A Progymnasmata for Our Time: Adapting Classical Exercises to Teach Translingual Style

Abstract

Scholarship on language difference has strived for decades to transform teaching practices in mainstream, developmental, and second-language writing classrooms. Despite compelling arguments in support of linguistic diversity, a majority of secondary and postsecondary writing teachers in the US still privilege Standard English. I join a number of scholars in arguing for a revival of classical style and the progymnasmata, albeit with the unique agenda of strengthening pedagogies of language difference. Although adapting classical rhetorics to promote translingual practices such as code-meshing at first seems to contradict the spirit of language difference given the dominant perception of Greco-Roman culture as imperialistic and intolerant of diversity, I reread rhetoricians such as Quintilian in order to recover their latent multilingual potential.

Notes

¹I thank RR reviewers Frank Farmer and Paul Kei Matsuda for their encouragement and the rigor of their insights throughout the revision process for this article. I also owe thanks to Nancy Myers, Kelly Ritter, and Stephen Yarbrough for their guidance and mentorship.

²Because code-meshing and translingual writing are relatively new terms in the field, I have tried to use them alongside more familiar concepts such as language difference and linguistic diversity. My own reading of work on code-meshing and translingual writing is that these terms serve as unifying and purposefully open-ended concepts that synthesize a lengthy list of other terms including multicompetency, metalinguistic awareness, human language rights, and even more specific names that describe interactions among language users via contact linguistics. The authors of this recent CCC article provide a thorough definition of translingual writing in a chart that may be helpful to readers who are unfamiliar with recent developments in language difference pedagogies.

³My article also builds on Ellen C. Carillo's use of stylistic figures of thought as pedagogical tools for literacy development.

⁴For more research on metalinguistic awareness and multicompetence, see Wagner et al., Horning et al., and Harrington et al.

⁵Adams and other sociolinguists use the term codeswitching when they refer to what Young, Canagarajah, and Horner call, more broadly, code-meshing. Readers may want to see work by Carol Myers-Scotton for a more detailed exploration of code-switching and language variation from a sociolinguistic perspective.

⁶Quintilian also criticizes Latin's poverty of language in Book XII, giving additional examples of the constraints it imposes on eloquence compared to Greek (10.8.27–34).

⁷These exercises and stylistic devices are available online through various websites. In particular I recommend Brigham Young University's website Silvae Rhetoricae, having incorporated it into my teaching for nearly four years now.