[Teaching_Composition] NEW MODULE

[Russ Hunt]

I've spent a little time working in Europe, with the sort of people 
Chris and others have expressed their awe of (which I entirely share: 
my best German friend's home is effortlessly trilingual, and all the 
now grown kids speak at least a couple of others besides French, 
German and English -- his middle daughter, for instance, married an 
Italian and lives outside Reggio Emelia). The discussion about strange 
idioms in English raises for me my humiliation when, at conferences 
where everybody but the North Americans speak a half dozen languages, 
the conference lingua franca is English and (some of) the native 
speakers of English use their command of all those English shibboleths 
to dominate the conversation and marginalize those struggling with 
arbitrary preposition customs and syntactic practices.

I've seen the same thing when articles published by non-native 
speakers are dismissed because they don't control those shibboleths. 
So when one of my students writes, as she did last week, "the article 
that I have did research on is about," I struggle to ignore the verb 
and take what she has to say seriously, because she, like my 
colleagues in Germany and the Netherlands, is not a native speaker of 
academic English.

-- Russ

Russell Hunt
Department of English
St. Thomas University
http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/