question 5

   Kaplan (1996) put forward the idea of Contrastive Rhetoric. His point was that nonnative speakers who write in English violate the norms of English rhetoric because they are negatively affected by the rhetoric of their first languages. The rhetoric he mentioned was mainly focused on how paragraphs are organized in specific languages. His notion of Contrastive Rhetoric was criticized by many researchers for his methodology used, and his oversimplifying writing in L1, L2, and the interaction between them. 

   Hinds (1987) criticized his methodology of not actually analyzing the texts produced by L2 writers. He looked through the columns in Japanese newspapers and identified the digressive and inductive nature of writings in Japanese. Kubota (1997,1998) confronted his account of CR by pointing out that writings in Japanese are not uniformly inductive and that many Japanese readers actually prefer deductive writings. Later on, many researchers (You, 2010; Xu, 2012 etc.) also demonstrated that writings in other languages can be diverse. 

   Later views of CR were continued to be criticized for “their seemingly static and essentialized portrayals of cultures, languages, texts, and hence writers, and for insufficient attention to the powerful influences of dominant groups, languages and text types (Casanave, 2003, p.39).” To address these problems, the notion of Intercultural Rhetoric was introduced by Connor (1998). However, some critics were still not happy with it, because they thought the term was still too bounded and essentialized. 

   Writing (whether in L1 or L2) is a complicated matter. One notion itself, of course, is not enough to explain all of the complexity. However, one needs to start somewhere to make progress in the field of myth. I think RC is a brave attempt to solve the puzzle, even though it is an oversimplified one.