Curt's post on Contrastive Rhetoric

It is interesting to read the correlative counter-arguments put forth by the authors of the three articles pertaining to cultures of contrastive rhetoric. It seems that even nearly forty years since the publication of Kaplan’s (1966) landmark article; “Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education” has sparked discussion that continues to this day. In all, it seems that the greatest issue taken with his research is that he lumped diverse languages into broadly defined generalizable regions that are categorized as much by geography as any other marker of definition (Connor, 2003: 224-225). Connor’s article, “Changing currents in contrastive rhetoric: Implications for teaching and research” explains that although Kaplan’s original article may have attempted to paint a detailed picture with a too broad of a brush by making hasty generalizations, he had in fact opened the door to an entire realm of research possibilities in the field of contrastive rhetoric. Over thirty years later, Connor took that contrastive premise and applied it to the business correspondence of the cover letter and used a sample of a predetermined population to use as empirical evidence that supports a claim of contrastive rhetoric and it effects upon international business correspondence of applications. Connor recommends that applicants must maintain a mindfulness of the formatting expectations of their target audience (Connor, 2003: 235). This reminds us that with any form of communication, it is the recognitions of the needs of the target audience, whoever this audience may be, must remain paramount in crafting the particular language. The authors, Kubota and Lehner, reminds their readers in “Towards critical contrastive rhetoric” that when examining expository discourse patterns, one must be careful not to overuse contrastive dichotomies such as their example of contrasting English as a linear, direct, deductive, and logical language to Japanese as being non-linear, indirect, and inductive language that leaves logical interpretations up to the reader (Kubota & Lehner, 2004: 8). This example demonstrates how other languages, in this case, languages other than English, are otherized in ways that seem to be logical and coherently clear in being useful in communicating ideas. This dichotomy can be seen as a means of perpetuating a linguistic gap between the colonizer and the colonized (Kubota & Lehner, 2004: 9). Also, “Colonialism draws a binary distinction between the logical superior Self and the illogical backward Other, legitimating unequal power relations” (Kubota & Lehner, 2004: 18). By examining the power dynamics in the above statement, one can see how the ridged implementation of a set standard can seem to be capricious and arbitrary, and thus problematic. The authors examine an advocacy of shifting from an assimilationist teaching protocol to having counter-hegemonic pedagogies such as allowing English to be an ever expanding language in the following statement, “English is a language that is added to the ways with words students bring to the classroom rather than a linguistic system meant to supplant their familiar discourses” (Kubota & Lehner, 2004: 21). This bilingual approach to teaching English as a second language allows people to gain access to trade opportunities without losing their own cultural identities. Casanave in “Contrastive rhetoric” note that many ongoing questions still linger in regards to the many issues surrounding the teaching of L2 writing beginning with how to define the issues themselves and how to address such issues when they arise during instruction (Casanave, 2007: 52-53). In addressing such issues, perhaps it would be most prudent to focus primarily upon the needs of the students that a particular teacher within the context of such givens as time, place, and learning situations which are occurring. These variables are continuously changing, which in turn requires teachers to notice emerging patterns of needs, while still taking care not to overgeneralize them, but to focus upon individual learning needs as they arise within their situational context.