Language in the Academy

Session Coordinator: Thomas Chase
University of Regina, Canada
thomas.chase@uregina.ca

Culture, Language, and Literacy in Academic Communities

Debates about language are, at least in part, disagreements over underlying theories of literacy. Current literacy theories hold that in appropriating or being appropriated by discourses, people must master both ways of writing, reading, thinking, or speaking and ways of being in and seeing the world. For example, students are academically literate if, or when, they can produce and consume academic texts, as well as construct themselves as rational minds within an entirely accessible and expressible world. However, some suggest that literacy events are spaces in which people employ a range of fluid, and often competing, discursive practices and, in so doing, negotiate among competing versions of who to be and how to see the world. To address these and other issues of language, I present the preliminary results from a literacy study of students at Northeastern Illinois University where more than one-half of the 11,000 students are classified as minorities. These data focus particularly upon the literacy histories of students in academic support programs, such as the Summer Transition Program, Proyecto Pa’Lante, and Project Success. Such data clarify conclusions about productive models of literacy, which provide a theoretical framework for debates about language in the academy.

Christopher Schroeder
Northeastern Illinois University
c-schroeder2@neiu.edu

Discourse Specificity and Discourse Community in the Context of Academic Literacy

Price (2001) evokes the constraints of social contexts on language use by this quote from L. Berger and T. Luckmann: “I encounter language as a facility external to myself and it is coercive in its effect on me. Language forces me into patterns”. Disseminating knowledge using established conventions of academic discourses demonstrates the capacity to effectuate its learning and expression (Hyland and Hamp-Lyons 2002). This crucial proficiency means specific practices in academic contexts and communicative behaviors. Academic literacy thus applies to a complex set of skills (Dudley-Evans and St. John 1998), and to a “common core of universal skills or language forms” (Hutchinson and Waters 1998; Spack 1988). Thus, critical questions include: Does a Language for Academic Purposes (LAP) clearly delineate disciplines? Is its specificity defensible in heterogeneous communities or classes? How different are individual discourse communities and disciplines vis-à-vis their social, communicative and cognitive dimensions? What are the outermost implications (Hyland 2002) of the genre of electronic, computer-mediated discourses on hirings, promotions, student selections, grant applications, annual appraisals, knowledge dissemination, institutional vision statements and actions plans? How about limited accessibility and inequalities in parts of the world? Or is the academic discourse community politically and ideologically neutral? How do institutions and academic communities fashion discourses (Hyland 2000)?

Emmanuel Aito
University of Regina, Canada
emmanuel.aito@uregina.ca

Analogy, Lexis, and Obscurantism

In his essay “The Resistance of Theory; or, The Worth of Agony,” Rey Chow argues that “[l]inguistic opacity, obscurity, impenetrability—these qualities that are characteristic of high modernist works of art and literature, with their aversion to realist and mimetic representation—are also descriptive of much deconstructive critical writing. In the case of poststructuralist theory, such qualities serve less as markers of an alternative poetics and aesthetics than as signs of a dissident politics based … on consciousness raising” (99). It may well be conceded that impenetrability (in the sense of a closed system of illogic) can lead to a heightened consciousness, but Chow fails to distinguish between obscurity and obscurantism. In fact, like several recent scholars writing about the aftermath of High Theory, Chow studiously avoids consideration of critical texts that willfully mislead their readers. Focusing especially on analogy and lexis, this paper examines several instances of obscurantism, and reasserts the distinction between genuine “hardness” and linguistic window-dressing.

Thomas Chase
University of Regina, Canada
thomas.chase@uregina.ca