Ramanathan, Vai. (2002). The Politics of TESOL Education: Writing, Knowledge, Critical Pedagogy. Reviewed by Jon Reyhner, Northern Arizona University

	Ramanathan, Vai. (2002). The Politics of TESOL Education: Writing, Knowledge, Critical Pedagogy. New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer. Pp. ix + 186 $22.95 (Paper)     ISBN 0-415-93353-6 Reviewed by Jon Reyhner Northern Arizona University May 25, 2004 The intended audience of this book is “all professionals involved in English-language teaching and learning (ELTL) and L1 [first language] teachers” (p. 8), and it focuses on teaching writing at the university level. Key questions addressed in the book are the micro- and macro-contexts that Teachers of English to speakers of other languages (“TESOLers,” as the author calls them) learn and teach in, how the writing assignments TESOL students are required to produce in their preparation programs socialize them into their profession, and what is “appropriate written knowledge—specifically college-level academic prose—and how this knowledge is to be displayed and the (textual) politics of such display” (p. 11). Ramanathan also poses the question whether the TESOL professional organization needs to develop standards for college level ESL students, whereas currently they only have K-12 standards. The book has some things that this reviewer found annoying, including the extensive use of the acronyms, such as “TC” for “thought collectives,” which seem to be similar enough to subcultures that the use of this more common term might have helped the reader. Sometimes the author states the obvious, such as saying that chapter 2 “demonstrates by example ways in which the divergent evolving cognitions of TESOLers are, to a large extent, shaped by the programs in which they are enrolled” (p. 15). However, while not new, the idea that Ramanathan weaves through this book is that teachers of English-as-a-second language (ESL) should not only pick up the “tools of the trade” but also gain a critical understanding how these tools are not value-free and how they fit into larger social-political environments is an important one. To do this the author starts out in the first chapter on “The Politics of (TESOL) Thought Collectives” with a discussion of the sociology of knowledge based on the work of Karl Mannheim (1952) and Berger and Luckman (1966), among others. The second chapter on “The Politics of Local MA-TESOL Programs and Implications for the Larger TC” was originally published by the author in the TESOL Quarterly. This chapter compares and contrasts two ESL teacher preparation programs at the Masters degree level, one on the eastern United States in an English department and another in the western United States in a linguistics department. The author examines the cultures of the two programs and their dependence on graduate students who teach freshman composition courses. In both cases, the TESOL program, as a teacher-education program, had lower prestige in its department but was valued for its enrollment and the service its students provided staffing lower division courses, especially for international students who needed to improve their English. The third chapter on “The Politics of Genres and Text Types” discusses issues such as the three levels of authorship. Authors write to earn a living by addressing a market, authors use language conventions to express their own thoughts, and finally the authors’ thinking is socially produced.” A critical issue discussed in this chapter is how “L2 [second language] students are disadvantaged because genres are not explicitly taught” (p. 83). These genres vary from the simple European fairy tale that is signaled by a story starting “Once upon a time…” to the research genre of a Reading Research Quarterly article that includes sections on methodology, population, results, discussion, and so forth. This chapter gives a good overview of what freshman composition instructor needs to know, particularly in regard to ESL and minority students. Depending upon a student’s major, they may need to develop quite different writing skills: “The sciences and the social sciences, for instance, typically discourage the use of personal pronouns, active-voice verbs, and stylish prose, whereas the humanities often encourage them” (p. 127). The fourth chapter on the “Politics of Written Knowledge” discusses the need to uncover latent assumptions in classroom materials. Ramanathan notes, “Textbooks are inherently ideological tools, both progressive and retrogressive, depending on the social context” (pp. 87-88). She indicates that TESOL students need to “recognize that their ‘commonsensical,’ ‘natural’ ways of organizing information are based on culturally valued social practices” (p. 88), but one would hope that would occur even before students reach college. One very interesting cross- language illustration is given on pages 99 and 100 where in an example from Berman and Slobin (1994) children retell a story from a set of pictures without words. Students speaking different languages retold the story quite differently based on “the linguistic possibilities inherent in each of the languages.” Ramanathan finds that L2 student writers in being expected to meet the discourse expectations of their English–speaking audiences…are doubly disadvantaged: they are not likely to have been socialized into North American middle-class literacy practices that would facilitate mastery over these models, and they are more likely to have been socialized into other linguistic systems that employ different logics to address problems and the structuring of information.” (p. 107) She argues that freshman composition texts that give a few pro and con articles on a controversial topic and then asks students to write an analysis change “real problems into pseudo-problems with easy solutions” (p. 110). The final chapter discusses “Politics, Again: Some Practical Ways to Build Meta-Awareness into (L1 and) L2 Teacher Education,” which includes getting students to “think of textbooks as a genre” (p. 134). Teachers need to not only evaluate student writing and thought but to “extend” those performances by encouraging students to explain and justify. In her conclusion, Ramanathan notes that educators have to acquire the rules of their trade before they can achieve a meta-awareness about them. While not for a general audience, The Politics of TESOL Education is worth reading both for its insights into how university programs can be shaped by the culture of the departments within which they are placed and for its discussion of the hurdles faces by ESL students as writers in university courses. References Berger, P., & Luckman, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise on the sociology of knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Berman, R., & Slobin, D. (Eds.). (1994). Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic development study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Mannheim, K (1952). Historicism. In P. Kecskemeti (Ed.), Essays on the sociology of knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. About the Reviewer Jon Reyhner Department of Educational Specialties Box 5774 Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, AZ 86011