| This study seeks to understand "global English," through an inter-disciplinary perspective informed by new rhetorical genre theory and postcolonial studies, by examining post-secondary schooling as a local context where discourses on English and positionalities of non-native speakers configure themselves. Focusing on China and Chinese international students in Canada as pragmatic cross-cultural sites for the study, this project participates in three interrelated areas of inquiry: the writing contexts---and their attendant subjectivities---of cross-cultural students, contrastive rhetorical assumptions about cross-cultural student writing, and discursive constructions of English as a global language.; I examine cross-cultural student writing as a social, cultural, and political activity fraught with negotiation and repositioning on the part of the students. I speculate that in the act of composing there is always tension and struggle between cross-cultural students' particular subject positions and the hegemonic forces of Western discourse. The concepts of genre and meta-genre are explored as both constraining and generative aspects of student writing. In turn, I consider the writing contexts of cross-cultural students as sites for social action and identity formation as well as occasions for interrogation of Western knowledge-making practices.; Students' experiences are juxtaposed with professional discussion about diversity, in particular, contrastive rhetorical assumptions about cultural difference in student writing. Suspecting that the notion of cultural difference can be recruited to the service of universalism, I examine how contrastive rhetorical assumptions about cultural difference may intersect with Western discursive constructions of English as a global language, and how they may share origins in colonial binaristic representations of Self and Other: from the native speaker/non-native speaker dichotomy to the assumptions about the cultures of those acquiring English.; My interest in this study is to develop an inter-disciplinary perspective that can accommodate more complex and more democratic ways of understanding academic literacy in cross-cultural situations. I suggest that, to address serious challenges diversity poses to traditional assumptions about cultural difference, researchers and educators need to go beyond cultural "facts" or the simple comparison of facts to engage in developing the knowledge and sensitivities needed for cross-cultural understanding that involve critical self-reflection. |
