Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Cross-cultural Perspectives on Writing 277
not necessarily presented in the introduction but rather in the middle or
at the end of the essay. Thus, the fi xed style in school writing (especially
primary and secondary schools) is only one of many styles appreciated in
English written discourse and elegantly written texts are not necessarily
linear (Leki, 1997). In fact, the fi ve-paragraph essay is not always preferred
as an instructional goal; some teachers and researchers argue that
it limits students’ creativity and rhetorical choices (see Shi & Kubota,
2007). Likewise, although English-type rhetoric is promoted in China and
Japan, the actual reading materials that appear in some textbooks do not
always follow what is promoted (Kubota & Shi, 2005). The contextual
specifi cities that texts and the act of writing are situated in pose the question
of whether a universal concept of good writing exists (Coe &
Freedman, 1998).
Critical contrastive rhetoric
The criticisms reviewed thus far reject ahistorical, fi xed and simplistic
defi nitions of cultural rhetoric and focus on human agency. These criticisms
can be theorized in the framework of critical contrastive rhetoric,
which draws on the so-called post-foundational (i.e. postmodern, poststructuralist
and postcolonial) critiques that question normative and
essentialist assumptions, illuminate the sociopolitical construction of our
knowledge about language and culture, and offer possibilities for appropriating
a linguistic form to express alternative meanings (Kubota &
Lehner, 2004). As with critical applied linguistics and critical pedagogies
(e.g. Pennycook, 2001), critical contrastive rhetoric problematizes and
politicizes a common understanding of language, culture, teaching and
learning to illuminate unequal relations of power involved in such knowledge
and aims to transform oppressive discourse and social practice.
From a postmodern point of view, the modernist relativity that assumes
fi xed cultural and linguistic binaries are questioned. Instead, knowledge
and practice are viewed as situated in sociopolitical arenas and historical
trajectories, and are thus always in fl ux. Postmodernism focuses on the
plurality of meaning and the hybrid, diasporic and dynamic nature of language
and culture, while problematizing various forms of essentialism,
including the static view of language and culture constructed by contrastive
rhetoric research.
A poststructuralist approach to critical contrastive rhetoric views
knowledge about language and culture of Self and Other as constructed
by discourses rather than existing a priori divorced from politics and relations
of power. This view allows us to explore how cultural difference in
rhetoric and an implicit assumption of the superiority of English are discursively
constructed in contrastive rhetoric research. In addition, student
writers are viewed as agents with multiple subjectivities who act on