Contrastive rhetoric

participants are to be viewed as equal, then the norms of any one community 
cannot be held as 'superior' to the other. Furthermore, truly intercultural writing 
76
Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). 
Critical academic writing and multilingual students.
Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of 
Michigan Press. P-271 

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practices may not be related to any one community but rather are hybrid and 
contingent. This is obviously still a controversial position and, as the ELF studies 
referred to earlier have shown, many academic institutions are still deeply attached 
to NES orientations in Anglo-American settings. However, ELF research has also 
indicated a growing awareness and tolerance to different forms of English as well 
as the notion of emergent and situated communicative practices and the subsequent 
increased variation. This is a discussion that L2 writers and teachers of writing 
should be aware of and given the opportunity to take part in. 
Secondly, just as L2 writers need to be made aware of the debate 
surrounding different varieties and forms of English (or other languages where 
appropriate), so they should also be made aware of the contested, complex and 
dynamic perspectives on cultures. This would entail taking writers beyond 
simplistic L1/C1 and L2/C2 comparisons. Writers should be encouraged to 
understand the complexities of cultures, large and small, and the influence this 
may, or may not, have on the production of texts. In particular they should be 
introduced to the ideological construction of powerful and dominant discourses on 
cultures and conventions. In this way, while recognising the power that such 
discourses may have on their own writing practices, they are no longer seen as 
monolithic and immutable and there is space for negotiation and adaptation. 
Likewise teachers can present models of texts which follow the dominant tradition 
as one of a range of possible approaches to producing a text and also explore 
adaptations and alternatives. Again an intercultural perspective should highlight 
the inappropriateness of placing the cultural conventions of one group above many 
others and the need to understand culture as emergent and fluid. 
Furthermore, within intercultural communication studies there is a large 
body of work that has examined the implications this field has for second language 
teaching and learning. If IR is to take an intercultural perspective, then there is 
much here that could inform writing pedagogy. The extensive studies by Michael 

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48 
Byram
77
and colleagues have investigated how an increasingly complex awareness 
of cultures and communication can be developed in the classroom through the 
concept of intercultural communicative competence (ICC). 
Building on Byram's notions
78
of ICC and critical cultural awareness, 
proposes an interdisciplinary approach to language education that aims to develop 
critical postmodernist understandings of cultures that recognise the dynamic and 
sometimes dissonant nature of cultural identifications. Risager, also building on 
Byram's work, adopts a transnational paradigm in her proposals for a language and 
culture pedagogy that equips learners with the competencies needed to become 
'world citizens'. In all of these approaches, similar to CR/IR, the role of 
comparison in recognised, but crucially these comparisons can be viewed as a 
starting point for more complex understandings of culture and language. In the 
same way CR/IR can make use of comparisons between texts in non- essentialist 
ways that approach teaching writing as an intercultural process and emphasize the 
place of negotiation and mediation in communicative practices. 
Although these approaches have been invaluable in laying the foundations 
for how intercultural communication can inform L2 teaching, recently they have 
been criticised for maintaining national conceptions of culture, however complex, 
and for taking communication between non-native speakers and native speakers as 
the baseline by which to measure all communication. In particular, in respect to 
English they have not fully recognised or considered the implications of a language 
used as a global lingua franca. As already suggested, what might be most 
characteristic of ELF is variety and hence successful communicators need the 
knowledge, skills and attitudes to be able to negotiate this variety. Although we 
might expect more variety in spoken than written communication and need to 
recognise that without immediate response negotiation in writing can be more 
challenging, this is not to deny the range of variety in written languages and thus 
77
Byram, M., Nichols, A., & Stevens, D. (Ed.). (2001). 
Developing intercultural competence in practice.
Clevedon: 
Multilingual Matters. 
78
Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence.Clevedon: Multilingual 
Matters.

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49 
the ability to negotiate variety would apply to writing as much as spoken 
communication. Within ELF studies this has resulted in the suggestion that it is the 
strategies and skills needed to deal with this variety that are key to successful 
communication, rather than knowledge of a fixed variety of language. ELF 
research has subsequently examined how strategies such as accommodation, code-
switching, cooperation, repair, negotiation and linguistic and intercultural 
awareness contribute to successful communication and how they can be 
incorporated into the classroom (Baker, 2012). 
Horner believes
79
it is these communication strategies associated with ELF 
that are most appropriate to teaching writers in the multilingual and multicultural 
settings of many academic institutions. He proposes introducing students of 
writing to texts written in a variety of Englishes and also hybrid texts that cross 
genres or languages. This, he argues, will introduce students to the fluid nature of 
language and rhetoric. Horner also recommends making learners aware of how 
meaning is negotiated, again as shown in ELF studies, and how as writers they 
"might persuade readers to respond with more tolerance to their texts and to 
accommodate the plurality of meanings to be made from them". He further 
suggests that to achieve this aim, writers can make use of many of the already 
existing strategies in writing pedagogy such as addressing imagined questions, 
adding explanations and contextualisation, defining terms and providing a range of 
phrasings for ideas. An analogous discussion has been taking place in regard to 
multilingual writers. Canagarajah and Jerskey list of number of features which they 
refer to as "shifts in teaching multilingual writers". These involve similar 
perspectives and strategies, including viewing texts as fluid, providing choices, 
focusing on strategies and accommodating to different literacy traditions. For 
example, Canagarajah reports on a case study of a graduate level L2 writing class 
in which a student makes use of her multilingual repertoires by including Arabic 
proverbs and poetry in her English essay. She combines this with various strategies 
79
Horner, B. (2011). Writing English as a Lingua Franca. In A. Archibald & A. Cogo (Eds.), 
Latest Trends in ELF 
Research.
(pp. 299-311)Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. P-482 

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50 
such as preparing the reader for alternative approaches, anticipating difficulties and 
directly addressing the reader to draw the reader into negotiating and co-
constructing meaning. Through the development of such flexible strategies and 
attitudes, learners of writing should be in a position to produce texts that better 
reflect the variety inherent in ELF and to challenge the dominance of any single 
group of writing conventions and norms.