Last summer, my grant partner, Dr. Megan-Brette Hamilton, and I consulted and designed the crossover assignment for our spring classes, my Composition II classes and her Introduction to Communication Disorders class. The operating principle was that our students would interview each other, recording the interviews, in order to explore the connections between language and identity from both oral and written perspectives. On the whole, I would say our new assignments succeeded, though there were bound to be a few logistical problems in arranging interview partners and having the students schedule their own interviews outside of class time.
Nevertheless, to be utilitarian about it, I think the benefits gained from the assignment outweighed the few difficulties that arose, but since these latter were largely logistical, let me address them first. We decided to assign our students interview partners as a matter of expediency, but Dr. Hamilton’s class had about sixty-four students and my combined Composition II classes had fifty students, which meant some students were arranged in pairs and others in triads. Clearly arranging a meeting with three is a tad more complicated than arranging one for two.
We also had to rely on each student to responsibly contact their partners and show up for their mutually scheduled interview. Indeed, there were a few students who didn’t follow through on the obligations of the assignment, and in those few cases we either quickly found substitute interview partners or, in what we considered a last-case event, we assigned them a partner from their own class. Nevertheless, most of the interviews were successful and many of the students reported it as an enlightening experience.
The other complication we hadn’t anticipated, though perhaps I should have, was that six of my fifty students were citizens of the People’s Republic of China, for whom English was a second, if not a third language. However, this may have been a fortunate bump in the road as it added a broader perspective to the subject of language and identity, and, for some of the American students, it may have been their first extended encounter with a person for whom English was not the native language. In any case, I can’t imagine any student who wouldn’t benefit from thinking about the assumptions we make when we hear people speak or write, or about the disregard we have for how others may perceive the way we communicate them.
Ultimately, we want the students to consider how closely enmeshed language and identity are, to raise their linguistic self-awareness. In the case of my composition students, I want them to listen to others talk about their language experience and to share their own. I want them to record this conversation so that they can listen to the exchange again, more closely and as often as they like, and also, one hopes, to listen to themselves as they communicate with others. So, having done the interviews, they then write a report detailing its key points and, in keeping with my composition course theme of sustainability, drawing a conclusion regarding the sustenance of cultural identity through language.
Many of the students, as a consequence of their interviews, described the importance of audience to communication choices, regionalisms, prejudices associated with linguistic styles, the differences between language disorders and learned speaking patterns, and the stress of maintaining patterns of communication regarded as standard or formal. Truly it would be fascinating to follow up with these students later to see how lasting these insights have been and where they might have applied them.