Week 6 reading response: Kubota and Connor

SUMMARY

Ulla Connor - Changing currents in contrastive rhetoric

This chapter discussed the the history and implications of contrastive rhetoric. Connor writes "The underlying premise of the field is that any given language is likely to have written texts that are constructed using identifiable discourse features". Connor takes us through a history of Contrastive Rhetoric, beginning with Kaplan's influential "doodle" paper, wherein Connor explains Kaplan's original insights regarding the rhetoric of different cultures. Contrastive rhetoric has now gorwn into an interdisciplinary domain of second language acquisition with rich theoretical underpinnings in both linguistics and rhetoric. Connor then talks about applications of contrastive rhetoric in EFL situations. Connor then addresses some criticisms of contrastive rhetoric. One of the issues with contrastive rhetoric is that it presents individuals of a culture as being subject to the rhetorical devices of their first, native, or dominant language. Another issue is culture is a fluid and ever-changing thing. This means that it would be difficult to assert what the rhetorical conventions of a language are, since they could be and likely are in flux most of the time. Connor then concludes the chapter by summarizing the current state of contrastive rhetoric, and suggesting what the future holds for contrastive rhetoric.

Ryuko Kubota - Japanese Culture Constructed by Discourses

This article from the TESOL Quarterly discusses Japanese culture identities as view through a dichotomous relationship of East vs. West. Kubota argues that this is a problematic binary. Kubota writes "This article takes Japanese culture as an example, and after summarizing the characterizations of Japanese culture that appear in the applied linguistics literature, critiques the essentialized representations of culture found in discussions of teaching writing and critical thinking to ESL students. It also attempts to come to terms with the pedagogical tension between acculturation and pluralist approaches... Second, I point out that the Other adopts cultural distinctiveness, manifesting a struggle for power in Westernization, as is evident in the discourse of the uniqueness of Japanese culture that has been promoted in Japan since the 1960s. Third, I present an emerging body of research on Japanese schooling as counterknowledge that is generating a new understanding of culture in Japanese education. Finally this article discusses (a) a perspective of critical multiculturalism as a way of understanding cultural differences in educational contexts and (b) implications for L2 teaching from a view of critical literacy." In a later section Kubota discusses pedagogical issues relating to approaches in teaching culture and language. Kubota presents three models: The acculturation model, the pluralist model, and critical multiculturalism. She then has a section regarding dominant codes, and discusses the power struggle between languages of high and low prestige, and how to be more conscious of the issues that may arise from said power inequality.

Ryuko Kubota - Unfinished Knowledge: The Story of Barbara

This was an interesting text. It basically did in narrative what the two aforementioned articles did in demonstrating the historical currents of contrastive rhetoric. It was easy to follow and very informative.It was an interesting alternative approach to informative writing.


REFLECTIONS

I was first introduced to contrastive rhetoric at community college in a Women's Literature class. I can't remember what the instructors point was, but I think perhaps it was that different cultures think differently, or rather that individuals think differently and will approach communication in different ways. I remember that she showed us the Kaplan doodles specifically. She was probably priming our pumps for alternative viewpoints and narratives. The whole thing kind of reminds me of the joke "White people talk like this..." and "Black people talk like this...", which only supports the concept of essentialism, unfortunately.

I guess before that and since then I haven't much considered or entertained the idea that individuals from other cultures will approach communication differently. I feel like contrastive rhetoric is an off-shoot of discourse analytics, but in a different form. I suppose we're all kind of familiar with the notion that people approach communication in different ways, and that misunderstandings typically arise from a lack of understanding between interlocutors. So I see how it is important for us as future educators of English as a second language to be cognizant about these issues that will inevitably arise with teaching the rhetorical stylings of English. It is a delicate balance between helping students maintain their identity and voice while also successfully using the rhetorical strategies and devices of their L2.

On a semi-related note, I asked someone on facebook today to "not reduce me to a single aspect of my identity". He told me I should like spicy food because I'm a Mexican.

FURTHER QUESTIONS

1. Is anyone else becoming really, really hyper-critical of the conversations they have with others?

2. Why isn't there more of an emphasis placed on educating people about this stuff earlier in life? It seems like this knowledge would be valuable to more than just future ESL teachers.

Week Four Reading Response

SUMMARY

Holliday et al.

