Contrastive rhetoric

CHAPTER III. IMPLEMENTATION OF CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC IN 
DIFFERENT CLASSES 
III.1. Constructive Rhetorical awareness in foreign language writing
 
Rhetoric can be defined as the ―choice of linguistic and structural aspects of a 
discourse chosen to produce an effect on an audience‖
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. Therefore, rhetoric is a 
matter of choice with respect to the uses of language, which children learn in 
schools or through other forms of instruction. They learn this according to certain 
conventions, many of which have to do with the cultural heritage of a society 
rather than the structure of the language. Thus it seems reasonable to assume that 
students (or, for that matter, professional writers) from different cultures, growing 
up with different writing conventions, will produce structurally different discourse 
patterns. 
Kaplan was the first scholar to study the differences in discourse structures in 
various languages, coining the term ‗contrastive rhetoric‘. The term used to 
describe the argument that the linguistical, organizational, and presentational 
choices that English-as-second-language (ESL) student-writers make substantively 
differ from the choices that native-English student-writers make
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. 
Contrastive rhetoric, like contrastive analysis, began as an effort to improve 
pedagogy, and its adherents believed that interference from L1 was the biggest 
problem in L2 acquisition. It was initially founded on error analysis; ―errors‖ in 
beginning-level students‘ paragraph organization were examined and reasons for 
them were hypothesized based on the language background from which the student 
came. However, contrastive rhetoric never entered the next stage, interlanguage 
analysis. 
The hypotheses underlying the traditional approach to contrastive rhetoric are 
summarized as:
1. each language or culture has rhetorical conventions that are unique to itself;
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Purves, A. C. (1988). Introduction. In A. C. Purves (Ed.), 
Writing across languages and cultures 
(pp. 9–21). 
Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Page- 9 
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Kaplan, R.B., (1966). Cultural thought patterns in inter-cultural education. 
Language Learning
16, pp. 1–20. 

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2 the rhetorical conventions of students‘ L1 interference with their ESL 
writing.
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Kaplan‘s pioneering study analyzed the organization of paragraphs in ESL 
student essays. Kaplan identified five types of paragraph development for five 
groups, as indicated in his frequently reproduced diagram (Figure 1), showing that 
L1 rhetorical structures were evident in the L2 writing of his sample students. 
Figure 1. Diagram on cross-cultural difference in paragraph organization in 
Kaplan’s (1996) study on cultural thought patterns in intercultural education.
Over subsequent decades, Kaplan‘s ―traditional‖ contrastive rhetoric has 
gathered both proponents and opposition. Proponents have touted the pedagogical 
implications of contrastive rhetoric. As Purves pointed out, ―When students, taught 
to write in one culture, enter another and do not write as do the members of the 
second culture, they should not be thought stupid or lacking in ‗higher mental 
processes‘, as some composition teachers have stated‖
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. Instead, they simply do 
not know about the rhetorical structures of the new culture, but they have the 
capability to learn the new conventions if given ample opportunity. 
Kaplan‘s ―traditional‖ contrastive rhetoric has been criticized for several 
reasons:

for being too ethnocentric and privileging the writing of native English 
speakers;

for examining only L2 products and ignoring educational and 
developmental process variables;
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Grabe, W., & Kaplan, R. B. (1989). Writing in a second language: Contrastive rhetoric. In D. M. Johnson & D. H. 
Roen (Eds.),