Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

266 Part 4: Language and Literacy
This chapter provides an overview of contrastive rhetoric research in
terms of conceptual assumptions, historical background, multiple perspectives
provided by criticisms, impact of the knowledge developed by
the fi eld on language shifts, and implications for practitioners who work
with second language learners.
Assumptions and Findings of Contrastive Rhetoric Research
In his seminal article and subsequent publications, Robert Kaplan (1966,
1972, 1988) discussed how thought patterns differ according to language
groups and how they are refl ected in the discourse features of some essays
written by international students in US universities in English as a second
language (ESL). There are two major assumptions of contrastive rhetoric:
(1) each language or culture has unique rhetorical conventions due to a
culturally specifi c cultural thought pattern, and (2) the rhetorical conventions
of students’ fi rst languages (L1) interfere with or negatively transfer
to their ESL writing. These tenets were based on Kaplan’s observation that
academic essays written by ESL writers display features that are different
from those in typical essays written in English as the fi rst or native language
(L1). The oft-cited fi gure that appeared in Kaplan (1966) offers
graphic representations of cultural thought patterns, in which English is
depicted with a linear line, Oriental languages with a centrifugal circle,
Semitic languages with parallelism, Romance languages with digression
and Russian with digression with a dotted line.
Many studies since then have investigated cultural difference in rhetoric
and described the characteristics of written discourse in various languages.
For instance, Ulla Connor (1996), a leading scholar of contrastive
rhetoric, offers a summary of previous research on various languages:
Arabic is characterized by a parallel construction with coordinate clauses,
which can be traced back to classical texts such as the Old Testament and
Qur’an. Chinese, Korean and Japanese are often lumped together and
described as inductive and indirect, characterized by a four-unit organization
called qi-cheng-zhuan-he in Chinese, ki-sung-chong-kyul in Korean or
ki-shô-ten-ketsu in Japanese, which originates in Chinese classical poetry
(see Hinds, 1983, 1987, 1990). Chinese rhetoric is also characterized by
another model called the eight-legged essay, which was required for the
civil service examination during the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) (e.g.
Kaplan, 1972).
With regard to other languages, German is characterized as digressive
and is focused more on content than form, Finnish as inductive and indirect,
Spanish as elaborated and fl owery with longer sentences and ‘loose
coordination’ (Connor, 1996: 52–53), and Czech (as well as other Slavic
languages such as Russian, Polish and Ukrainian – see Petrić, 2005) as less
linear than English and with a delayed statement of purpose. One term