Moving Towards Critical Contrastive Rhetoric

Kubota, Ryuko, and Al Lehner. “Toward Critical Contrastive Rhetoric.” Journal of

     Second Language Writing 13: (2004), 7-27. ERIC. Web. 4 March 2013.

In my first blog entry, I wrote about Baxter and Holland’s concept of contrastive rhetoric, a feature often used in ESL pedagogy, to work with nonstandard dialect students in the classroom.  Kubota and Lehner’s article calls for a move towards “critical contrastive rhetoric” because traditional contrastive rhetoric often sets up binaries between English and other languages, where the other languages are viewed as lacking in comparison (7).

Kubota and Lehner revisit Kaplan’s 1966 discussion of contrastive rhetoric and recognize its worth to the linguistic community. They also revisit other scholars who have advocated for contrastive rhetoric through the past 40 years, such as John Hinds and Benjamin Whorf’s theory of linguistic relativity to establish an understanding of the history before suggesting reasons for a move beyond contrastive rhetoric.

The authors note that critical contrastive rhetoric aligns with critically applied linguistics, which problematizes and politicizes “the common understanding of second language learning/acquisition” and should focus on creating critical approaches to language and culture that affiliate with post-structuralist, postcolonial, and post-foundational critical theories and pedagogies (16). Instead of teaching assimilation, Kubota and Lehner suggest teaching counter-hegemonic pedagogies and cite Canagarajah’s recent work and Freire & Macedo’s work from 1987. They recognize that issues of structure and agency and the macro (classroom-external) and micro (classroom-internal) are issues of power that shape teaching and learning (20). They again refer to Freirian pedagogy of critical contrastive rhetoric when talking about explicit ways languages are valued or devalued.

Kubota and Lehner suggest starting a discussion in class by having students perceive the ways in which they write, or don’t write, in their first languages and critically bring their perceptions to bear on work for composition in another language (21). They argue it is essential in these exercises to bring self-validation to the student’s first language and culture so that students don’t just value their language and culture but recognize it as systematic and useful.

In traditional pedagogical approaches to contrastive rhetoric, agency resides completely within the instructor, but Kubota and Lehner suggest a move towards student agency. It is also essential for teachers not to position English writing as fixed, let alone “better than” other languages (22). This calls for instructors to constantly be self-reflexive and re-evaluate their own purposes and methodologies in the classroom.

While Kubota and Lehner focus on second language teaching, I find this article to be extremely relevant to teaching nonstandard dialects in the writing classroom. I see it clearly connected to the other authors I have focused on in the blog entries, who are all looking for ways to allow multilingual and nonstandard dialect speakers to connect to the writing process in the classroom. What I like about Kubota and Lehner’s concept of critical contrastive rhetoric is the understanding of the usefulness of other languages, and making students aware of them to include in their own writing experiences, rather than making them feel obligated to assimilate to a different set of cultural expectations about the writing process.