Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

Rhetorical Convention(s)

"Cultural Representations of Rhetorical Conventions: The Effects on Reading Recall" by Hsi-Chin Janet Chu, Janet Swaffar, & Davida H. Charney (2002)

108 of 128 occurences in corpus

Hsi-Chin Janet Chu and colleagues (2002) created a pedagogical experiment to determine whether what they term "rhetorical style" affected the recall of Chinese student readers of English-language texts as well as those readers' perceptions of rhetorical differences. By "rhetorical style" here, the authors meant conventions that are associated with qi–cheng–zhuan–he, an organizational scheme that emerged during China's Yuen dynasty in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In this scheme, the writer digresses or "turns" (zhuan) within an exposition in order to exemplify, elaborate, or offer complementary or contrasting perspectives. While the authors clarified that qi–cheng–zhuan–he names an approach rather than a rigid textual arrangement, they did describe the approach in specific discursive terms by focusing on its differences from what they termed Western expository style. As part of the experiment, authors revised original editorials from a bilingual (Chinese–English) Taiwanese magazine into English-language versions that foregrounded explicit topic and thesis statements, frontloaded background information, shifted to deductive argumentation strategies, and increased the number of discursive markers for cohesion. Both first-year and senior-level students at a Taiwan-based university participated: each student read two passages—one in the original and one in the revised version.

Students' recall was consistently better for the original versions, leading the authors to conclude that Chinese rhetorical conventions were influential enough for these students that they interfered with comprehension of the more Western seeming revisions. The authors also observed, in response to previous studies referencing cognitive development/deficiencies (for example, Mohan & Lo, 1985) that the Chinese conventions were so influential that they affected the senior-level (thus more "developed") students to a similar degree compared to the freshmen—even though students overall did not report that they actually perceived differences among the texts. In addition, authors noted a strong correlation between students' recall and their interest in/familiarity with different topics, suggesting that motivation and background knowledge may help students compensate for difficulties presented by organizational schemes.

"Rhetorical convention" in this study thus names a collection of textual features that may be manipulated and operationalized as experimental variables. While the authors disclaimed the idea that qi–cheng–zhuan–he is a "rigidly formalized structure" (Chu et al., 2002, p. 515), they did claim that the "essence" of the organization underlies a wide range of "Chinese" rhetorical strategies. They also noted that Taiwanese teaching of Chinese texts emphasized the conventions while teaching of English texts (at least prior to the late 1990s) did not focus similarly on English macrostructures. The authors' equation of rhetorical conventions with such macrostructures reinforces contrastive rhetoric's focus on paragraph-level arrangement, and it recasts such conventions as formal cognitive schema.