Intercultural Communication

Unit B1.3 Discourse and Identity

    In this section Holliday et al discusses "how far people's identities are bound up with how the speak and write, and all the contextual factors that go together with how they speak and write" (101). The authors make the claim that, according to Stephenson, "Our sense of self is acheived through our capacity to conceive of our own lives as a unity and this in turn is a result of our capacity to tell the story of our lives" (101). This section discusses how people take on particular perspectives when talking about what the world is like. This idea is attributed to James Gee, and it involves "us taking perspectives on what is 'normal' and not." (101). The first text from this unit comes from A. De Fina and is titled "Group identity, narrative and self-representations". In this text De Fina argues that "people do not possess one identity related to the social categories to which they belong, but rather they present and re-present themselves, choosing within an inventory of more or less compatible identities that intersect and/or contrast with each other indifferent ways and in accordance with changing social circumstances and interlocutors" (102). This is basically arguing that a person consists of multiple intersecting cultural identities from which the given individual is able to pick and choose from these identities how to represent oneself in differing situations. The communities from which a person comes is referred to as a discourse, an idea which James Gee promotes heavily over the idea of the hard-to-define 'culture'.


"I am not a big fan of the word "culture"-- too many meanings and gets us sometimes to think at too large a scale and miss important intergroup differences. I am more a fan of Discourses in the sense of socially recognisable identities and activities." -James Gee, 2008

    The other reading from Unit B1.3 comes from Gee. It is an excerpt from "An Introduction to Discourse Analysis". Gee establishes what a discourse community is over the idea of a culture. He writes "The key to Discourses is recognition" and "It is sometimes helpful to think about social and political issues as if it is not just us humans who are talking and interacting with each other, but rather, the Discourses we represent and enact, and for which we are 'carriers'"(106).

Unit B1.4 Discourse, Identity, and Intercultural Communication

    We are presented with two texts in this section. The first is written by Scollon and Wong Scollon. The title is "Discourse and intercultural communication". The authors discuss and elaborate on the Gee position towards culture and discourse community. These authors also mention the concept of a mediated discourse perspective, which "shifts from a focus on the individuals involved in communication... to a focus on mediated action as a kind of social action" (111). The next text in Unit B1.4 is from Roberts and Sarangi and provides us with some discourse analysis of some medical encounters. This section builds upon and applies Gee's theory of Discourse.

Unit B1.5 Identity and Language Learning

    In this section Holliday et al present information on how an individual's identity is shaped by the acquisition of a second language. We are presented with two texts: Pellegrino Aveni's "Study Abroad and Second Language Use" and Pavlenko and Lantolf's "Second language learning as participation and the (re)construction of selves". These articles discuss what it is that happens to a person's identity through the process of acquiring a second language.

K. Hall, Language and Identity Ch. 2

    In this chapter the author Hall discusses what goes into making a person's social and linguistic identity. There were some really good definitions of some terms used so far in class that I particularly enjoyed, which I will share here:

"Social identity encompasses partcipant rules, positions, relationships, reputations, and other dimensions of social personae, which are conventionally linked to epistemic and affective stances." - Elinor Ochs, 1996
"[habitus] is a set of bodily dispositions acquired through extended engagement in our everyday activities that dispose us to act in certain ways. We bring them with us to our social experiences, and are inclined to make sense of our experiences, and coordinate our actions with others in particular ways. It is through or lived experiences as individual actors by which our habitus is continually being reconstructed."

    Hall also talks about how context is important for discussing a person's identity.

Quote: "[Individual identity is] the situated outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others." -Richard Bauman, 2000

B. Norton Pierce, "Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning"

    This article attempts to argue that "SLA theorists have not developed a comprehensive theory of social identity that integrates the language learner and the language learning context." Furthermore, "This theory of social identity... assumes power relations play a crucial role in social interactions between language learners and target language speakers." The article offers multiple analysis of real life data and ends with some implications and objectives to be striven toward in the classroom and/or target language conversation contexts.


REFLECTIONS/CRITIQUE

    Okay, so this stuff is starting to make more sense to me. Once you become accustomed to the register of Intercultural Communication language, I guess things just start clicking. It really helps to connect this stuff with my own personal experiences with SLA and the identity that arose out of those situations. The trouble is that I don't have an environment in which I can submerse myself in the target language. But none-the-less, I can still make connections. I particularly enjoyed the Hall chapter on language and identity as well as Units B1.3 and B1.4 in the Holliday text. The emphasis on how a person conveys their cultural identity speaks to me. I enjoy the approach of Gee's discourse analytics, rather than the traditional view of intercultural communication (that miscommunication arises out of cultural differences, I think?). The notion that identity is something that is projected and re-projected is fascinating. We all have experiences of people doing this. I have a friend who has a black friend that the original friend claims can pass between registers and styles. As my friend puts it, "He can talk like a black person and like a white person when he wants to." My friend is impressed by this fact,  but I think many of us do this every day. Identity is somewhat shaped by the individuals perception of how the interlocutor perceives the individual. This is kind of convoluted, I think. I suppose what dawns on me now is that a lot more goes into communication than just words.

FURTHER QUESTIONS

1. How does linguistic determinism (the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) factor into Intercultural Communication, especially with regard to cultural identity projections of self?
2. Who is Foucault?
3. Is it possible to be lacking in cultural identity? i.e. to not have a discourse community to hail from. This is impossible, right?

Regards,
TfM