Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

Controlled Rhetoric

"Bridging the Gap Between Controlled and Free Composition: Controlled Rhetoric at the Upper-Intermediate Level" by Elaine Dehghanpisheh (1979)

12 of 12 occurrences in corpus

Elaine Dehghanpisheh (1979) advocated "controlled rhetoric" as a compromise pedagogy between "controlled" and "free" composition. Her contemporaries, she noted, tended to reject both approaches. While free composition promised to encourage and support students' writing fluency, it risked allowing students too much latitude to commit surface-level errors that would be difficult to address later. And while controlled composition could minimize error, it prevented students from exercising "content-selection and data-organization procedures" (p. 512)—that is, decision-making beyond the sentence level. As she related in her introduction, controlled composition had been the state of the art in L2 writing instruction until second language writing professionals—with Vivian Zamel (1976) most vocal among them—proposed adopting process approaches from L1 composition colleagues. A predictable debate ensued between process advocates and scholar–teachers who believed second language writers should (first) not be permitted to write at all until they had apparently mastered spoken target-language expression and (second) only be permitted to write in highly constrained forms that promised to eliminate sentence-level error.

Dehghanpisheh's proposal centered on the paragraph: the compositional threshold at which, for her and many of her contemporaries following Robert Kaplan, written rhetoric begins. She wrote, "successful generation of acceptable paragraphs indicates a basic proficiency in written English that can be easily expanded to longer pieces of discourse" (p. 510). Reinforcing Kaplan's (1966) claims about the paragraph, Dehghanpisheh argued that proficiency may best be achieved by leveraging it both as a fundamental rhetorical structure and as a platform for making contrasts between students' L1 and L2 as visible as possible. But she argued further that such a contrast is only pedagogically effective in expository writing: exposition is the most common modal target for tertiary students. And exposition can level some of the "interference" writing researchers noted from the "stylistic and cultural literary expression patterns" of students' native language (p. 511, quoting Erazmus, 1960, p. 23). Indeed, Dehghanpisheh's (1973) own research with L1 speakers of Persian concluded that "proverbs and metaphors" seemed to carry over into those students' English-language writing in ways that became apparent to error analysis.

Dehghanpisheh's article is the only place the phrase "controlled rhetoric" appears in the corpus, but it connects its definition of rhetoric to a legacy of control in second language writing pedagogy in which the paragraph plays a central role.