Contrastive Rhetoric Revisited and Redefined

Clayann Gilliam Panetta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781135656546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The theory of contrastive rhetoric was first put forth by Robert Kaplan in the mid 1960s to explain the differences in writing and discourse between students who were native speakers of English and their international counterparts. Over the past three decades, contrastive rhetoric theory has been used primarily by linguists in language centers and involved in ESL teaching. As the number of international students in American universities has continued to grow, contrastive rhetoric has become increasingly relevant to all disciplines, and to rhetoric and composition in particular. This volume breaks important new ground in its examination of contrastive rhetoric in the exclusive context of composition. The editor has assembled contributors with varying areas of specialty to demonstrate how the traditional definition of contrastive rhetoric theory can be applied to composition in new and innovative ways and how it can be redefined through the lens of addressing "difference" issues in writing. Thus, the volume as a whole clarifies how the basic principles of contrastive rhetoric theory can help composition instructors to understand writing and rhetorical decisions. With the inclusion of current research on multicultural issues, this collection is appropriate for all instructors in ESL writing, including teachers in rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. It can also be used as an advanced text for students in these areas. Wherever it is employed, it is certain to offer significant new insights into the application of contrastive rhetoric within the composition discipline.

I
CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC REVISITED

1
Understanding Cultural Differences in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom: Contrastive Rhetoric as Answer to ESL Dilemmas¹

Clayann Gilliam Panetta
Christian Brothers University

Contrastive rhetoric—the term used to describe the argument that the linguistical, organizational, and presentational choices that English-as-a-second-language (ESL) student-writers make substantively differ from the choices that native-English student-writers make—has only relatively recently been prominent in the scholarly literature and teacher-talk of composition. The whole notion of a “contrastive rhetoric” began in 1966 with Robert Kaplan, who, along with other writing instructors, discovered that the writing patterns of international students who had recently come to the United States were much different from the writing patterns of native writers. He began research into these phenomena, examining the writing of ESL students and trying to determine where their writing deviated from that of native users of English. By closely analyzing compositions written by ESL students, he realized that the differences he had noted were not simply grammatical or surface matters (differences in “spelling…or differences in lexicon”), but underlying differences, including “paragraph order and structure” (Kaplan, 1988, p. 277). He then compared ESL cultural practices to typical Western practices and found many interesting rhetorical trends and deviations (Piper, 1985). Student-writers from Anglo-European languages seemed to prefer linear developments, whereas student-writers from Asian languages seemed to take a more indirect approach, coming to their points at the ends of their papers. The paragraph development in writing done by students from Semitic languages tended to be based on a series of parallel organizations of coordinate, rather than subordinate, clauses, whereas students from Romance and Russian languages tended to prefer extraneous material (Connor, 1996). In short, Kaplan was able to suggest that rhetorical structure is not universal, but culture-dependent (Piper, 1985).

Kaplan coined the phrase contrastive rhetoric to describe the differences he had seen, and he began to encourage instructors to use his research in their classrooms (Purves, 1988). To aid these instructors, he created diagrams to explain the five different types of paragraph development he had identified.² His aim in this compilation was, first, to help ESL students better understand the typical patterning of English rhetoric by contrasting it to the rhetorical patterning of their culture. He also encouraged close instructor scrutiny of contrastive rhetoric, because contrastive rhetoric would be a pedagogical contributor to reading and writing issues—more advanced ESL reading and writing students could be taught about language characteristics and differences among cultures (Piper, 1985). Kaplan saw this as vital information to any instructor of ESL; understanding the rhetorical deviations apparent in languages would bridge the gap between cultural encoding and decoding. In essence, instructors were called to realize that “differences among rhetorical patterns do not represent differences in cognitive ability, but differences in cognitive style” (Purves, 1988, p. 19).

Li (1996) has shown this to be true in the following discourse:

I was considered a good writer in China…. I still remember the “appreciation classes,” during which the teacher read aloud to the class a number of the best student papers from the last assignment and analyzed the accomplishments of each selected piece…. I remember the pride and joy when my writing was read to the class, and the secret comparison I made with the selected papers when they were read. The climax usually came at the end of the class when the teacher walked down the aisles and handed us our papers with grades and her written comments. Although I often had more or less the same comments—“Well-structured, fluent and expressive use of language…”—I cherished the red lines scribbled on my paper, for the teacher was talking to me about my writing, alone….

In my American classes I soon found myself struggling aimlessly…. The problem was not with grammar or the lexicon…, supposedly the most daunted aspects of English for a Chinese learner, for although I did have many problems with the linguistic aspect of the language, I could always consult grammar books and dic-

tionaries, and I was used to doing that. It was comments beyond the sentence level in my writing that left me in endless speculation. The instructions were usually kind and encouraging, telling me that I should write “just what you think,” and write in my “honest voice.” But other comments indicated that to write just what I think and in the way that I felt most comfortable were not good enough. My writing was sometimes “too vague,” other times “lacked specifics,” and still others “redundant,” or I was told that I should “go straight to the point.” I was at a loss as to how to be “specific” yet not “redundant,” how to avoid “beating around the bush” and to be subtle and suggestive (aren’t they the same?), and more important, what was worth writing, (p. xi)

The difficulty Li notes is characteristic of most ESL students in American writing classes; Kaplan’s aim was to answer such dilemmas.

