Contrastive Rhetoric

Shows how a person's first language and culture influence writing in a second language.

This volume demonstrates the role of contrastive rhetoric in ESL courses, and offers suggestions for using CR toward cultural understanding of rhetorical decisions. For scholars and educators in composition, rhetoric, education, ESL, and related areas.

Shows how a person's first language and culture influence writing in a second language.

This volume provides a wide-ranging overview of the diverse issues in applied linguistics today. The contributors consider the relation of their own areas of enquiry both to professional practice and to the discipline as a whole.

The book addresses issues in the field of teaching academic writing to non-native speakers. This book provides a series of discussions about multiple aspects of second language writing, presenting chapters that collectively address a range of issues that are important to new teachers at the post-secondary level. The 13 chapters provide scholarly visions, insight, and interpretation, oriented toward explaining the field of teaching academic writing to non-native speakers. The book is designed to provide foundational content-knowledge in this area, with each chapter authored by recognized experts in the field. In addition to helping train new teachers, the book will serve as an updated reference book for practicing teachers and scholars to consult.

It is easy to argue that the need for attention to how we navigate rhetorically within and across cultures has never been greater, given ever-increasing global migrations and seemingly instantaneous global communication. Yet, the conceptual basis of intercultural rhetoric (also known in the past as contrastive rhetoric) has been under fire ever since it first emerged as an area of research and pedagogical interest. In recent years, Ulla Connor has built a steadily more extensive and sophisticated case for how a culturally contextualized study of rhetoric in any media can be carried out without static and reductive over-generalizations about culture/s or rhetoric. This volume provides both an eloquent summation and further theoretical expansion of Connor’s arguments. Readers who have wondered about the possibility of exploring connections between their students’ (or anyone’s) culture and discourse style will find many of their questions addressed in this volume; other readers who have not previously raised such questions will very likely begin to see the value of doing so.

The essays in this volume explore the field of contrastive rhetoric--the study of how a person's first language (L1) and culture influence the acquisition of another language. Contrastive rhetoric encourages inquiry into various levels of discourse and text, examining the conventions and rhetorical structures of L1 and their influence on the use of another language. It also studies the cognitive dimensions of transfer in relation to both writing and speech. The four sections of this volume--focusing on writing and translation, diglossia, second language acquisition, and pragmatics--cover a broad spectrum of studies in the field of contrastive rhetoric, with essays by some of its leading scholars from Cyprus, Egypt, Hong Kong, Jordan, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The collection will be invaluable to language teachers, students of applied linguistics, and anyone interested in second language acquisition and related issues. Contributors: Nahwat El Arousy, Reem Bassiouney, Ulla Connor, Mohammed Farghal, Ola Hafez, Martin Harfmann, Julide Inozu, Georgette Ioup, Mona Kamel Hassan, Miranda Lee, Zuhal Okan, Mona Osman, Andreas Papapavlou, Paul Stevens, Hulya Yumru, Izzedin al-Zou'bi.

The essays and research papers in this collection explore current issues in Language Education, English for Academic Purposes, Contrastive Discourse Analysis, and Language Policy and Planning, and outline promising directions for theory and practice in applied linguistics. The collection also honours the life-long contribution of Robert B. Kaplan to the field.