3.2 Intercultural Rhetoric
Connor(1998)reviewed the origin of Contrastive Rhetoric and its new development in the areas of contrastive text linguistics,writing as a cultural activity,classroom-based studies,and contrastive genre studies.She addressed the postmodern critiques of teaching English to meet the rhetorical expectations of native speakers or others in power positions,maintaining that it is the audiences’expectations that the Contrastive Rhetoric studies aim to help second language writers to meet,such as teachers and journal editors,who hold more power than writers.Connor contends that readers of English writings are not necessarily native English speakers and gave two examples in her previous studies,in which the audience is non-native speakers of English.
The first study,an investigation into the rhetoric of grant proposals for European Union research fund,aimed to provide Finnish scientists some guidelines in grant proposal writing(Connor &Mauranen,1999).As pointed out by Connor,the readers of the proposal are reviewers from a variety of European countries and have different rhetorical expectations from the“Anglo-American”ones.Connor named the European rhetorical expectations as“Eurorhetoric”.The second study examined the rhetoric of job application letters in English produced by writers in Finland,America and Belgium(Connor,Davis,&De Rycker,1995).Since the readers of the applications are local companies,Connor(1998)suggested that“Finns applying for Finnish jobs should continue to write like Finns:to be modest and humble about their achievements”(p.111-112),following the local people’s expectations,rather than those of English speakers’.
Connor(2002)addressed some criticism of Contrastive Rhetoric and pointed out new directions based on the implications drawn from criticism.The first critique is on student essays being the most popular type of writing examined in the field.Connor noted that recent empirical studies of contrastive rhetoric examine business and professional genres such as letters,résumés and job applications,which are more frequently used in the real-world global communication.The second critique concerns the“alleged insensitivity to cultural differences”(p.503)and the focus on national/ethnic cultural difference.Connor referred to Atkinson’s work on the concept of culture and introduces the postmodernist-influenced perspective of culture,which acknowledges the cultural influences from sources other than national culture or first language,such as educational background,disciplinary culture and discourse community conventions.The third critique is related to using English conventions as teaching norms and its danger of creating power hierarchies.Connor argues that the purpose of teaching norms of writing should be to help writers be aware of audiences’expectations and write in a reader-friendly way.In addition,the norms taught should not always be native English speakers’norms since the readers may be non-native speakers of English and have different rhetorical expectations.Apart from the three critiques above,Connor also mentioned critiques on research methods of contrastive rhetoric,suggesting that results obtained from text-based analysis may not be enough to address cultural issues beyond texts.
To address the last critique mentioned above,Connor(2004b)proposed a set of new research methods to be used in Contrastive Rhetoric studies in order to better understand the social context beyond texts.Apart from the traditional text analysis methods which examine the linguistic features and cohesion and coherence of texts,Connor introduced the use of genre analysis,corpus analysis and ethnographic approaches in Contrastive Rhetoric studies.
Connor(2004a)suggested a name change from Contrastive Rhetoric to Intercultural Rhetoric,putting culture,one of the crucial notions of the field,into the name.However,the difference between Contrastive Rhetoric and Intercultural Rhetoric was not clearly articulated until four years later.Connor(2008)summarized the changes made in Contrastive Rhetoric in three postmodern maps(a tactic of showing the relationship between key constructs and theories of a field visually and spatially to enable critical examination),which form the theoretical framework of Intercultural Rhetoric:a)text in context;b)large culture and small culture;c)intercultural and cross-cultural communication.
The first map,text in context,discussed the concept of discourse,which is one of the essential constructs of the field.After introducing Fairclough’s three-dimensional conception of discourse,which comprises the dimensions of texts,discursive and social practices,Connor emphasized the importance of examining discursive and social practices,or social contexts in the study of texts.She proposed that ethnographic research methods can be used to examine the context of texts,for example,interviews can be conducted to understand the views of writers and readers.
In the second map,large culture and small culture,Connor discussed the concept of culture and its postmodern definition.Traditional Contrastive Rhetoric studies examine rhetorical differences between national or ethnic cultures,which are referred to as large cultures and defined from the essentialist perspective.Intercultural Rhetoric,adopting the postmodern definition of culture,emphasizes the differences between small cultures,which are cultures in smaller groups,such as disciplinary culture,youth culture and students’culture.By conceptualizing the notion of culture,Connor legitimized the position of small culture in the field,and expanded the scope of study to include small group rhetorical variation studies,such as discipline,age and gender.
