ABSTRACT
Students who study English as a second or additional language travel from some location to the United States. Accordingly, they navigate, explore, and discover geographic and ideological terrain. Although their journeys have often been inspired by folklore ventriloquated through the ages within the voices of their lineage, and perhaps more currently through glossy covers of travel guides and in-flight magazines or technologically savvy university Web sites, it is their arrival in the United States that set upon them the tasks of localized ideological mediation. Such mediation is influenced by:
heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socioideological contradictions between the present and the past, between different epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 291)
It is not surprising, then, that students in composition classes for English speakers of other languages (ESOL) bring their own ideology when they arrive in the United States. Through these journeys, concomitant schemas emerge that transcend finite spatialtemporal markers and traverse ideological continua. Those schemas position ESOL students as potentially and uniquely available to dialogic investigations. They already hold in dialogic association cultural influences: family, friends, religions, economies, politics, and philosophies (Savignon & Sysoyev, 2002).
