subject: Students Need to Learn to Work across a Variety of Englishness and Languages [print this page] In Cross-Language Relations in Composition, the July 2006 College English special issue to which these scholars contributed, Horner argues that "students need to learn to work within and among and across a variety of Englishes and languages". Although composition scholars have already done this important work of responding to the various manifestations of English Only policy in the United States, they and other English scholars should view the present Links Of London Friendship Bracelets debate about a national security language policy as an exigent moment to articulate specific ends for a multilingual language arts education.
The election of Barack Obama makes this language policy debate no less pressing either, because national security, international diplomacy, and education are still high-priority items on the federal government's agenda. Composition, literature, and linguistics faculty in English departments, working alongside foreign language scholars at their schools and in organizations such as the Modern Language Association (MLA), should advocate a policy that promotes humanistic values. In creating the current form of the national security language policy, President Bush, high-ranking U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) officials, scholars at the Defense Language Institute, and several congressional leaders have been motivated in part by retired Israeli General Arie Amit's 2002 warning that the United States would not win its global war against terrorists unless it understands "their language, their literature, and their poetry" (qtd. in Porter 4).
This policy would provide financial resources in order to motivate schools to refocus their programs on these languages and these literatures. The purpose of the present essay is not to deny the significance of national security needs as part of what a multilingual society should be able to address. Rather, the essay calls on English scholars to analyze all of the effects that follow from linking "language instruction" to "national security" and to work toward seeing that the emerging national language policy attends to the political, social, and cultural needs of the many language communities within U.S. borders.
With this purpose in mind, I first analyze the policy debate concerning a national security Links Of London Charms "language crisis," highlighting in particular how President Bush's NSLI, several DoD documents, and congressional legislative proposals present designs for a national educational infrastructure that is grounded in definitions of foreign languages as military tools. I then move from critique to action by proposing three strategies that English scholars can pursue in their classrooms, in collaboration with their colleagues in foreign language departments, and in shaping institutional policy writing at their colleges and universities to promote multilingualism as a means of dialoguing to understand and resolve differences, rather than only to infiltrate and defeat enemies.
Students Need to Learn to Work across a Variety of Englishness and Languages
