Contrastive Rhetoric: Historically Situated, Currently Unstatic

"What are you reading about, Mom?" my ten-year old asks.

"Contrastive rhetoric," I respond.

"What is that?"

"Well,...." And there I sit, after nearing the end of the required readings for this week, feeling as if I have a firm grasp of what contrastive rhetoric was but only a shaky understanding as to what it is.

The two articles (Kubota and Connor) and the chapter in Casanave's volume all give a historically situated account of how contrastive rhetoric "came to be" as terminology or an area of study, as well as an explanation of what it is now (in theory), what it is in practice (current pedagogy), and where it perhaps should go in the future.

It seems to me a if Kaplan -- who began the primary discussion of contrastive rhetoric in the mid-1960s -- had good intentions but also a limited scope of what he felt contrastive rhetoric involved. The criticism that ensues over the next forty years is quite strong, accusing Kaplan's model of reinforcing binaries, disregarding political/power issues, and assuming an invalid transference of L1 writing to L2 writing. Casanave, for example, begins with a summary of Kaplan's original contrastive rhetoric views (from his 1966 article) and immediately begins her own analysis of it. Kaplan, Casanave asserts, includes strings of long quotes "without his commentary"; promises research that is never presented; fails to analyze or even provide proof of the hundreds of essays he mentions, resorting instead to text samples from the Bible; concludes the article with "textbook-like exercises"as opposed to bringing together his ideas to project a unified thought for going forward in the field (31)

Casanave also addresses a string of other critics of Kaplan's early theories. Casanave reports that Hinds claims that contrastive rhetoric is more about reader expectations and that Kaplan did not allow for cultural differences that would account for different readings of a text. McCagg challenged Hinds, claiming that Hinds' Japanese case-study texts (the newspaper articles) were not as circular as what Hinds posited. Kubota (as referenced in Casanave) argues against both Hinds and McCagg, as (being an L1 speaker of Japanese herself) the Japanese newspaper articles were poor case studies for Japanese rhetorical form in the first place. She also went on to add to the discussion the argument against "culturally unique patterns" or transference of any patterns to Japanese students' writing in English. Further, Kubota introduces complexity into the controversy of contrastive rhetoric; she claims that factors such as L1 writing skills, L2 language proficiency, students' personal beliefs about their own writing, their beliefs about Japanese culture, and their experience with L2 composition all contribute to the complexity of the topic of contrastive rhetoric (36).

More criticism of Kaplan's contrastive rhetoric model follow in Casanave's text. Mohan and Lo insist that critics not devalue the influence of topic knowledge, language proficiency, and basic writing skills on L2 writers' composing (37). Kowal, as Casanave summarizes, addresses Kaplan's "simplistic interpretations" of Whorf's linguistic theories (37). In Kowal's opinion, Kaplan's theories do not take into account the complexity that exists in contrastive rhetoric, that Kaplan attempts to "oversimplify" factors influencing second language writing.

Casanave concludes her chapter by citing some areas of which second language writing teachers need to be aware. Pedagogical objectives, according to Casanave, include, "making composition teachers aware that different conventions for writing exist in different cultures, that discourse-level and coherence features of text production may differ across languages, and that readers and writers may take on different responsibilities in different cultures" (44).  Casanave posits that we cannot believe that the area of contrastive rhetoric is simple and uncomplicated; rather, she says that cannot assume that Kaplan's 1966 theories have provided us with the answer, a "clear-cut unambiguous difference between English and any other given language" (Kaplan quoted in Casanave 45).

In applying a poststructuralist view of contrastive rhetoric, Kubota delves more specifically into the complexities of contrastive rhetoric than Casanave was able to in her chapter. Insisting that the concept of culture in applied linguistics is "a concept that needs to be complicated" (Kubota 23). Throughout the article, she does just that, demonstrating that contrastive rhetoric is not an area easy to define, as culture is itself a difficult-to-define term. These ideas -- along with issues of power, agency, colonialism, hybridity, and politics, to name just a few -- are themselves sticky and constantly in flux, as well as defined differently depending on culture (itself a complicated term when applied to linguistics).

Connor's article provides a brief historical overview of the history of contrastive rhetoric but it  addresses primary textual analysis: essay writing, form, and pedagogy, specifically, are addressed. She, too, acknowledges the "changing definitions of culture," contending that the concept of contrastive rhetoric needs to be one that is broad and has no clear-cut borders to exclude factors that may often need to be considered (233). Cultural groups are not static, and Connor suggests that "future contrastive rhetoric research needs to develop greater sensitivity to the view that sees writers not as parts of separate, identifiable cultural groups [as I now know Kaplan theorized] but as individuals in social groups that are undergoing continuous change" (234).

No wonder I had such difficulty defining "contrastive rhetoric"for my ten-year old. The term is a terribly complex one, and a short-and-sweet definition -- which might work for a child -- will not suffice for issues of second language writing and pedagogy. Contrastive rhetoric might be historically situated, but it is definitely not static.