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Journal of Second Language Writing 25 (2014) 59–67

What we need and don’t need intercultural rhetoric for:

A retrospective and prospective look at an evolving research area
Diane Belcher *
Department of Applied Linguistics/ESL, Georgia State University, PO Box 4099, Atlanta, GA 30302-4099, United States

Abstract
This article surveys the evolution of what is now known as intercultural rhetoric (IR) and considers how developments in IR
research may be seen as both productive and problematic in varying ways for goals that may not always happily co-exist, namely
theory construction (or deconstruction) and language/literacy classroom practice. The affordances, challenges, and possible
constraints of continuing to empirically and conceptually develop an area labeled ‘‘intercultural rhetoric’’ in view of recent research
are discussed.
# 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Contrastive rhetoric; Intercultural rhetoric; Culture

The pedagogically-motivated research area formerly known as contrastive rhetoric (CR) and now, thanks largely to
the efforts of Connor (2008, 2011), more often referred to as intercultural rhetoric (IR), has, like the concept of culture
itself, had a ‘‘checkered history’’ (Atkinson & Sohn, 2013, p. 21). Its early days of being perceived as intellectually
intriguing and pedagogically helpful may actually now be hard for many to remember or, for new English-language
teaching (ELT) practitioners, even to fathom, given the groundswell of CR criticism that emerged in the decades
following its arrival on the ELT scene. The purpose of this review is to revisit the contributions of both those engaged
in and those highly critical of the IR project and to consider how new theoretical and research developments may help
move us beyond the dichotomous pro and con arguments that this topic has inspired. The extent to which the related IR
aims of theory construction and linguaculturally sensitive classroom practice can productively develop in tandem, as
IR proponents have hoped, will be an underlying theme of this review.
In the beginning was Kaplan

Kaplan’s (1966) now almost 50-year-old study ‘‘Inter-cultural thought patterns in inter-cultural education’’ did
more than launch a pedagogically-inspired research area. Our reductive memories of this article, which many of us
know better from references than actual reading (Casanave, 2004), may make it challenging to think of it as more than
that ‘‘doodles’’ article, with easily remembered and arguably overly-influential graphic representations of discourse
flow as a straight line for English, a gyre for ‘‘Oriental’’ rhetoric, and varying zigzag lines for ‘‘Semitic,’’ ‘‘Romance,’’

* Tel.: +1 404 413 5194.

E-mail address: dbelcher1@gsu.edu.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2014.06.003
1060-3743/# 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
60 D. Belcher / Journal of Second Language Writing 25 (2014) 59–67

