2/20 Lape and Brice

Lape's discussion of toggling can easily be integrated into Brice's example of cross-cultural rhetorics. In fact, it seems that even though we "toggle" between HOC/LOC with native English speakers, it provides a "polite," "safe," and thoughtful approach to working with students from other backgrounds, cultures, countries, and languages. I was thinking about this in relation to when an ELL student says to me in tutoring sessions, something like, "I want it to sound fluent" or, more specifically, "I need help with grammar and verbs to sound fluent." I'm always caught with this request because "fluency" is not just about grammar (I've had many students in my classes who are native English speakers but whose writing does not sound like a native English speaker's); nor is "fluency" only about word choice or expression, because there is a deep grammatical/patterned element to it. But as I was reading Lape and particularly Brice, I was also thinking about the ways that we communicate fluency apart from writing, the ways we expect native and non-native speakers to be familiar with our terms about writing, or, as Brice brings up, the way we expect them to have the codes of a thesis or essay's structure already in place.

A disadvantage to the student and to the tutor, in working through cross-cultural rhetorics, is the expectation on both to create something that abides by our working standards (i.e. when Brice encouraged Phillip to have a thesis statement, despite his cultural aversion to prediction). I struggle with this because it seems always like micro-colonialism--another continuous enactment of Western oppression. And yet, there remains an advantage here, and that is style and standards that make communication meaningful for the dominant culture in which the university/college/workplace exists.

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