Contrastive Rhetoric: Reaching to intercultural rhetoric

This volume explores contrastive rhetoric for audiences in both ESL contexts and international EFL contexts, exposing the newest developments in theories of culture and discourse and pushing the boundaries beyond any previously staked ground. The book presents a comprehensive set of empirical investigations involving a number of first languages; 13 of the 17 authors are English-as-a-second-language speakers, many working in non-US contexts. This work develops a coherent agenda for contrastive rhetoric researchers, studying genres such as school writing, grant proposals, business letters, newspaper editorials, book reviews, and newspaper commentaries. Four chapters provide ethnographies and observations about contrastive rhetoric and the teaching of EFL and ESL. The book ends with a look to the future, suggesting it is more accurate to use the term ‘intercultural rhetoric’ to account for the richness of rhetoric variation of written texts and the varying contexts in which they are constructed.

Table of contents

 

Introduction Ulla Connor, Ed Nagelhout and William Rozycki	1–8
Section I. Current state of contrastive rhetoric	9
From contrastive rhetoric to intercultural rhetoric: A search for collective identity Xiaoming Li	11–24
The importance of comparable corpora in cross-cultural studies Ana I. Moreno	25–41
Section II. Contrastive corpus studies in specific genres	43
Metadiscourse across three varieties of English: American, British, and advanced learner English Annelie Дdel	45–62
A genre-based study of research grant proposals in China Haiying Feng	63–86
Different cultures – different discourses? Rhetorical patterns of business letters by English and Russian speakers Maria Loukianenko Wolfe	87–121
Spanish language newspaper editorials from Mexico, Spain, and the U.S. Chin-Sook Pak and Rebeca Acevedo	123–145
The rhetorical structure of academic book reviews of literature: An English-Spanish cross-linguistic approach Lorena Suбrez and Ana I. Moreno	147–168
Newspaper commentaries on terrorism in China and Australia: A contrastive genre study Wei Wang	169–191
Section III. Contrastive rhetoric and the teaching of ESL/EFL writing	193
"Long sentences and floating commas": Mexican students' rhetorical practices and the sociocultural context Virginia LoCastro	195–217
English web page use in an EFL setting: A contrastive rhetoric view of the development of information literacy Kara McBride	219–240
From Confucianism to Marxism: A century of theme treatment in Chinese writing instruction Xiaoye You	241–256
Plagiarism in an intercultural rhetoric context: What we can learn about one from the other Joel Bloch	257–274
Section IV. Future directions	275
A conversation on contrastive rhetoric: Dwight Atkinson and Paul Kei Matsuda talk about issues, conceptualizations, and the future of contrastive rhetoric Paul Kei Matsuda and Dwight Atkinson	277–298
Mapping multidimensional aspects of research: Reaching to intercultural rhetoric Ulla Connor	299–315
Notes on contributors	317–319
Index	321–324