and ‘‘Russian’’ discourse. Since most of us today were not in the field a half century ago when Kaplan’s article was first
published, it is easy to overlook its initial novelty and significance: its focus on the cultural-contextual, discourse-level
issues of what later became known as ‘‘contrastive rhetoric’’ rather than on exclusively linguistic, sentence-internal
concerns of then-popular contrastive analysis, and the article’s argument for written, not just or primarily oral, second
language use as meriting attention from applied linguists. Bloch (2013), who sees Kaplan’s 1966 article as ‘‘the single
most important contribution to the discussion of second language writing,’’ observes that ‘‘its value arose from its
ability to synthesize disparate fields that had long existed separately, in this case applied linguistics and contemporary
rhetoric, into a new, highly generative area of inquiry’’ (p. 243).
The generative legacy of Kaplan’s early work has, however, been complex. Not only did it spark interest in culture,
discourse, and second language writing, but it also eventually catalyzed what could optimistically be viewed as a dialectic
progression of contrastive rhetoric research. Kaplan’s (1966) study itself is now often pointed to as a template for how not
to do CR (IR) research: Don’t compare incommensurate texts, of different genres, by authors of varying expertise; don’t
label, overgeneralize, and oversimplify ethnolinguistic cultures and rhetorics, as, for instance, Oriental or Semitic, linear
or non-linear; don’t take a mainly etic perspective; and don’t overlook the need for empirical data analysis (Casanave,
2004; Connor, 1996; Leki, 1991). Kaplan himself (Grabe & Kaplan, 1996; Kaplan, 1987), we should add, later
acknowledged many of the shortcomings of his earlier work, but from the perspective of critical pedagogists like Kubota
and Lehner (2004), the damage was done. Despite the ‘‘good intention of associating ESL students’ writing in English
with their cultural or cognitive styles rather than their cognitive ability,’’ Kubota and Lehner have noted, ‘‘traditional
contrastive rhetoric’’ presents ‘‘a static cultural binary between the Self and the Other [that] constitutes a colonialist
construct of culture’’ and, in effect, ‘‘legitimates and reinforces asymmetrical relations of power’’ (p. 18).
Yet many, including Kubota herself, have found the challenge of empirically investigating Kaplan’s cultural,
cognitive styles argument hard to resist. Especially notable among the earlier Kaplan correctors is Hinds (1987, 1990),
whose oft-cited CR research can be seen as a crucial methodological and theoretical step, if not leap, forward. Rather
than extrapolating about L1 culture from L2 learner texts as Kaplan did, Hinds examined L1 Japanese texts by
accomplished, published authors, all using the same genre. More emic in his approach than Kaplan was, Hinds
considered the audience perspective, proposing a typology of reader vs. writer-responsible texts (1987), later refined as
deductive, inductive, and quasi-inductive discourse styles (1990), influenced, Hinds posited, by culture-specific
traditional patterns of organization. Yet Hinds’ work was not emic enough to avoid serious flaws, according to Kubota
(1997; see also Casanave, 2004), who as a native speaker of Japanese saw the journalistic genre Hinds focused on as
not representative of Japanese expository prose, and the ancient ki-shoo-ten-ketsu (quasi-inductive) tradition he
invoked as open to many different types of analysis. Kubota’s (1998) own methodological and theoretical advance
consisted of analyzing both first and second language texts produced by the same Japanese English-speaking writers,
whose essays in each language were evaluated by either Japanese L1 or English L1 raters. Given the variation found in
the essays, as well as lack of evidence of negative L1 transfer, Kubota’s work empirically undermined claims of
cultural homogeneity, which she later argued (1999) was a discursively constructed notion.
The methodological advance that Kubota helped pioneer (and then moved beyond) in the 1990s, is, according to Baker
(2013), still too culturally homogeneous in its approach: ‘‘. . .[We] need to go beyond a comparison of texts produced in a
writer’s L1 and in the target language. . . and look at texts produced with an intercultural audience in mind. . . .[We] should
be looking at the rhetorical patterns in essays written by and for multilingual and multicultural audiences’’ (p. 25). Baker
suggests that writers, like speakers, eclectically choose and adapt their communicative behaviors for the perceived needs of
their interlocutors (readers), who now more than ever before may be lingua franca speakers—a phenomenon that empirical
research based on text analysis is only beginning to capture (see also Kuteeva & Mauranen, 2014; Mauranen, 2012).
The work of one of the most steadfast proponents of CR (IR) can itself be seen as a microcosm of the evolution of
research in this area. As Casanave (2004) has observed, ‘‘More steadily than other scholars. . . [Ulla Connor] has noted
the weaknesses of some of the early CR work and attempted to correct them. . .’’ (p. 39). Casanave rightly credits
Connor with expanding this field of inquiry to include different languages, genres, and research methodologies, and
tackling one of the most formidable obstacles to empirically persuasive work in this area, namely comparability. In her
effort to rebrand CR as IR, Connor (2004), with her meta-awareness of the field, hoped the new name would better
represent where the field has been and should go: its growing interest in broader views of cross-cultural/linguistic
writing; its use of newer text-oriented methods, such as corpus analysis, and of more ethnographic approaches better
able to do justice to language in interaction; and its quest for more dynamic definitions of culture, including small, non-
ethnolinguistic cultures (see also Atkinson, 2004; Connor, 2008, 2011).
 D. Belcher / Journal of Second Language Writing 25 (2014) 59–67 61

