Clarissa Surek-Clark: Pidgins and Creoles

First of all: mad props to linguists everywhere, I love how elaborate, communication-oriented, and detail-oriented this field of study is. Struggling through the reading for this week, I imagined that linguists play an unbiased role in quantifying/qualifying elements of a mode of communication in order to determine its social status/status as a language, without referencing opinions regarding the future of what the speech will look like, or "should" look like. The approach feels scientific and objective. In this case, I absolutely see why prescriptivism is an appropriate lens through which to assess pidgins/creoles/languages, as using strict grammatical standards across languages can help infer social/historical connections in words, sounds, and phrases among different areas. So, it was very exciting when Professor Surek Clark used this lens to help highlight the connections we were experiencing as we read the samples in class. However, I also thought about prescriptivism as it is used in a general educational context, and how it is an implicit requirement for our speech and writing in different spaces. I struggle with the idea of whether following prescriptivism in every area of communicative language use (in general) is a good thing.

At the writing center, a lot of people come into the center asking to work on "grammar" (I'm using quotes because grammar has so many meanings for writers: some people want to make sure their article use and use of present tense is applied correctly, whereas others want to restructure the flow of ideas in their papers). When we have finished looking at "big picture" items, like content, use of evidence and effective organization, we start sweating the small stuff. Often, the writer asks excellent questions about grammatical rules (especially when I mention an exception to a previously-referenced grammatical rule) and I get embarrassed because often I don't know WHY that exception occurs, and I certainly don't want to say "well..erm... just because!" Whenever this happens, I realize just how implicit my acquisition of grammatical rules was, and how it was so heavily but ambiguously reinforced in my K-12 education. I am not saying it's a bad thing, but I do want to study more about grammar usage so that I can make less arbitrary and more meaningful references to the use of grammar.

But here's one thing that tends to get me riled up at the writing center; writers for whom English is not their first language (often international students) so often come in with papers that are wonderfully-organized and full of critically engaging content, but their content may be treated dismissively by instructors in the interest of seeing the paper written in "proper English". But if a paper does not contain global grammatical errors (that is, grammar that could actually confuse the meanings behind the phrase), has only minor mistakes, and has amazing content, that content is what needs to be critically assessed and given more attention! I also thought of it this way - if the student were arguing the content of their paper verbally in front of the instructor, his/her accent (which could include eliminating or adding in extra articles into speech, using different tenses... stuff that speakers of so many languages often do, including my family members) would not be the basis for assessment; their content would be. Why does this need to be so different on paper? The argument for prescriptivism in everyday life can certainly go both ways (and I'm trying to be moderate about it), but I also think there are cases in education in which we need to be conscious of the context in which we apply prescriptivism; we may consider the ways in which we need it, and the ways in which we possibly do not.