Sparks Professor at Pennsylvania State University. He teaches World Englishes, second language writing, and postcolonial studies in the Departments of English and Applied Linguistics. He has taught before in the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and the City University of New York. He was formerly the editor of TESOL Quarterly and President of the American Association of Applied Linguistics.

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