“This semester, I have three classes of respectful students who absolutely cannot write. I have sent most to the Writing Center Or english tutors…..they are telling me that the people at the WCenter are not helpful even though they are well-intentioned. Same with the English tutors. Usually, I have a handful of really good writers who I team up with those who cannot. This semester I am not able to do this.”

“These students NEED help with English construction, spelling, everything! Critical thinking does not even play into it at this point. Have a lot of chinese students who are struggling with the English language anyway. Any advice?”

thanks

Professor @

I oversee a staff of writing tutors and an English as a Second Language (ESL) language and computer lab at BMCC. The above email is emblematic of an ever more common kind of referral to our tutoring center, similar to the one from Professor @, from many others across the disciplinary spectrum who include writing in their curricula.[1] Professor @’s classroom is imagined around monolingual Standard American English (SAE) as the medium of instruction and around native English-speaking (and White) students as the norm, whereas in fact, he is confronted with the reality of teaching three multilingual classes full of plural nationalities, races, languages, and cultures. What further struck me when I read Professor @’s message is the fact that this instructor simultaneously exhibits what might be called “monolinguistic deficit-model” assumptions about the writing of his multilingual students, yet also himself deviates from SAE in the language of his email. Were I to critique Professor @’s writing from a similar deficit-model of idealized SAE, I would note that the message includes sentence fragments, for example, and poor adherence to usage rules of punctuation and capitalization. Of course, writing tasks are situated and context-specific: email is informal and often hastily composed, and collegial familiarity might also frame this kind of code-switching in this correspondence. More troubling to me, though, is degree of unequivocality of Professor X’s monolinguistic condemnation of his students: three classes full of students who “absolutely cannot write,” and “NEED help with… everything!” Moreover, this is not a small percentage of aberrant students; they are most or all of Professor X’s students.

Professor @ is very likely a well-intentioned, dedicated educator, and his opinion of the multilingual students in his classroom is not an anomalous one, but rather represents a fairly ubiquitous attitude among faculty and tutors across disciplines. Moreover, his assumptions concerning his students almost certainly do not arise from hostility or indifference, but rather from hegemonic cultural and language-oriented notions that pervade both academic and public discourse. As educators, we all need to pause and reflect on the assumptions we bring into our classrooms when encountering multilingual students, including assumptions about the definition and nature of “correctness,” “critical thinking” and “language proficiency,” as well as what we mean when we say a student “cannot write.” These phrases may well be accurate descriptions of some of our students, from a certain vantage point. However, they may also be illustrative sketches of our own reflexive cultural and linguistic misapprehensions, as well as descriptions of our own struggles with rendering or effectively communicating complex pedagogies within classrooms in which the English language is the norm. This normative standard of monolingualism is not conducive to effective pedagogy within CUNY, or, for that matter, within any higher education environment that shares similar values of pluralism and linguistic diversity.