King Faisal University Name/Abrar S. Al-Zoubi College of Arts I.D. #: 212503192 Foreign Languages Dept.

Course name: Methodology Higher Studies Professor name: Dr. AlHibr Applied Linguistics Program Date: 27 / 5 / 2013 ******************************************************************** A Summary of: Contrastive Rhetoric and Reading in a Second Language: Theoretical Perspectives on Classroom Practice
Kaplan has argued that structures, logical or rhetorical, were not universal but rather culture-dependent. He advised teachers to teach their students Contrastive Rhetoric , i.e. the different characteristics of structures apparent in different cultures. He believed that this would enable students to comprehend foreign languages texts more easily. A number of studies have been conducted in an attempt to understand cross-cultural narrative processing in L1 and L2 learners. First, Bartlett proposed a theory called Schema theory. He found that each individual has his own schemata, which is his/her generic knowledge of the world, and this knowledge is affected by culture. They try to construct and reconstruct foreign information in order to normalize and interpret it with their own cultural experience. Kintsch and Greene conducted an experiment with Northern American university students. They compared their summaries of both European and Apache folktales. They observed that they only faced a difficulty in understanding the Apache folktale due to its bizarre rhetorical structure. Then, Steffensen et al. undertook a study to find out whether the previous assumption that cross-cultural interpretation is affected only by the bizarre or unusual contrasts. They gave American and Asian Indian subjects two texts to read, one about their own culture and the other about their collogues culture. As a result, they discovered that the use and effects of background knowledge in cross-cultural interpretation were but an extension of normal processing and not the result of bizarre contrasts. These studies showed us the important role that L1 cultural schemata plays in reading comprehension of foreign literary heritage. They wanted teachers to facilitate these narratives by tailoring teaching materials in that foreign language to meet their students cultural needs. So, they provided them with three pedagogical possibilities. First, to follow Kaplans proposal of giving the students direct instruction in contrastive rhetoric. Second, to write the materials in the second language but based on the first language culture. This will facilitate the process for the students because they will exercise the foreign language by utilizing their own culturally based schemata. Third, to make the students familiarize with the narrative and rhetorical characteristics of the language and culture required.

Interlanguage and story-grammar contributed much to debate about the nature of cross-cultural narrative processing. Each of which favored a certain possibility. Interlangugae, which is the second language learner simplified and constrained own internal structure (Selinker), helped contrastive rhetoric to achieve its main objective, of making students conscious of the culture specific features of narratives, by making them do interlingual comparisons. Interlingual researchers favored the first two possibilities. They believed that both conscious cross-cultural rhetorical comparison (through direct instruction) and expressing the first cultural ideas in a second language are important because they enhance reading comprehension. On the other hand, story grammars advocated the use of the third possibility because they thought that students would benefit more from this immersion. Contrastive rhetoric, based on story grammar theory, need to focus more upon the absence or presence of information in the surface structure of the foreign languages narratives than upon crosscultural rhetorical distinctions. These two theories cannot be employed alone because they will not help us understand the complex interactions of cross-cultural learning. They both identify two central dimensions of knowledge that must be adopted in teaching cross-cultural reading. First, the content dimension, which is related to the story grammar investigation, consists of two kinds of knowledge: knowledge about narrative structures and knowledge about inferential and referential meaning. Those are necessary in identifying features of second cultural texts. Second, the processing dimension, which is strongly related to interlanguage studies, deals with the range of conscious (monitored) through to unconscious (unmonitored) knowledge used in language processing. Thus, these two dimensions along with understanding the role of affect in narrative processing will provide us with an area in which the location of background knowledge, learning strategies and teaching approaches can be partly identified. In conclusion, for teachers to have a successful role in aiding the students crosscultural transition, they need to vary in their classroom activities between each of the previously mentioned pedagogical possibilities. They have to take into their considerations that contrastive rhetoric is not just comparison of structures, but it includes having a fuller understanding of the foreign cultures as a whole.