Strangeness Will Always Win

Harklau's and Kachru's chapters were very troubling for me as a student of creative writing. Though I do not yet have experience in the TESOL classroom from what I gather it seems to be very similar to the environment of the creative writing workshop. In a workshop each student comes from a different background of literature study, and in this respect each student comes with their own unique language. What an instructor of a creative writing workshop attempts to do, in a sense is to promulgate a new language understanding and practice. From the accounts of these two chapters I believe that ESL and creative writing workshops have nearly the exact same goals. However, a key difference in creative writing classroom and ESL writing classrooms is apparent, especially in the disturbing quotes from ESL teachers in Harklau's chapter: 

So she [Grayson] picks the  paper and she,…goes, "This is not your work!…No, I don't believe it This is perfect you could have not do it…No…It's odd for you to write about Germany!

and

He complained that she was writing very "romantic" essays talking about cultural identity and feeling stranded between cultures, which he characterized as expressive writing that did not meet course goals.

and

 Other people from Vietnam disagreed. You'll have to talk to one another!

It is my severe hope that this cited incidents were merely an unfortunate occasion of ignorant, bad teachers, however I have the inclination that these types of interactions are not isolated. 

When approaching the teaching of writing, even if it is in a person's or group's L1, experimentation and writing towards subjects for which student are enthusiastic, must always be encouraged. It may seem contradictory to encourage non-traditional styles of writing, when attempting to improve students' academic approach, but I believe that allowing students to explore the L2 writing in a way that actively engages their thoughts and interests, as opposed to shutting them down often to a point of creating classroom resistance behaviors, will allow them not only to open-up new language code pathways into the academic style of writing, but it will also help to foster the formation of a more confident L2 cultural identity (in whatever form that may present itself). It seems vastly ironic to me, that the ESL writing classroom environment seems to be one of identity restriction because as Harklau cites in her chapter: 

Learning how to writing in another language produces profound changes in those who live and work in other countries…"writing is so tied to thinking—the inner expression of a person's being—and to communicate style—its outer expression—thus touching the core of the writer's identity" (120). 

It would be a valuable experience for TESOL/ESL writing instructors to take a creative writing workshop so that they too could experience the difficulty it is to write in a foreign language, and furthermore how troubling it can be to have others critique a piece of personal writing that may be held very close to one's heart. As Kachru points out it important perhaps to remember that "a narrow view of what constitutes good writing may shut out a large number of original studies from publication and dissemination because most information technology is controlled in the Inner Circle." The hegemony of native English writers may, in blatant self-righteousness, work to diligently exclude non-native approaches to writing simply because their individual style (that is often multicultural/bilingual in its conception and execution when writing in English), does not conform to preconceived notions about what standard English is, or should be. 

Weirdness, estranged, broken, disjointed, and unfamiliar uses of English however, are encouraged in the creative writing classroom. And where does new literature begin its journey to the public readership? In the writing classroom where innovation is encouraged.

In an essay by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Robert Brinley entitled "What Is a Minor Literature?", these types of L2 writings are encouraged. In fact they claim that all of Franz Kafka's achievements in literary greatness stem directly from the strangeness in his German, German being his L2. It is the "desiccated vocabulary, incorrect syntax…[that] in general we could call intensive or tensor the linguistic elements (however varied) which express the 'inner tensions of a language,' (22) that make writing interesting.

So, I beg you future ESL/TESOL educators, spare your students conformity and help them embrace the  strange and peculiar territory of writing in their L2.