Multilingual Writing as Rhetorical Attunement: A Comprehensive Study Guide

Introduction to Multilingual Literate Lives

  • Alicia's Multilingual Profile: Alicia grew up in Argentina, attended bilingual Spanish-English schools, and learned Hebrew. Her grandparents were Arabic-speaking immigrants, providing her with a family tradition of Arabic phrases. She also studied French in high school and learned basic Portuguese from books during family travels to Brazil. She eventually moved to the United States to attend a liberal arts college and became an ESL teacher in the Midwest.
  • Complexity of Practice: Alicia characterizes her language repertoire as "just complex." She notes that while Spanish/English and Spanish/Hebrew are connected in her mind, there is no direct connection between Hebrew and English. When communicating with people who speak both, she describes her mind as a "total mess," feeling the need to translate first into Spanish before switching, which she says "takes double the time."
  • Repertoires as Dynamic: Literate repertoires are not fixed or stable resources that move with writers as static knowledge. Instead, writers create or call on these resources in the process of "making do," asserting themselves, or communicating in transient rhetorical situations.

Defining Rhetorical Attunement

  • Definition: Rhetorical attunement is defined as an ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity. It is a literate understanding that assumes multiplicity and invites the negotiation of meaning across difference.
  • Core Concepts:
    • It is fostered through daily experiences with language variety.
    • It treats language difference as an element at the heart of rhetoric.
    • It involves a sensibility developed over time across geographical and language boundaries.
  • Theoretical Connections:
    • Alignment and Accommodation: Like communication accommodation theory, attunement involves adapting rhetorical strategies to integrate with available meaning in context.
    • Translanguaging and Shuttling: It shares traits with "shuttling" (Canagarajah), "translanguaging" (Garcia), and "translingual dispositions" (Horner et al.), accounting for creative, agentive practices used to make sense of the world.
    • Multicompetence: It aligns with the view of multilinguals as successful multicompetent speakers rather than failed native speakers (Cook).
    • Tuning Metaphors: Paul Prior and Jody Shipka use "tune" to describe how writers sync activities to environments. Andrew Pickering uses "tuning" to convey temporal emergence in the "real time of practice," similar to tuning an instrument.

Methodology of the Study

  • Participants: The research analyzed life history interviews with 2525 multilingual writers in the Midwestern United States.
  • Demographics: The group consisted of immigrants from 1717 different countries speaking 2222 languages.
  • Sampling: Snowball sampling was utilized by asking participants to refer acquaintances reading and writing in multiple languages.
  • Interview Process: Semistructured interviews elicited memories of reading/writing in home countries, current in- and out-of-school literacy activities in English, and reactions to translingual theories.
  • Data Analysis: The study followed the heuristic strategies of grounded theory.
    • Coding: Responses were coded in rounds: looking for patterns, refining categories, and building theoretical arguments.
    • Gerund Coding: Action-oriented codes were used, such as "advocating for literacy" or "struggling with systems."
    • In Vivo Codes: Using the participants' own words to name codes.
    • Memo-ing: A process to refine codes and revise the interview protocol.

Practicing Attunement through Teaching

  • Teaching Philosophy: Many participants employed as bilingual teachers advise students to worry less about "right or wrong." One participant tells students, "Just write. Even if you have to put like some Portuguese or whatever language mixed up, just try. It’s just a start."
  • Alicia’s Pedagogy: She explains to her students that their Spanish-influenced writing (like long sentences) is not "wrong" but simply doesn't "fit" the rules of English writing, which requires a specific intro, connecting sentence, and argument (1,2,31, 2, 3).
  • Yolanda’s Improvisational Method: Yolanda, formerly a veterinarian in Colombia, uses a "comedy" approach in her bilingual science classroom to handle language struggle.
    • She invites collaborative meaning-making, asking students "How do you think you say this?" when encountering difficult scientific terms.
    • She treats families as experts, asking students to consult parents (e.g., a student’s father who is a biology teacher) for pronunciation.
    • She employs the "let it pass" principle (Alan Firth), telling students, "But what if it’s wrong? Doesn’t matter, look at me!"
  • NGO Influences (Nimet’s Account): Nimet describes founding the Azerbaijani English Teachers Association with a friend.
    • They worked outside the government, contacting the British Council, the American ambassador, and the Soros Foundation.
    • The association grew from 1212 people to 800800 members.
    • Nimet’s experience highlights an attunement to the power of English and global political interests.

