Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

280 Part 4: Language and Literacy
Russian, Wolfe (2008) uses Hofstede’s (1984) cultural dimensions that
draw boundaries in terms of power distance, avoidance of uncertainty,
individualism versus collectivism, and masculinity versus femininity. The
cultural difference found in the analysis led to a conclusion that Russian
speakers writing in English to American partners are likely to transfer
their L1 conventions and cause miscommunication. One would wonder if
this is a new approach to contrastive rhetoric when old cultural binaries
are still used to explain rhetorical differences. Furthermore, why is miscommunication
always attributed to the problem of Russian business
people who do not use English conventions, and never vice versa? A question
then is whether the focus on a dynamic and nonessentialist approach
to rhetoric, as Connor proposes, is still within the modernist, rather than
postmodernist, framework of seeking objective truths about differences
between cultures (or small cultures) and whether renaming the fi eld is
merely a cosmetic, rather than paradigm, change.
Any fi eld of inquiry should aim to contribute new knowledge. While
contrastive rhetoric has certainly illuminated, albeit controversially, issues
of culture in writing, one peculiar facet of contrastive rhetoric research is
its impact on the rhetorical shift of languages other than English. This
addresses the important social and ideological infl uences of the research,
to which I will now turn.
Ideological Impact of Contrastive Rhetoric on
Rhetorical Shift
As discussed earlier, the English-type mode of communication has
recently been promoted in the Japanese language. I argue that this shift is
infl uenced by the perceived linguistic and cultural differences between
Japanese and English. Language educators in Japan have indeed drawn
on assumptions of contrastive rhetoric, underscored cultural difference
and argued for the need to improve communicative effectiveness in
Japanese in the globalized world. Some have cited the graphic model
offered by Kaplan (1966) to point out cultural difference in thought pattern,
with the implication that the Japanese need to adopt English-type
discourse in order to express their views and opinions clearly and convincingly
in increasingly internationalized communicative settings (see
Kubota, 2002b). The trend toward English-type rhetoric is refl ected in L1
Japanese language textbooks. As Kubota and Shi (2005) indicate, these
textbooks recommend that students use features similar to English conventions.
In addition, the fact that recent studies have found in Japanese
students a tendency to use a deductive style in their writing indicates that
the knowledge created by contrastive rhetoric research has perhaps supported
a discourse that the inductive and indirect style hinders international
communication and that Japanese written (and spoken) discourse