Abstract
This chapter examines the struggles of bilingual authors to write in English as an additional language. Autobiographical works in English illustrate themes found to be central to the development of biliteracy. The theme of finding voice is a highly variable theme in the writing of many bilinguals. The theme of constructing identity takes multiple forms as bilingual authors renegotiate their identities in the additional language. The struggle for place is a theme that permeates the narratives of expatriation, exile, immigration, and repatriation. These three struggles offer new writers opportunities to learn to develop their own creativity. Teachers of English as an additional language can structure their curricula to reflect the language learning practice of reading and writing.
TopStruggles To Find Voice
Classic expressivist composition theory (Elbow, Murray, etc.) view writing as fundamentally a matter of voice which Ramanathan and Atkinson (1999) identify as a reflection of the cultural value of a private, independent, original, and assertive self characteristic of the ideology of western individualism. However, some cultures find the notion of individualism in western writing to conflict with their first language (L1) cultural values, and consequently their cultural positionings and expectations differ or conflict with those valued and promoted in the United States (U.S.) Scollon and Scollon (1981) first observed this in the conflict experienced by indigenous Athabaskan students in Alaska, who refused to display their self as distinct from their community values in essays required for college composition classes.
Other cultures, such as Japanese, as Matsuda (2001) shows, construct voice differently than in English. In the case of Japanese, voice is constructed through a number of language specific features (e.g., use of tense, honorifics, and the absence of pronouns), which minimize the narrator’s role as agent. According to Dyer and Friederich (2002), Japanese student writers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) grapple with the distinction between him/herself (autobiographical self) and his/her narrator (authorial self) in personal essays.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Identity: The characteristics and qualities that is unique to a person that distinguish one person from the next.
Narrative: A flowing story in a spoken or a written format.
Authors: A creator of a piece of writing.
Struggles: Energetic engagement to get free in pursuit of a goal.
Bilingual: The skill to be able to use two languages.
Creativity: Transforming imagination into reality.
Cross-Cultural: The phenomenon that compares cultures to identify which specific qualities form cultural differences.
Autobiography: A type of a biography, which tells the life story of an author from the author’s perspective.
Voice: The consistent yet distinctive traits that form a unique writing style for an author.
Writers: A person who communicates in a written form to convey his or her ideas.