Guillermo Lopez

09/18/17
English CTW

Monolingualism

The main point of Matsudas essay, The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity

in U.S. College Composition, is that most college institutions do not recognize the
different forms of english that students may speak. They assume that students that
enter their classes are all at the same level of proficiency in what he calls privileged
english. This however, as Matsuda explains, is rarely ever the case. All students do
not fit the profile that college teachers have which is that of a person who grew up
speaking a formal english and writing in perfect grammatically correct sentences. They
fail to take into account students that do not fit this profile or do not give enough
attention to these students. Professors who do this are not to blame though because
they get this perspective of students from what they see the most in their classes. Most
students that they see are indeed proficient in the privileged form of english but not all
of them. Some are proficient in other languages and those students that are are, for the
most part, international students but instead of stopping to help these students most
professors send them to tutoring centers instead of doing their part to adapt to the
student body. This is more of a modern day issue, Matsuda explains, as in the past
most students were the ones that spoke this english and it wasnt until the end of WWI
that there was an influx of international students due to the Unites States wanting to
maintain healthy relationships with european countries. With this influx of students came
the differences in language that we see today and this in it of itself brought major
problems for composition english classes. Students no longer all spoke the same form
of english thus began the problem of monolingualism in classes. Moreso, colleges have
been alienating students way before this as most institutions began to use placement
tests beginning with Harvard in 1874.
One main point in Matsudas essay is that colleges do not do enough to help
students that do speak different forms of english. They send students to get help from
even less prepared tutors (Matsuda 5) rather than doing their part. This is important
because it does not help these students and makes it so that only privileged english
speaking students can thrive in these classes.
Another main point was how these language differences became prominent in
the early to mid 20th century after World War 1. The war caused the relationships
between the United States and countries in Europe to become less stable so one of the
things that the US did to attempt to keep good relations with European countries was
admit more students to their universities. This influx of non-native english speakers into
a predominantly english speaking university environment introduced new challenges for
universities and professors. One way that universities attempted to fix this was by
creating separate english courses for these students.