Contrastive Rhetoric - Questions of Relevance

Questions of Relevance

Some postmodern and critical pedagogy writers in the second language (L2) writing field, however, have begun referring to contrastive rhetoric as if it had been frozen in space. Over the years, the term contrastive rhetoric has gained a negative connotation. Understood by many as Kaplan’s original work, contrastive rhetoric is often characterized as static, and is linked to contrastive analysis, a movement associated with structural linguistics and behavioralism. Many of the contributions made to contrastive rhetoric in the past 30 years have been ignored. In a 2002 article, Connor attempted to address these recent criticisms and to offer new directions for a viable contrastive rhetoric. In addressing the critiques, she aimed to draw attention to the broad scope of contrastive rhetoric and determined that a new term would better encompass the essence of contrastive rhetoric in its current state. To distinguish between the often-quoted “static” model and the new advances that have been made, Connor suggests it may be useful to begin using the term intercultural rhetoric instead of contrastive rhetoric to refer to the current models of cross-cultural research.

The term intercultural rhetoric better describes the broadening trends of writing across languages and cultures. It preserves the traditional approaches that use textual analysis, genre analysis, and corpus analysis, yet also introduces ethnographic approaches that examine language in interactions. Furthermore, it connotes the analysis of texts that allows for dynamic definitions of culture and the inclusion of smaller cultures (e.g., disciplinary, classroom) in the analysis.