By now, it should come as no surprise that a number of scholars have not shared Connor’s rosy view of IR’s past,
present, or future. Casanave (2004) has remarked that while it can alert teachers to important issues, it has failed to live
up to its apparent pedagogical promise of clear and compelling implications for the classroom. From Kubota and
Lehner’s (2004) perspective, on the other hand, there has been too much impact on classrooms, that is, encouragement
of explicit, uncritical teaching of rhetorical norms, and resulting complicity in assimilationist tendencies rather than
empowerment of learners as appropriators of dominant forms and conventions for their own purposes. Kubota and
Lehner proposed a radical reconceptualization of CR, namely ‘‘critical contrastive rhetoric,’’ which by employing
‘‘poststructuralist, postcolonial and postmodern critiques of language and culture’’ would re-envision the study of
culturally-related rhetorical styles in terms of ‘‘relations of power, discursive construction of knowledge, . . . [and]
rhetorical plurality’’ (p. 7).
Equally critical of the CR project as Kubota and Lehner have been, Canagarajah (2013b), has, however,
acknowledged Connor’s re-modeling attempt as a move in the right direction, away from ‘‘the deterministic,
normative, and prescriptive orientations typical of cross-cultural orientations’’ (p. 205), but in his view it fails to go far
enough. In offering his own new label, cosmopolitan practice (also referred to as ‘‘translingual practice’’; see
Canagarajah, 2013a, 2013c), he carefully unpacks what he sees as the unfortunate connotations of Connor’s choice of
IR as a label. From Canagarajah’s (2013b) perspective, intercultural still suggests autonomous entities (large or small),
and rhetoric has too often been used to index stabilized linguistic conventions. To Canagarajah, cosmopolitan, in
contrast, suggests multilayered affiliations and contact zones rather than separate communities, and practice alludes to
negotiated interactions, with norms ‘‘always open to negotiation’’ (p. 214).1
For Atkinson and Matsuda (2013), however, cosmopolitan practice does not so efficaciously denote or connote all
that Canagarajah intends, and the intentions themselves may be somewhat problematic. In his dialog with Atkinson,
Matsuda suggests that there are crucial differences between written and spoken discourse that cosmopolitan practice
elides. ‘‘Written language [far more than spoken],’’ Matsuda notes, ‘‘has traditionally played a huge role in
standardizing and institutionalizing dominant languages’’ (p. 238), and literacy instruction invariably produces new
generations of language users with specific expectations about written language. For Atkinson, all linguistic activity
requires both some degree of stability and negotiation, or interactivity. Atkinson argues that a broad conceptualization
of IR can ‘‘take both of them into account’’ (p. 233).
For the rest of this review, intercultural rhetoric, rather than contrastive rhetoric or cosmopolitan practice, is the
term that will be used to refer to this area of inquiry, partly because of its increasing popularity among those who
engage in what Abasi (2012) has called ‘‘cultural studies of writing’’ (p. 195). The remaining sections of this review
will examine recent developments that appear toward opposite ends of the negotiation/stability continuum:
postmodernism and digital literacies at the discourse-as-ongoing-negotiation (even when written) end, and at the other,
‘‘stabilized-for-now’’ (Schryer, 1993), or at various points in time, end of the continuum, neo-Whorfianism and recent
histories of non-Western rhetoric.

