PEDAGOGICAL CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: PROMOTING ACADEMIC LITERACY THROUGH ESOL COMPOSITION by JEFFERY LEE ORR (Under the Direction of Mark Faust) ABSTRACT Journals like Second Language Writing and TESOL Quarterly have documented studies on ESOL composition, among other language oriented issues, that evoke the clinical. Student writing undergoes examinations, diagnoses, evaluations, and prescriptions. Textual prognoses include, invariably, the need for students to acquire additional proficiencies whether in the areas of lexicon, syntax, or discrete grammar. Students’ texts, accordingly, present as acutely deficient, deficient lexicosyntaxically and detached socioculturally. This study portends, then, the dawning of an alternate model, one bound not toward the annihilation of the evaluative and the prescriptive but cast instead as a proclamation that ESOL students bring, in concert with some linguistic challenges surrounding textual production in English, robust repertoires of social and historical knowledge to composition classrooms. Such student knowledge, when privileged in instructional contexts, particularly the ESOL composition classroom at the university level, reduces the deficit model of learning and reconstructs curricular models for teaching. Recasting models for learning and teaching in ESOL composition warrants a revitalization of academic literacy as a sociocultural affordance. Academic literacy affords students discursive opportunities to integrate their own cultural and historical knowledge to interpret, evaluate, synthesize and create texts. It contributes to students’ ability to textually initiate and reiterate dialogues in context within the academy and additional institutional and social realms. INDEX WORDS: academic literacy, ESOL composition, cultural affordance, utterance, critical discourse analysis, dialogism, sociocultural theory, identity PEDAGOGICAL CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: PROMOTING ACADEMIC LITERACY THROUGH ESOL COMPOSITION by JEFFERY LEE ORR M.A., Jackson State University, 1980 B.S., Mississippi State University, 1978 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2006 © 2006 Jeffery Lee Orr All Rights Reserved PEDAGOGICAL CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: PROMOTING ACADEMIC LITERACY THROUGH ESOL COMPOSITION by JEFFERY LEE ORR Major Professor: Mark Faust Committee: Linda Harklau Betsy Rymes Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2006 iv DEDICATION to Spirit and desire v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To polyphony, a communion of voices affirming this effort: Ancestral—the Whitfields, the Orrs, the sayers and seeers Familial—Johnnie, Devotie, Joyce, Ashley Communal—Wanda, John, Linda, Tim, Jeff, Lynn, Kim, Rachelle, Nancy, Paul, Terry Academic---Mark Faust for cohesion, Linda Harklau for methods, Betsy Rymes for discourse, and Joan Kelly Hall for Bakhtin. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER 1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY ..............................................................................5 2 METHODOLOGY……………………………………………………………….….25 Research Context ……………………………………………................................25 A Pedagogical Critical Discourse Analysis.............................................................30 Data Collection…………………………………………………………………....37 Data Analysis……………………………………………………………………..39 3 DIALOGUES WITH BUMPER STICKERS..............................................................41 Assigning Bumper Stickers.....................................................................................48 Experiencing Bumper Stickers................................................................................50 4 CONTEXTUALYZING CRITICAL DISOURSE ANALYSIS .................................69 Critical Discourse Analysis as a Pedagogical Practice ...........................................69 Thinking Side-by-Side with my Students ...............................................................73 More Theory, More Pedagogical Possibilities……………………………………77 Connecting CDA and Issues of Academic Literacy………………………………82 5 TEXTS IN CONTEXT................................................................................................90 vii Headings in “The Hispanic Challenge”...................................................................91 “Early Warnings” and “The Threat of White Nativism?”.....................................100 ENGL 1001 Final Examination.............................................................................109 6 DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY ..................................................127 “EASY PREY”…………………………………………………………………..127 ENGL 1102 Final Examination …………………………………………………135 7 DISCUSSION............................................................................................................153 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................168 viii LIST OF TABLES Page Table 1: Joe....................................................................................................................................26 Table 2: Miguel..............................................................................................................................26 Table 3: Abrihem ...........................................................................................................................27 Table 4: Carlos...............................................................................................................................27 Table 5: Bumper Stickers ……………………………………………………………………... 51 Table 6: Students ……………………………………………………………………………… 52 Table 7: Epistemic Stances …...….……………………………………………………………...53 Table 8: Affective Stances ……….……………………………………………………………..53 Table 9: Headings in “The Hispanic Challenge” ...…………………………………………… 99 Table 10: “The Threat of White Nativitism?”…...........................….………………………… 108 Table 11: ENGL 11001 Final Examination…..………………………………………………. .125 Table 12: “EASY PREY”………………………………………………………………………135 Table 13: A Venezuelan Identity……………………………………………………………….141 Table 14: A Taiwanese Identity………………………………………………………………...146 Table 15: A Columbian Identity………………………………………………………………..149 Table 16: A Nigerian Identity…………………………………………………………………..152 INTRODUCTION What matters is knowing how to make meaning like the natives do. -Jay Lemke, 2004 ESOL students who arrive in the United States just prior to beginning their collegiate experiences in American universities pursue academic literacy first by attempting to make meaning in ways their cultures have afforded them. Such affordances, though culturally rich in contexts with which students are familiar, often leave students challenged by institutional contexts that permeate higher education in the United States. A most salient context for undergraduate students, the composition classroom, exists primarily to foster students’ acquisition of academic literacy. Some instructional challenges that mar ESOL composition and guide this study, however, are the myriad conceptualizations of academic literacy in English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) composition. These conceptualizations include lexico- syntatic proficiency (Hinkel, 2003; Schleppegrell, 2002; Celce-Murcia, 2002); contextualized "social languages" (Gee, 2002); competencies (Scarcella, 2002); behaviors (Blanton, 1998); and socially and politically contextualized teaching and learning (Columbi & Schleppegrell, 2002; Ramanathan, 2002; Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995; Leki & Carson, 1997). The varied approaches to academic literacy affect not only ways instructors construct syllabi for composition courses but also ways students perform in those classes. ESOL students, in any first year writing class, will very likely face challenges including varying degrees of lexiosyntatic competence, particular cultural and linguistic approaches to meaning making, and the above cited myriad of conceptualizations of academic literacy, in theory and in instruction. 2 They will also face instructional contexts without awareness of course content when they move from one composition class to another, from one instructor to another, from one institution to another. The students in my classes are no exception. I know this to be true because I am an ESOL composition instructor at a university in a suburb of a metropolitan area in the South Eastern U.S. While I have taught composition for twenty years, I have taught ESOL students during the past six years. Within that time, I have become increasingly cognizant of ESOL students’ ability; that knowledge informs my teaching. And even though these students did not enter my classes with an awareness of the instructional model they would experience, they soon learned that the knowledge they bring, the cultural affordances they hold, contributed to the instructional model I introduced. They discovered also that the instructional model did not represent an “either or” dichotomy. That is, instruction did not focus either on appropriate lexicosyntatic proficiency or on language as a socially situated phenomenon; rather, it took on “both and,” that is, lexicosyntatic systems and context. Instruction in these classes combined experiences with language as socially situated and culturally