Jose Di Paola - Week 5

             Casanave emphasizes the seductive nature of contrastive rhetoric. We humans like to identify patterns where we see them. For example, my multilingual student from the current semester repeatedly used phrases like “meat of the goat”. I thought of the way Romance languages like French assign possessives, so I assumed that was the issue. The student knew French better than English. The problem with making these assumptions though is that, as Casanave notes, we mistake other educational issues as purely language barriers. When I assumed a linguistic origin for my student’s wording, I dismissed any individual problems he might have. My student's first language wasn't even French, so why go to that instead of his actual tongue?

            The galling part is that I experienced learning another language: Spanish. My family moved to the United States when I was only a year old, and did not speak Spanish in the house. I only really started learning Spanish beyond the absolute basics in High School. The most difficult parts of my classes were always the long essays. My word choice and grammar were fine, but my tone was consistently stiff and wooden. Almost every sentence in one of my essays was short, simple, basic, correct, and boring. A contrastive rhetoric argument would claim the problem originates from an aspect of English that is lost when translated to Spanish; for example, Spanish arguably has more flexible word placement. The actual explanation for my situation was very different. I certainly tried to write long and dynamic sentences, but as with any new language they were the most difficult parts to write out and often contained mistakes. While self-editing I focused on correctness rather than style, so I pruned or split up the flashy statements while leaving the most basic ones alone. My style came not from a quirk of my first language, but from grade systems focused on basic functionality over natural rhetoric. 

Comments

  1. TatianaSeptember 30, 2020 at 1:17 PM

    Thanks for sharing, Jose! I'm interested in your experiences writing in Spanish. It makes me think of the creative writing assignments I give my students--many of my second language students have rich, creative ideas, but their language is so stiff they're not able to create the worlds characters they want. I imagine it's a frustrating process.

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