Twenty-Five Years of Contrastive Rhetoric: Text Analysis and Writing Pedagogies

Contrastive rhetoric studies with implications for the ESL writing classroom began with Robert Kaplan's 1966 study of some 600 L2 student essays. This work was exploratory and, to a degree, more intuitive than scientific, but valuable in establishing contrastive rhetoric as a new field of inquiry. It has also created controversy. Kaplan's diagrams of rhetorical patterns have been widely reprinted, appearing even in ESL composition textbooks. Indeed, it is in L2 writing classes that contrastive rhetoric work has the greatest potential practical application. The diagrams, with their implications in regard to patterns of written discourse, readily place contrastive rhetoric into the current traditional approach to teaching ESL writing (Silva, 1990), but contrastive rhetoric has not found much favor with those who adopt a process orientation to teaching writing. Proponents of process approaches maintain that contrastive rhetoric research examines the product only, detaching it from and ignoring both the contrastive rhetorical context from which the L2 writers emerge and the processes these writers may have gone through to produce a text. Furthermore, as a result of this research orientation toward the product, when the findings of contrastive rhetoric have been applied to L2 writing, they have, almost by definition, been prescriptive: In English we write like this; those who would write well in English must look at this pattern and imitate it. Modern contrastive rhetoric researchers, hoping to reconcile contrastive rhetoric to teaching composition, insist, perhaps somewhat defensively, that text-oriented research does not equal product-oriented writing instruction (Grabe & Kaplan, 1989). While that may be the case, in practice the diagrams have, in fact, been used to justify prescriptive approaches to teaching writing. Even more unfortunately, perhaps because of the simplicity of the diagrams, the findings of early contrastive rhetoric studies were