Recent developments

Negotiation and dynamism

Postmodernism
While it may not be difficult to see how postmodernist concepts of fragmentation, hybridity, fluidity, performativity,
and identity construction (usually with reference to individuals) could move us beyond static linguacultural notions of

1
Canagarajah (2013b) does not deny the value of norms, but with the term practice attempts to focus attention on the role of human agency and
deflect it away from more static, deterministic views of communication.
62 D. Belcher / Journal of Second Language Writing 25 (2014) 59–67

rhetoric, perhaps a more powerful illustration of the impact and relevance of postmodernism for intercultural rhetoric
can be found in the life and scholarly work of Emi Otsuji (2010), herself a transnational embodiment of
postmodernism (see also the focal participant, Jija, in Atkinson & Sohn, 2013).2 Born in the US to Japanese parents,
Otsuji’s childhood was spent in Japan, her teen years in Scotland, Singapore, and Holland, and adult life in Australia.
She sees herself as having an ‘‘unstable sense of origin’’ (p. 187), with co-existing competing feelings of connection
and alienation as the ‘‘partially sedimented product of experiences’’ (p. 190) everywhere she has been. For Otsuji, the
postmodernist-informed work of Pennycook and Maher have been especially facilitative of reflections on her own
identity construction. From Pennycook, especially meaningful for Otsuji is his focus on performativity. She identifies
with Pennycook’s (2003, 2004; see also 2013) anti-foundationalist notion of language as performance, ‘‘not a prior
system tied to ethnicity, territory, or nation’’ (Otsuji, 2010, p. 190), as inspired by Butler’s (1999) conceptualization of
gender as ‘‘the sedimentation of iterative performances’’ (p. 43). Equally meaningful for Otsuji is Maher’s (2005; see
also 2013) ‘‘post-ethnic’’ notion of metroethnicity (Otsuji, 2010, p. 191). According to Maher (2005), while the
‘‘language-ethnicity romance . . . does not and will not go away’’ (p. 85), metroethnicity functions as an enabler of ‘‘a
kind of self-reconstruction’’ (p. 87), as seen in the ‘‘postmodernized’’ struggle (p. 89) of minorities such as young Ainu
in Japan, who may reject traditional language loyalty and choose to speak, for example, Italian. To Maher, such
examples of ‘‘emancipatory politics’’ (p. 84), consciously breaking the language/ethnicity link, are the antithesis of
Whorfianism. In Otsuji’s collaborative work with Pennycook (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010), they propose
metrolingualism as an extension of Maher’s metroethnicity, or more specifically, as a way not only of disconnecting
language systems from statist views of identity, ethnicity, and place, but also from the linguistic boundaries established
by conventional language ideologies. For Otsuji and Pennycook, urban code mixing should be understood not as
switching from one distinct code to another, or first and second languages, as the term multilingualism suggests (see
also Canagarajah, 2013a), but as a lingua franca in its own right thriving in local contexts.
Interestingly, despite her postmodern self-awareness, Otsuji (2010) admits to sometimes falling into the
essentializing trap of categorizing her own Japanese-language students in Australia by their apparent ethnicity. One of
Otsuji’s contributions mediated through her postmodernist self-reflections is indeed her candid, personally-embodied
highlighting of the tension between self-reconstruction and the much harder-to-escape ‘‘other’’ construction so easily
slipped into when viewing anyone outside ourselves.

Digital literacies
While postmodern theory has encouraged us to conceptualize discourse in less static and compartmentalized ways,
technology is radically changing discourse itself. Non-geographically-determined communities are the norm in
cyberspace, which, as Jones and Hafner (2012; see also Hafner, Chik, & Jones, 2013) have noted, enables development
of ‘‘affinity spaces’’ (Gee, 2004, p. 67), places online where people can easily interact and create new communities,
inevitably influenced by prior community connections but also by the affordances and constraints of digital interaction
and the new ‘‘cultures of use’’ (Thorne, 2003, p. 40) that arise online. Thorne’s notion of cultures of use assumes that
there are ‘‘historically sedimented characteristics that accrue to a CMC tool from its everyday use’’ (p. 40), or as Jones
and Hafner (2012) put it, conventions and values ‘‘grow up’’ in groups of media users over time, practices that may
have no off-line analog and may not even be possible in ‘‘real life’’ (pp. 120–121). As optimistic as Jones and Hafner
are, they also point out that our digital world is no simple McCluhanesque cyber-utopia, where members of the global
village interact, learn about each other’s views, and happily accommodate each other. Jones and Hafner observe that
the Internet, by greatly facilitating our ability to find like-minded others all over the world, has become increasingly
‘‘ghetto-ized,’’ with netizens rarely venturing beyond their ‘‘habitual hangouts’’ (p. 126). The Internet may also give us
the illusion of freedom of movement and communication. Not only are there governmental ‘‘Internet ‘cops’’’ who
‘‘enforce censorship on the information highway’’ (Li, 2008, p. 16) and block the flow in various directions, but the

