Preface
In 1995 I received my MA in English, Composition and Rhetoric, from Eastern Washington University (EWU) in Cheney, Washington near Spokane. This was a teaching degree designed to train me for teaching writing at the community college level, but I initially had no intention of teaching. I had come into the program almost 14 years after receiving my BFA in Communication Arts (primarily Speech and Theatre) from Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) in Tacoma, Washington, to improve my own writing, intending to work primarily as a socio-political writer.
The dilemma early in this program was that halfway through my first quarter, in the spring of 1993, sitting in a traditional grammar course taught Dr. Marc Lester, I realized I couldn’t possibly do the rhetoric aspect of my degree any justice without comparing and contrasting the rhetorical standards of English and those of other languages; there were just too many first-language speakers of other languages in this country to expect every person coming to a piece of my future writing to automatically understand the thrust of whatever my topic might be. By that time, too, I had realized that I might also enjoy teaching, and the inter-language, inter-cultural rhetoric problem was going to be even more pronounced in the classroom. I felt I needed a background in bridging the gaps, and the only way to get that at EWU was to take the four core classes of the English as a Second Language (ESL) MA teaching degree as my electives for my composition and rhetoric degree. This turned into five classes, as the director of the ESL master’s program, Dr. LaVona Reeves, and a colleague of hers in anthropology put together an experimental course in psycholinguistics.
By the time of the psycholinguistics course I had determined to make the comparative rhetoric and linguistics the basis of my professional paper (my program’s equivalent of a thesis) and had named Reeves to direct my project, despite the fact that she was going into her tenure year when I would be in the bulk of the writing. This turned out to be a boon to my study and research, however, as LaVona and I disagreed on some matters of basic language-learning theory, such as Critical Age Theory (now commonly referred to as Critical Period Hypothesis), plus we had to use some interesting rhetoric methods ourselves just to accomplish all the necessary conferences on my project.
These decisions had come out of a five-week professional seminar for teachers generally already in the classroom that I took as my second quarter during the summer of 1993. Reeves had come in for a two-day demonstration of working with foreign languages and their speakers. At one point, she instructed us each to write for ten minutes in any language other than English that we knew, or in English for those who were monolingual (which was one teacher in the class). We were to write whatever came off our pens, essentially without stopping for correction, just to see what came out. This was a process we learned later in my program, called “free writing” (a tool for dealing with, among other things, “writer’s block”), but which Reeves tended to call “mind spill” whenever teaching it.
During that ten minutes I wrote in German, my known but unused second language, and discovered that words I hadn’t used in over ten years came flowing off my pen properly constructed and in proper syntax. This was an immediate lesson in what the mind retains of language and language learning, and it did two things for me: it triggered memories of my own early language learning and that of my two sons, and this subsequently made me aware of some flaws in language-learning theory and education that later became painfully clear in my disagreements with Reeves over Critical Age Theory and with some of the concepts presented in the psycholinguistics course.
I won’t be discussing these extensively here, because the groundwork of my actual professional paper must be laid, after which I will publish a subsequent book based upon my further observations, research, and conclusions since receiving my MA in 1995. In this second book I shall discuss the further development of my ideas and ideals regarding language learning and instruction, social and instructional languages, and the rhetoric involved. I will demonstrate the practical experience of why I have become even more adamant against such fallacies as Critical Age Theory and their application (at least regarding second-language acquisition), as well as why I now challenge some of my own earlier thinking as equally limited and why I support now more than ever a fully multilingual society and educational system.
The foundation, however, is my professional paper from 1995, which is presented here unaltered from its original form, except for formatting concerns relating to consistency in reading and spacing for the 2013 reader. I have double justified the text margins, though the APA standard of the day was to justify the left margin only, as this is what people are used to reading in trade books. I have standardized longer quotes so they are more consistently set apart from the main text, rather than some being buried within the text (as was the APA standard of the day). Additionally, I originally used the standard of the day of double-spacing between sentences, but have noticed that everything I now read is single-spaced between sentences, so I have shifted the text to this standard. I have refigured the pagination in the Table of Contents to reflect the actual pagination of the current edition, rather than that of the original, so as to avoid confusing the current reader. I, also, have corrected a few typographical errors in the original text.
Also, it needs to be noted that as this Essay was presented originally in 1995, the references in it are dated. This, however, can be overlooked in context, particularly given the continuing debate which has transpired since and become even more divided and virulent at times, both regarding English as a primary or official language in this country and regarding immigration laws. It also should be considered that I shall be following this project in the not-too-distant future with the additional book mentioned above, which shall include much more recent references.
Finally, in regards to the two original case studies included in the current volume, it should be noted that I have recorded them as they occurred, with interrupted thoughts and sentences, vocalized pauses, grammatical mis-speak in context, and the like. Thus, they are filled with ellipses, particularly in the case of the conversation with Celia. I believe this more clearly demonstrates the actual conversational use of language by my two subjects, as well as some of my own, and this should help demonstrate some of my points.
David Trotter
Seattle, Washington, USA
January, 2017