CABANDING, MONICA R. Dr.

Pauline Gocheco
Contrastive Rhetoric (LIN628D) March 13, 2014
Short Paper 3

Prompt

After being exposed to much of the literature in Contrastive Rhetoric, how do you think can CR
inform and enrich second/foreign language teaching? Based on your readings and on your
experience as an English teacher, give a comprehensive discussion of the field’s implications for
second/foreign language teaching.

The onset of Contrastive Rhetoric as an area of study was triggered by the classroom

situation where non-native speakers of English were always conceived as less competent in their

writing output as opposed to the native speakers. Explaining this phenomenon, linguists and

educators alike found ways to interpret the seemingly biased situation. This brings us to the

relevance of Contrastive Rhetoric as a field of study and as an area of concern for language

teachers in general. Intertwined with the cultural, psychological and cognitive theories of

language acquisition, Contrastive Rhetoric unfolded many areas of study about the writer, the

reader and the text.

This seemingly broad coverage of Contrastive Rhetoric challenged the classroom

teachers to bring into the classroom the issues of Contrastive Rhetoric in the teaching of writing,

not only to the classes of diverse cultures but to the second language learning as well.

This is the case of most English classrooms in our country. On my end, as an instructor of

general and major English courses in a state university, the teaching of writing to tertiary

students becomes more challenging because the task is either to strengthen or to annul their

existing skills and knowledge of composition writing. When students come to you from

different levels of literacy skills, you have no choice but to start from the basics of “good

writing”.

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 Contrastive Rhetoric on the one hand, has more or less, taught us about what “good

writing” is about from the tip of the varied areas investigated by authors of different nationalities.

From the rhetorical patterns of discourse (Kaplan ,1987; Kamimora et al.,1998; Dayag, 2005;

and Qi, 2007) exhibited by different cultures , Hinkel’s (2003) investigation on the use of

simple and complex words as well as Lautamati’s Topical Sentence Analysis (TSA) of discourse,

the study of CR gave us enriching ideas that classroom teachers could bring into their language

classes. From the empirical and conceptual studies undertaken to describe the varied ways people

from different cultures write, the rhetoric and the language behind them have been emphasized

and scrutinized, thus, to the advantage of language teachers, our awareness on these features of

writing heightened as well. Our exposure to the text types that researchers are very careful to

consider in making comparisons also put in our awareness, the appropriate context that a certain

type of composition must be analyzed and graded. After our readings, we can bring into our

classes the importance of rhetorical patterns that create impacts on our readers, the choice of

words that express different purposes and the importance of the variety of appropriate words, all

these can make the quality of writing to be “good” as they had been the features examined in the

studies.

However, the study of CR basically, does not impose on “hard and fast rules of good

writing” as it intentionally demarcates the idea of ethno/linguocentricity, that is, no particular

language owns what “good writing is about”. The very notion of Contrastive Rhetoric is to gain

perspective of knowledge about individual languages and cultures, not to exult any language but

to gain a general understanding of language based- communication and establish the relative

ways people from difficult cultures and perspective express themselves. This perspective is what

language teachers of our time must embrace. In so doing, the perspective that CR provides us,

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not only enriches us as language teachers but it helps us to become more effective in our

classrooms. When we understand the relative ways in which different people from different

cultures express themselves we become more aware of our identity as a people whose culture is

reflected in the way we write and think. Thus, we will know how to direct our students to the

right tract of writing for “different audiences”. Moreover, the knowledge of CR would always

give us the leeway to understand the common errors and the “seemingly “inappropriate ways of

expressions and use of language among our second language learners.

The study of CR in its interdisciplinary nature would always concern the classroom

situation in its basic application, however, the complexity of merging the Filipino students’

nature of writing as individuals and as a people to several other cultures can only be done, at the

minimum, to exposing them to others’ writing compositions and make them aware that people

express the same ideas in different ways and that, given the chance they will encounter other

culture in close encounter, they would understand better, just as classroom teachers would

understand why Filipino students would sound differently from the expectations of the native

speakers.