2
Throughout this review I have had to make difficult choices about whose work to include from a wide range of possibilities. The motivations for
these choices have varied. Otsuji’s reflections on postmodernism, for instance, struck me as particularly worthy of inclusion due to her articulation of
lived theory: being both informed by theory and aware of her own embodiment of it. Everett’s neo-Whorfian work, cited later in this article, has
posed a significant recent challenge to linguistic universalism, so significant that a number of linguists have felt compelled to refute it (e.g.,
McWhorter, 2014). Kirkpatrick and Xu’s as well as You’s works, also cited later, provide unusual (for applied linguistics, if not writing studies)
historical perspectives on complex, culturally situated rhetorical and pedagogical practices. In my discussion of these and other works, I have often
referenced additional contributors to these subtopics, but many more could have been included.
 D. Belcher / Journal of Second Language Writing 25 (2014) 59–67 63

architecture of the Internet itself, as well as of social media and web browsers, not to mention the financial costs of
access, has an impact on the who and how of online engagement. Regarding global networks and flows, Kramsch and
Boner (2013) have similarly pointed out that those in the developing world may either be left out or affected in ways
that serve First World neoliberal economic interests much more than their own. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the
Internet does offer hitherto unimagined opportunities for new cultures of use and transcultural flows (Pennycook,
2007), and more potential for the global to reach the local (for better or worse) and the local to affect the global than
ever before. Many traditional barriers to communication, geographical and otherwise, are coming down.

Stabilized-for-now

While postmodernist theory and digitized communication have pushed us conceptually and experientially toward
greater awareness of discourse as dynamic and negotiated, other recent developments point to the relative stability and,
to some extent, uniformity of discourse within certain spatial and temporal boundaries, suggesting that the
geopolitical, ethnolinguistic large culture concept, which ‘‘will not go away’’ (Maher, 2005, p. 85), may be worth
revisiting.

Neo-Whorfianism
Everett’s (2012) study of the language of the Pirahãs, an indigenous people in Amazonian Brazil, provides abundant
evidence of a linguaculturally distinct group.3 Their relative physical isolation and lack of interest in commerce have
meant that contact with others outside their community has had little impact on their language and lifestyle. Everett
has found the Vygotskian perspective on language as cultural tool especially useful when considering the Pirahãs,
whose linguistic sign system appears to have developed to ‘‘fit their cultural niche’’ (p. 8). As Everett suggests,
focusing much more on community than interpersonal language use, ‘‘Languages . . . take on the properties required of
them in their environments’’ (p. 234) and may be seen as tools that ‘‘bring coherence to community lives’’ (p. 236).
Everett has discovered that the Pirahãs, apparently not in need of a counting system, have no numbers in their language
or practice of counting. With no perfect tenses in their language, the Pirahãs appear to live by an immediacy principle
in the here and now. Yet their language does not lock them irretrievably into (or out of) certain ways of thinking.
Though without abstract color words, they use color concepts, e.g., ‘‘it is like blood’’ (p. 257), and though lacking
kinship terms that would prohibit incest, they have a strong incest taboo. Everett, hence, sees a weak version of
Whorfianism at work, with language affecting, not controlling, thought. If the need for numbers arose for the Pirahãs,
for instance, if they decided to engage in trade with other groups, Everett assumes they probably would adopt a number
system, as other groups have. Neo-Whorfianism thus suggests, as Everett observes, that though ‘‘we can . . . think
beyond the bounds of our language,’’ in fact ‘‘often we do not’’ (p. 264).

