Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

Rhetorical Awareness and Consciousness

"Rhetorical Consciousness Raising in the L2 Reading Classroom" by Sima Sengupta (1999)

Awareness: 7 of 11 occurrences in corpus

Consciousness: all 32 occurrences in corpus

This study focused on developing reader/writer awareness among tertiary students in Hong Kong. Sima Sengupta (1999) referenced "consciousness raising" as a key concept in second language pedagogy—especially grammar teaching. She acknowledged that rhetoric is an extremely broad category to operationalize in pedagogical terms, though she did claim that there is a substantial linguistic component apparent in metadiscourse, organizational cues, and other prototypical textual features. By extension, rhetorical consciousness-raising involves "enabling students to talk about texts and get a feel for how a text is skilfully crafted" to allow a writer and reader to create knowledge (p. 293). In tension with this implicit textual/craft–centered definition, though, Sengupta recognized that rhetoric's capacity for "creating an appetite in the mind" (p. 293, citing Podis & Podis, 1990) means that rhetorical consciousness must extend well beyond awareness of specific textual devices. It must extend to understanding that the quality of written text ultimately rests on its fit with (shifting) contextual and audience expectations.

In an attempt to understand how a pedagogy based on rhetorical consciousness raising might work, Sengupta conducted observations and interviews and collected summaries and reading journals from students in a course on language and society. Her research questions focused on perceptions of "reader friendliness," a theme she explored through students' reading journals, transcribed classroom interactions, interviews, analysis of student writing, and students' immediate reflections on completing a summary task. Four features of reader friendliness emerged:

• signals (including forecasting and recapitulating statements as well as explicit statements of authorial stance)
• structure (including headings and sections following generic models)
• introductions that provide organizational forecasting, a statement of purpose, and background
• conclusions that reiterate purpose and authorial point of view

Sengupta reported that students believed they were becoming better readers after paying more attention to such features—claims corroborated by their performance on the summary task. However, there was uneven evidence of their application of the features to their own writing. Sengupta concluded that students became more sensitive to even subtle differences between how they as novices write and how experts write. But she argued that such declarative knowledge clearly runs ahead of procedural knowledge—that students' rhetorical awareness (at least in the limited sense of "reader friendliness") did not immediately transfer to their own composition.