Academic Discourse vs. Home Discourse

Barbara’s article Plateau Indian Ways with Words shows how the indigenous rhetoric affect Plateau Indian students’ writing and brings us back to our discussion of home discourse vs. academic discourse, but in a broader way. Reading the previous articles and the current ones, I can confirm one fact: the person who speaks is the person who writes. However when we write, we always put on a different identity with scientific characteristics. We try to use different expressions and different syntactical structures as well as we exert efforts to explain every point mentioned since we do not expect that our readers know our context or our subject. But in oral discourse the case is different. When we speak, we use different registers and depend largely on stress, rhythm and intonation. The difference between the two discourses, then, is fait accompli; but the most important questions that we should ask are “ is there anything bad with either discourse?” and “can we combine both discourses in a piece of composition?”
And to answer the two questions, we need first to discuss the issue of identity. It is a truism that one’s identity is a complex structure. It is shaped and carved by our social practices ( economical, political and cultural) as well as by our social forces (gender, race, and sexuality), all of which differ from one place to another, from one time to another and from one society to another. It is also a truism that our behavior including language is a projection of this identity. The way we eat , the way we walk and the way we speak and write will tell you who we are. It is impossible to find two people who share all these social elements. They may have some in common, but not all of them. In other words, our identities are like our fingerprints. They characterizes us. So, Ali ( a male, heterosexual Arab who came from a working class family, subjected to dictatorship and lived in an Islamic culture) will be different from any other person in our 597 cohort.
We come back to our point. As I said above, our language reflects our identity. Thus, all our social practices and forces will form our language and give it a different flavor. Since this is the case, we should not blame our students for writing such and such or for using a particular expression. In addition, we should not distinguish between them based on the way they write. Our students coming from middle class families, for example, will write better than those coming from poor families, as a general rule. As teachers, then, we should take all this into consideration. We should appreciate what our students compose and understand that their productions are a result of different factors, many of which are not controllable. The challenge for teachers, in my point of view, is how to make academic discourse be part of our students’ identities and how to push them to combine the two discourses in a distinctive and interesting way.
I remember when I was a high school student, I could not differentiate between the two discourses though I wrote very well. The only thing that I considered while I was writing was inserting as many formal expressions as possible. I do not remember I was aware of the other elements of academic discourse. This humble experience confirms the fact that academic discourse should be not be learned but acquired. The hard question is” how do we lead our students to reach this stage”.