Over subsequent decades, contrastive rhetoric has gathered both proponents and opposition. Proponents have touted the pedagogical implications of contrastive rhetoric. For instance, Leki (1991) pointed out that even though writing instructors who teach ESL students may not have backgrounds in the rhetorics of different cultures, contrastive rhetoric helps us bypass stereotypes and realize that writing strategies are culturally formed (p. 138). For example, what is relevant/irrelevant, what is logical/illogical, what constitutes an argument, even, are all culturally determined. Sometimes ESL writers seem to “miss the point.” However, the “proper” way to make a point in one language differs from the “proper” way in another (Leki, 1992). Pointing out and realizing such contrasts between rhetorics helps instructors and students analyze what represents successful communication among cultures. As Purves (1988) pointed out, “When students, taught to write in one culture, enter another and do not write as do the members of the second culture, they should not be thought stupid or lacking in ‘higher mental processes,’ as some composition teachers have stated” (p. 19). Instead, they simply do not know about the rhetorical structures of the new culture, but they have the capability to learn the new conventions if given ample opportunity (p. 19). In short, a number of researchers have argued that, with contrastive rhetoric, instructors who teach writing to ESL students can come to see that our truth is not the truth and that, in reality, truth is a relative concept across cultures and languages (Leki, 1991).

On the other hand, Kaplan has been accused by some of “reductionism—of trying to reduce the whole of linguistics to this single issue” (Kaplan, 1987, p. 9). Others have added that his observations were faulty because he focused on English but implicated other languages (p. 10). Furthermore, since Kaplan’s diagrams for language characteristics were so simplistic, Leki (1992) has shown that many teachers and students have come to think of rhetorical patterns as equal to native thought patterns of other cultures. However, strategies for successful communication are not innate or universal; they are rhetorical. For instance, one study has shown how the goal of the ancient Chinese rhetorical tradition differs from the goal of the Western rhetorical tradition. Instead of using rhetoric to “convince political equals in a public forum of some political position, placing a great deal of emphasis on an individual speaker’s ability to reason and to marshal proofs,” the Asian tradition called on the rhetor to “announce truth…. Language was used not to discover but to uncover truth based on accepted traditional wisdom” (Leki, 1992, pp. 89–90). At the same time, politically, “lack of clarity…helped the ruling elite retain power” (pp. 89–90). They confused the audience to remind the audience of the rhetor’s superiority. Examples like these show how contrasting rhetorics represent historical, social, economic, and political issues, “not natural mental processes or psychological capabilities” (pp. 89–90), as Kaplan initially indicated. Finally, others have criticized Kaplan’s disregard for Aristotelian rhetoric in two ways. First, he truncated the canons from invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery to only arrangement; second, he excluded persuasion from his view of rhetoric (Connor, 1997, p. 32).

Kaplan (1987) agreed with some of this criticism, admitting that, “in the first blush of discovery, [he] overstated both the differences[s] and [his] case” (p. 9).³ Nevertheless, he does not “regret having made the case.” To Kaplan, “[the] issue is that each language has clear preferences, so that while all forms are possible, all forms do not occur with equal frequency or in parallel distributions” (p. 11). Native writers have at their disposal a number of rhetorical alternatives, but non-native writers do not posses this inventory and do not know about the sociolinguistic constraints on the alternatives. Pedagogically, our job should be to increase this inventory (Kaplan, 1987). One way this has been done, according to Connor (1997), has been to revise the contrastive rhetoric paradigm and definition to reflect the broader implications of contrastive rhetoric: “A broader definition that considers cognitive and sociocultural variables of writing in addition to linguistic variables has been substituted for a purely linguistic framework interested in structural analyses of products” (pp. 18–19). In short, Connor continues, “Contrastive rhetoric has moved from examining only products to studying processes in a variety of writing situations” (pp. 18–19).⁴ Therefore, some have argued that if writing instructors avoid the reductionist tendencies of contrastive rhetoric and use it as a way of realizing the tremendous role culture plays in ESL students’ rhetorics, then it can become a powerful resource for conquering the difficult ESL (and other “difference”) issues that present themselves in all rhetoric and composition classes.

The increasing need for specific training in American rhetorical styles is a responsibility that does inevitably fall on writing instructors because it is in writing classes that one would expect culturally based rhetorical differences to most readily present themselves. Unfortunately, as Dillon (1992) pointed out, many writing instructors, who are “hired to teach all students how to use language effectively,” simply feel ill-equipped for teaching ESL students:

To teach English as a second language…, he or she has to know something about students’ first languages, but the typical nonheterogeneous mix of L2 learners renders impractical, if not impossible, attempts to discover or design an appropriate variety of learning aids…. [S]pecialists who are not formally trained to teach English to speakers of other languages get unnecessarily mired in philosophical misgivings, suffering guilt because they are less adept at hurdling the language barrier than are the students whose “errors” they judge, (p. 9)

Fortunately, contrastive ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• I CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC REVISITED
• II CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC REDEFINED
• Afterword
• About the Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index