A few weeks ago, with about three days notice, I was asked to help facilitate a writing workshop with some of the Indonesian staff of The Nature Conservancy. Actually, the conversation went something like this:
“There’s a non-profit that is headquartered in the United States that wants wants its employees in Indonesia to improve their written communication with the office in Virginia, so they have contracted us to do a writing workshop for three days. Can you help?” This question from my Indonesian language teacher, and department colleague, and friend, who phrases such matters as questions grammatically but which she has already answered for you.
So, “yes, of course I can help with that. What’s the name of the organization?”
“TNC.”
“TNC?” My ears perked a little bit. “What does that stand for?”
And so I learned that The Nature Conservancy (‘The,’ not ‘the,’ as I learned when the welcome I’d written for the PowerPoint hello was helpfully edited for me while I was out of the room) worked in Indonesia, and I became very excited. They work on the coral reefs in Bali, where we had snorkeled, and forests in Borneo that we hope to visit, and I love the…er, The…Nature Conservancy for the work they do in the United States, already, so I was thrilled to have a chance to learn about the work here and to meet people committed to those enterprises in Indonesia.
It takes about five minutes in Java, and everywhere else I’ve been in Indonesia, to get the fact that this is a country in environmental crisis. For one thing, littering is simply not a social concern here – I cannot count the number of times that I have watched people throw trash out the bus window, or out of the car, or just dropped things on the street. (Seamus now, in ways that I am not sure are helpful, has enough Indonesian now to lecture people when he sees them do this.) From the ferry’s arrival into Lombok from Bali, at about nine at night, I have an indelible image of seemingly hundreds of lit cigarette butts tracing their way into the ocean as people prepared to disembark. Rivers here are clogged with plastic debris, and there really is trash all over the place.
But the crisis of course goes far deeper than that. Indonesia is a country incredibly rich in natural resources, from fish to oil to lumber to minerals, and one with enough lack of government regulations or lack of attention to existing regulations to make it a very friendly place for foreign corporations. And it is a poor country, too, in which the matters of day-to-day survival simply make environmental issues seem less important. The overwhelming corruption of the government here make dealing with such matters seemingly impossible. And yet the country is becoming choked on itself, at least so it seems to me, in ways that are impossible to sustain. So I was pleased to meet some people working to address those issues in critical places.
The workshop was fairly standard stuff for the day I ran things, in part because I didn’t have so much time to prepare. Beginning, I asked them to write what they would tell somebody about why TNC’s work in Indonesia was important – why did it matter? Most interesting to me in their responses was the blend of environmental work with a focus on sustainable community economic development, reminding me that in Indonesia, as perhaps everywhere else, environmental work must also be human rights work. I wanted to remind them that improving work was the goal of this workshop too – it wasn’t to “make them better writers” or “improve their English” – it would matter, if it mattered, in service of those larger goals. I asked the group of about 12 to make a list of all the types of texts they wrote during a typical week, and then I asked them to make a list of all the people they wrote to, and a list of the purposes they wrote various texts. From the perspective of my field, this is a pretty basic approach, designed to help them realize that there is no “one best way” to write something, that the text always must adapt to a variety of factors, and that they have to hold all those in mind, especially audience, when writing.
They had sent along some writing samples, and I copied a couple of them to use as discussion pieces. They were, for the most part, perfectly capable writers of English, able to communicate complex ideas and concepts, deliver scientific data, report on progress in local community development, and so forth. The most interesting discussion came from the following writing sample, which I reproduced in that teacherly way, where you give a class something because you know it will get the semi-canned answer you want. My favorite moments as a teacher come when the answers I get vary wildly from the canned answer I had been planning my curriculum. I expected them to read it like I read it, with an eye to how convoluted it was in addressing the main point of the email:
Dear Deputy Director of Science,
With this e-mail, I would like to share an issue relate a plan to revise the Wakatobi National Park (WNP) zoning system. As you knew before, the prior zoning which developed 2 years ago was not fully operate as well. And now District Government of WakatobiWakatobi had the spatial plan especially for the coastal and marine area with the national park zoning system. Why because of that promised budget they want to revise the zoning system of the park and create a spatial plan project to realize it? There is no big deal to do that this time. Because the National Park zoning system was integrate coastal and land area. They must not act like that.
Firstly, revise the zoning is earlier than mentioned in the management plan document. This is mean break the agreement which had signed before. Secondly, from my point of view this plan was not reasonable. It was because the prior zoning system not evaluated yet then they were straight to revise it. In my perspective, before decide to revise a zoning system need to measure and evaluate what have done so far with the prior zoning. A further study to find out advantage and disadvantage of that zoning system is important. After knowing advantage and disadvantage of the prior zoning system, we can start decide to revise it or not. In this condition, biological, economical facts, would valuable to be used as basic to improve the prior system. For example from biological fact, we can map coral reef coverage in the National Park, existing locations of fish spawning aggregation, size of fish etc. This process will take time and is not easy to deal with local community about the zoning system in a short time. This is will give our organization extra work out of work plan and it is not yet budgeted in this fiscal year.
My opinion, this is not correct to support them revise the zoning system only because extra budget that promised by Central Government without consider any scientific reason or field facts behind the decision. That is all my issue that I want share with you and your attention please.
I’m curious what other American readers made of this, if you had to read it several times to understand it, like I did. This was a draft, so I am leaving aside the errors in usage and mechanics - I’m more interested in the structure and My point in showing it was to emphasize the lack of directness in the letter, how its main point was shelved until the second to last sentence of the email. I assumed that everyone would immediately point this out as well. But the group of participants was uniform in its praise of the email: clear, lucid, made its arguments well, and so forth. They really liked it.
Of course at that point we had to stop and work through this. What became instantly clear to me, in a way I had understood intellectually but have rarely had the opportunity to grasp so clearly, was that we read this email differently based on cultural expectations about discourse. Indonesians, I have learned, are not comfortable about coming at something straight-on. To begin the email announcing that the zoning system should not be revised until further review would have sounded too direct, too abrupt. Instead, it remains at the end, and it too is couched in softer language – “not correct to support” – than I would have used.
At one point, a biologist who studies the reefs in Bali became very frustrated, and asked, “Are you telling us we have to change the way we think if we want to communicate well in English?” To my mind, there is no more important question for teachers of the English language all over the globe. I comfortably answer with a fairly loud “no,” but that’s not enough of an answer, of course. Language teachers typically think they are teaching grammar and vocabulary, but they are also teaching values around language use, of course. I used to become frustrated with the curriculum (written in advance and handed to me) in my Public Speaking course last semester, because it was based completely on modes of argument coming from English language academic venues, with no self-reflection about how argument and speaking occurred in Indonesia. To teach the structure without a careful analysis of the cultural values it promotes is to leave out the centrally most important aspect of the writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment