Intercultural rhetoric
A. Kaplan
Briefly and basically:
Pedagogical premises of contrastive rhetoric (CR): Teachers’ awareness in reading and writing classes.
Overview, concerns and class discussion:
Our perceptions greatly depend on cultural dispositions (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis);
Reading and writing processes are affected by cultural factors;
There is no single rhetoric since there are multiple cultures.
Comparison between English rhetoric and Semitic language (Bible)
Question 1: On p. 47, the author discussed English rhetoric based on parallelism found in the Bible and he claimed that the passage was influenced by one Semitic language the Bible (King james version) was translated from. Was the English version of the Bible really translated from a Semitic language? Which one?
Question 2: The author provided two models of paragraph writing on pp. 53-55. To what extent do you find them useful? Do you have any suggestion for another model to propose?
Question 3: Kaplan proposed 5 visual representations on paragraph structure in various cultures/languages. What are exactly the classification criteria?
If you belong to any of the author’s “classification”, do you agree with his findings about rhetoric patterns?
B. Casanave
Sharp critiques on Kaplan’s article
In her study of 46 students, Kubota (1998) found no evidence of cultural influence on the participants’ English writing (p. 36)
New orientations
Matsuda and Leki: Learners’ background
Writers’ agency to be taken into account: background, socioeconomic class, past writing experience
Casanave: Learner-centered approach
Teaching writing according to learners’ needs
Giving learners opportunity of looking into English articles and comparing them to materials in other languages and drawing conclusions
Learners as ethnographers of their own writing
Contextualization of writing classes.
Question 4: Both Kaplan and Casanave look at English as a homogeneous and identical language (English rhetoric is linear) worldwide and yet there are World Englishes (English was spread in different countries, merged with local cultures and amalgamated with indigenous languages with radical changes in grammar, pronunciation, lexical items and ……possible new sprouts in rhetoric!) Therefore, how to define and and eventually teach rhetoric of World Englishes? Is the idea of English rhetoric perceived the same way in multiple contexts?
Q1. As far as I know, the King James Bible was translated from Latin and that was translated from various Semitic languages.
ReplyDeleteQ2. For the level of writing we assign to students (generally) in first and second year composition courses, the paragraph model explained by Kaplan is helpful. Once students are aware of the rules, then they are allowed to break them.
Q3. Kaplan's doodles indicate the direction the main idea of the paragraph takes from introduction to conclusion. This doesn't indicate the order/direction of the whole text, though, which would be interesting to see if the same patterns emerge.