Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

268 Part 4: Language and Literacy
later section, inquiry foci under the new name have become diversifi ed,
while the basic assumptions have remained unchanged in many studies.
With regard to pedagogical implications, contrastive rhetoric has proposed
explicit teaching of the conventional rhetorical structure of English
through mechanical means, such as rearranging scrambled paragraphs,
writing according to an outline, developing an outline, imitating models,
identifying topic structures and so on (Kaplan, 1966, 1967, 1972). Making
students aware of cultural difference is another strategy (Kaplan, 1988;
Reid, 1989; see Kubota & Lehner, 2004, for more details). Some recent studies
have investigated the effects of the explicit teaching of English rhetoric
on students’ writing development (Kobayashi & Rinnert, 2007; Petrić,
2005). All in all, contrastive rhetoric tends to support explicit teaching of
the rhetorical norm with a goal of integrating the students into the mainstream
academic discourse community.
Methods of Investigation and Challenges
The above knowledge about cultural difference in rhetoric and L1–L2
rhetorical transfer has been developed through several methodological
approaches, many of which contain limitations. It is important to keep in
mind that the research impetus arose from pedagogical interest in helping
ESL writers develop academic writing skills in English, and thus the
research focus is on fi nding cultural differences between English and other
languages. In general, carefully conducted studies that compare comparable
texts illuminate a range of complexity of rhetorical features.
One method of investigating the culturally specifi c rhetorical structures
of languages other than English is to analyze published texts in those languages.
In oft-cited publications, Hinds (1983, 1987, 1990) mainly examined
essays written for a Japanese newspaper column that appeared on
the fi rst page of the newspaper; he identifi ed the unique four-unit organizational
feature as the preferred style for expository writing in Japanese.
Hinds argued that this culturally specifi c style makes the text diffi cult for
native speakers of English to comprehend, because the third unit, ten,
shifts the topic abruptly without any explicit transition from the previous
content. However, McCagg (1996) and Donahue (1998) point out that
Hinds’ examples contain culturally loaded topics that reduce the level of
perceived coherence and comprehensibility of the text. In other words, it
is not the culturally specifi c rhetorical style but the audience’s lack of prior
knowledge of the topic that makes the texts diffi cult to comprehend.
Moreover, this method of analyzing selective texts confl ates journalist
writing with academic writing, which have very different purposes, contexts
and audiences (Kubota, 1997). As genre studies demonstrate (e.g.
Johns, 2002), cross-cultural studies of texts need to take into account the
compatibility of genre types and communicative purposes in analyzing