Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

Rhetorical Instruction

"Toward a New Constrastive Rhetoric: Differences Between Arabic and Japanese Rhetorical Instruction" by JoAnne D. Liebman (1992)

13 of 18 occurences in corpus

JoAnne Liebman (1992) contextualized her article in a general shift to newer conceptualizations of Contrastive Rhetoric, in which scholars pay attention to contrasting other elements of text—and pedagogies for text production—beyond arrangement schemes. Her focus was on rhetorical instruction received by international students at a mid-sized U.S. university who come from predominantly Arabic- and Japanese-language backgrounds. While Liebman referenced Bernard Mohan and Winnie Au-Yeung Lo's (1985) pivotal study of composition instruction in British Columbia and Hong Kong, she directed attention before students' early English writing to their previous other or native–language writing instruction.

In surveys about their native-language writing teachers' pedagogies, students in Liebman's (1992) survey generally reported little difference in how they were taught to organize writing between home and U.S. classrooms, relating that they arrived in the United States already familiar with U.S.-style assertion–support arrangements. However, differences did arise more consistently in students' reports of instructional methods: students responded that teachers in both Japanese and Arabic writing courses tended more often to give them established product-focused outlines for written targets and less often to give them opportunities to invent or revise. Students also reported their clear understanding that they were consistently writing to inform the teacher and only the teacher, and that they were infrequently required to try strategies of persuasion. Student surveys also revealed clear differences between Arabic and Japanese schooling: Japanese students recalled far less writing instruction than their Arabic-speaking counterparts, and Arabic-speaking students remembered more source-based composition than Japanese students, who were generally required to write expressively and imaginatively.

In arguing for more attention to students' educational backgrounds, Liebman asked critical questions about the field's articulation of rhetoric's scope, claiming that "if we're going to contrast rhetorics, then they should be rich views" of the concept (p. 146). Indeed, she saw this kind of work as a direct response to Robert Kaplan's own expanding definition, which eventually included paragraph-level arrangement patterns plus linguistic considerations, audience awareness, and knowledge of cultural commonplaces (Grabe & Kaplan, 1989). Such expansion, however, does circumscribe "rhetoric" as a formal educational matter: following Alan C. Purves (1988), Liebman argued that grammar is acquired in home settings while rhetoric is taught in schools.