Essay Writing and Political Context

  • Cultural Expectations: Nimet found the "brief information" and the "a lot of why" required in US application essays uncomfortable compared to her education in Azerbaijan, where end-of-year tests required relaying subject matter without personal opinion.
  • Societal Matching: Nimet observes that one cannot always "match" different societies, noting that her communication "takes a long sentence" to resolve the gap between socially derived norms.
  • Post-Soviet Context:
    • Nimet notes that in the 1515 republics of the Soviet Union, everything in school was in Russian. Learning Russian was a prerequisite for finding a job.
    • Sofia describes essay writing in Russian as descriptive and "long" (writing a page or more to describe a tree), whereas English is perceived as faster and "clear."
    • Sofia links her language use to the history of Ukraine, noting that the south of Ukraine mostly speaks Russian due to historical events.

Tashi’s Narrative: Literacy as Survival

  • Refugee Status: Tashi, a Tibetan in India and later the US, situates her literacy identity in a context of being "countryless."
  • Language Acquisition Strategies: She taught herself English at a boarding school by analyzing newspapers and books.
    • She marked vocabularies and phrases to see how they were used to make "literal" or "applied" meanings.
    • She focused on how writers "play with the words," allowing her to "manipulate whatever [she] want[s] to with the language."
  • System of Discourse: She views her linguistic identity as a "jack of all trades and master of none," speaking Tibetan, English, Hindi, and Kannada.
  • Intergenerational Responsibility: Her teachers instilled a sense of "extra responsibility," framing academic excellence and English mastery as a way to honor donors and ensure a better life for future generations.

Dictionary Use and Linguistic Instability

  • Language Overlap: Sabohi notices the many loan words English has borrowed from Hindi (e.g., "bund"). She concludes that because languages are already "messy," the focus should be on communication and pleasure rather than "the fuss" about standards.
  • Political Mediation: Nimet describes how the lack of a direct English-Azerbaijani dictionary meant she had to go from Azerbaijani to Russian, then Russian to English. This mediated access led her to view "correct" languages as related to political power rather than fixed rules.
  • Methodical Substitution: When Nimet writes in English, she still moves among multiple dictionaries (synonyms, antonyms, homonyms) to negotiate meaning.

Comparing Perspectives on English

  • Stylistic Contrasts: Spanish and Russian speakers in the study often contrast their native languages' preference for long, sophisticated sentences with the English requirement for being "clear" and "precise."
  • The "Chop Chop Chop" Effect: Alicia describes the process of switching to English as "Chop chop chop," removing extra words to meet the organizational norms of English essays.
  • Standards as Subservient: Alicia maintains a "relaxed attitude" toward error, making stylistic standards subservient to her rhetorical purpose. While she uses shorter sentences to be effective, she still prefers her long sentences because they "make sense" to her.
  • The Power of English: Sabohi links the global dominance of English back to India being an English colony, describing a "slave mentality" where the colonizer’s language was imitated for convenience and status preservation through generations.
  • Language Dynamics in Transition: Sofia describes a visit to Ukraine where she felt "discomfortable" because signs had shifted from Soviet Russian toward Ukrainian and English. Despite being from Ukraine, her lack of Ukrainian language skills made her feel distanced from her native land.

Conclusions on Rhetorical Attunement

  • A Chord vs. A Note: The study suggests that while monolingual writers might hear a "note" in language, multilingual writers hear a "chord"—a simultaneous perception of cultural history, politics, "mess," and social power.
  • Attunement as Empathy: Alandra, a participant from Brazil, describes her move across languages as "Conectado" (connected), which she likens to "empathy"—a deep desire to communicate across difference and an appreciation for others' languages.
  • Universality of Variability: Rita Franceschini suggests that monolinguals and multilinguals both exploit language variability, but differ in the "amount and diversity of experience and use."
  • Summary of Attunement: It is a honed sensibility derived from the "specific and felt everyday need" to navigate difference. It allows for a transition from individual literate experience to a collective awareness of language as a conduit of both connection and domination.