The third map,intercultural and cross-cultural communication,distinguishes writers composing in a different culture from writers composing in their native culture.The difference between“intercultural”and“cross-cultural”is similar to the difference between ESL and EFL in that intercultural studies are concerned with writers writing in a second language environment,while cross-cultural studies are related to writers writing in a foreign language situation.In Connor’s words,“‘cross-cultural’attends to abstract entities across cultural borders,while the‘intercultural’deals with the analysis of an actual encounter between two participants who represent different linguistic and cultural backgrounds”(p.309).In other words,intercultural writers physically work within a new community while cross-cultural writers,though may have readers from another community,work in his/her home community.
Based on the distinction between intercultural and cross-cultural writing,Connor described the theory of accommodation as describing the process of individual’s adaption to“each other’s linguistic,prosodic,and nonverbal features”(p.311),arguing that in intercultural situations,writers accommodate to the language and style of others in the community,and thus the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of writers in intercultural situations are not fixed.
Connor further elucidated the new name of the field at the end of the article,stating that the term“intercultural”used in the name is an umbrella term which covers both intercultural and cross-cultural situations.According to Connor,there are two guiding constructs in the field,“intercultural”and“rhetoric as persuasion”,both of which are included in the new name of the field.
Connor &Moreno(2005)adopted the notion of tertium comparationis or common platform of comparison as a guideline for collecting and comparing data in contrastive/intercultural rhetoric studies.For data collection,Connor and Moreno contend that certain features of texts should be constrained to make sure that the data gathered are comparable cross-culturally.These features may include genre,topic,writers’level of expertise and textual unit of analysis.For data comparison,Connor and Moreno interpreted the guideline of tertium comparationis as establishing comparable qualitative categories which can be used to contrast rhetorical features across groups,such as coherence and cohesion.Therefore,the concept of tertium comparationis was introduced as a principle of data collection or corpus building,and qualitative data analysis in contrastive/intercultural rhetorical studies.
A contrastive rhetoric study reported by Folman and Connor in the same year adopted the principle of tertium comparationis.Folman and Connor(2005)compared the rhetorical features of high school research papers written by 30 American and 40 Israeli students to identify their writing style and cross-cultural differences.For data collection,the text features being controlled include genre(research paper),discipline(sociology),writer’s age(17-18)and year of schooling(Twelfth Grade),and writing in first language(English versus Hebrew).Other features taken into consideration comprise length of paper,credits for paper,supervision,educational settings,location of school(suburban),ethnicity and social class.For qualitative data analysis,Folman and Connor developed a five-category evaluation taxonomy,comprising 18 items which are rated separately.The evaluation criteria are established based on the writing norms of the international academic community.Significant differences were revealed in four out of five categories,namely content-conceptualization,communicative considerateness,linguistic realization,and the research-paper procedural imperatives,that is the reporting of details of research methods such as research instruments.In all the four categories in which significant differences exist,Israeli students outperformed their American counterpart,indicating that one’s genre performance is not associated with ethnicity but rather with his/her community experience.Folman and Connor suggested that the differences may be attributed to a more serious attitude of Israeli students who favor the academic style and use more citation from academic journals.The American participants,on the other hand,treat research papers more casually,writing the research paper as a term paper and using citations from popular journals.
Folman and Connor’s study(2005)shows that national/ethnic variation in rhetoric exists on top of small cultures since the participants are from the same age group and both compose according to the research paper conventions of the international academic community.Therefore,tertium comparationis can be seen as an effort to constrain the influence exerted by small cultures(e.g.age group,disciplinary community)to compare the influence of national or ethnic culture on rhetoric.Therefore,as suggested by the tertium comparationis principle,to investigate the influence of large cultures,researchers need to isolate the large cultures by controlling small cultures which might have influence on rhetoric.
Connor and Rozycki(2012a;2012b)continued to explore ways to navigate through large and small cultures in contrastive rhetoric studies in the area of Language for Specific Purposes(LSP)/English for Specific Purposes(ESP).Following a review on the traditional view and the postmodern view of culture,Connor and Rozycki(2012a)introduced the middle-ground approach proposed by Atkinson(1999)which recognizes the influence on rhetoric from both large and small cultures.Connor and Rozycki(2012b)reported an Intercultural Rhetoric ESP program for health care professionals,in which the students are introduced to both the medical professional culture or the small culture and the national/ethnic culture or the large culture.From the program,students gained an understanding on the large culture such as politeness and personal modesty,as well as proper utterances to be used in specific medical scenarios.