Contrastive Rhetoric

The relationship between perceptions about culture and power in the context of learning English as a second language was unexpected for me in this set of readings, but it reminded me of several occasions where I observed essentialized cultural labels placed on the Other and this relationship also reminded me of the labels that occur in the non-ESL composition classroom.

Throughout my encounter with the arguments in these readings, I consistently recalled the labels I feel are encouraged to place on undergraduate students. Having a vocabulary to refer to their background, behaviors, and habits is often seen as key to understanding undergraduates and therefore be able to teach them. There is a great deal of anxiety associated with being out of touch with the undergraduate student’s mind. In the writing program, much emphasis is placed on being cultural relevant to the student, and there is little concern for when this becomes patronizing. The damage for learners of English is far greater.

The analysis of how the students’ cultures affect their learning of a second language and the competence in speaking and writing in that language contains useful observations, but at times, those observations seem to Other students more than inform about the first language or the culture of the student. Students are more than traditions and generalizations. When reading about parallel constructions in Arabic, indirectness and the lack of expression of personal views in Chinese, the specific-to-general pattern in Japanese, and digression in German, I have both an interest and an appreciation for how this information was collected. While I do not want to appear dismissive of the research, I feel that the features that stand in contrast to English in the discussed languages could be seen in the writing of native speakers without being said to be problematic.

After turning to Ryuko Kubota’s “Japanese Culture Constructed by Discourses: Implications for Applied Linguistics Research and ELT,” the cultural politics in this became obvious. Navigating the dominant language looks less like being able to use its cultural capital to one’s advantage and more about expressing oneself as a Westerner. Students are then not only asked to satisfy the goal of speaking and composing in English but to think like an English-speaking person. The knowledge about the learner’s language and culture is then not being used to be able to better communicate with them as students but to overcorrect them, linguistically and culturally. In addition to the corrections based on the knowledge of cultural differences, Kubota mentions that “in the field of contrastive rhetoric, recent studies have debunked cultural myths that Japanese written discourse is characterized by culturally specific features such as reader responsibility, ki-shoo-ten-ketsua, and delayed introduction of purpose . . . (15). The already problematic labeling taking place is at times inaccurate, so we must consider the power excreted over those already Othered by defining, sometimes erroneously, their cultures.