Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Cross-cultural Perspectives on Writing 281
should become similar to the English counterpart. This implies that
contrastive rhetoric research is never a neutral endeavor to discover cultural
and linguistic patterns. Rather, the knowledge constructed by
research can assign a range of positive to negative values to different languages
and cultures, affect the ways people judge which language or culture
is more superior or desirable than others, and prompt cultural and
linguistic shifts.
The differing amounts of currency attached to languages are certainly
related to the global hierarchy of power among languages. English is considered
to be the most privileged international lingua franca and a ‘marvelous
tongue’ (Pennycook, 1998: 133). Moreover, academic knowledge,
such as contrastive rhetoric, created in the Anglophone world of the West
has hegemonic power (Scheurich, 1997; Willinsky, 1998). Thus, for instance,
when a researcher from the West conducts a contrastive rhetoric study
funded by the Mexican government to investigate practices of teaching
and learning writing in Mexico (LoCastro, 2008) and concludes that a lack
of L1 and L2 writing instruction hinders EFL learners from acquiring
international norms for academic writing, would the funding agency be
compelled to preserve the perceived features of written Spanish (e.g. long
sentences, loose coordination, or few cohesive markers) or would it try to
introduce English-type writing in L1 and L2 writing instruction?
The above discussion, however, does not mean that all language groups
in the world necessarily adopt Western knowledge or a preferred rhetorical
style. In postcolonial societies, English has been appropriated to express
religious and cultural identities for the political purpose of nation building,
as seen in contemporary Pakistani English language textbooks, in
which biographical texts (and other genres) prioritize a reference to Islamic
faiths over factual information (Mahboob, 2009). Here, non-English-type
rhetoric is purposely used in English to promote religious/cultural identity.
From the mainstream contrastive rhetoric point of view, this would be
viewed as a refl ection of a unique cultural thought pattern. However, the
defi nition of culture is contentious. Should culture be conceptualized as a
primordial, objective and unchanging category or is it discursively constructed
through political and ideological processes (Kubota, 1999)?
Another related question is this: Is it the language or culture itself that
decides what counts as a rhetorical norm or is it the educational institution,
which is infl uenced by the politics and ideology of the nation state,
that imposes the defi nition of what should be the norm (Kramsch, 2004)?
If a Pakistani nationalist scholar promotes the uniqueness of the rhetoric
of Pakistani English, should such an argument be interpreted as evidence
of cultural uniqueness or as identity politics?
The problem of describing culturally specifi c rhetoric raises a question
of the fundamental purpose of contrastive rhetoric research and its future.
The fi eld was originally developed in order to address pedagogical needs