Historical overviews of non-Western rhetoric

While Everett’s research points to the usefulness of a large culture concept, given the relative stability and
distinctiveness of the linguacultural group he studied, one can easily argue for the anomalousness of communities like
the Pirahã. Most of the world’s population is far from being as isolated as they are. Several recent historical studies of
rhetoric outside the West, more specifically, of Chinese and English in China, however, also suggest relative stability
of a large (extremely large) culture over various periods of time.
Kirkpatrick and Xu’s (2012) examination of rhetoric and writing in Chinese over several millennia is motivated by
the goal of disabusing English language teachers of the notion that Chinese students carry with them ‘‘rhetorical
baggage that is uniquely Chinese and hard to eradicate’’ (p. 3). Kirkpatrick and Xu’s aim for their Western audience is
to show the complexity and dynamism of Chinese rhetoric, which ‘‘change[s] for the same types of reasons and in the
same types of ways as writing styles in other great literate cultures’’ (p. 4). Rejecting simplistic cultural determinism,
they see Chinese rhetorical practices through the ages as having been shaped largely by sociopolitical context.
What Kirkpatrick and Xu point out, however, about the characteristics of past rhetorical traditions in China is
reminiscent of, but qualitatively different from, claims made in the early days of contrastive rhetoric. They find

3
For a Chomskyan response to Everett’s claims about the Pirahãs, see Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues (2009); for an account of the controversy
over Everett’s work, see Bartlett (2012).
64 D. Belcher / Journal of Second Language Writing 25 (2014) 59–67

evidence of a preference for indirect persuasion, with ‘‘the conditions surrounding the development of [ancient]
Chinese rhetoric [having] encouraged those persuading up [my emphasis] to couch their arguments in indirect ways
. . . for fear of offending the [more powerful] listeners’’ (p. 29). More direct methods, however, were used too, ‘‘when
times justified this’’ and authors were willing to take a ‘‘calculated risk’’ (p. 29). Also in clear evidence in Chinese
rhetorical history, Kirkpatrick and Xu observe, is inductive reasoning, a ‘‘preference for chain reasoning and reasoning
by analogy and historical precedent’’ (p. 139), as well as inductive arrangement at the sentence and extended discourse
levels, through deductive organization, which can also be found in classical Chinese rhetoric, has become increasingly
evident in the wake of escalating contact with the West. Kirkpatrick and Xu lament that it is not only Western teachers
of English that lack awareness of the complex history of rhetoric in China, but also educated Chinese themselves, who
are far more likely to learn much more about writing in English than in Chinese while attending Chinese universities.
Kirkpatrick and Xu see the need for a new rhetorical repertoire for twenty-first century China, influenced neither by an
‘‘imperious ‘top-down’ style’’ nor the ‘‘agonistic ‘cultural revolution’ approach’’ (p. 205), a new public Chinese
discourse that could be informed by the ‘‘extraordinarily rich and diverse rhetorical tradition of traditional China’’
(p. 206) if training in Chinese rhetoric were re-instated. While underscoring throughout their overview just how
complex and dynamic Chinese rhetoric has been, Kirkpatrick and Xu also impress us with the distinctiveness of
rhetorical styles influenced by language and context in China, styles that can be identified as Chinese.
You’s (2010) look at English-language—or ‘‘foreign devil’s tongue’’ (p. xi)—writing and pedagogy in China serves as
an interesting complement to Kirkpatrick and Xu’s survey of Chinese rhetoric. Fully conscious of the reductionist,
essentializing risks of attempting such a project, especially given postmodernist awareness of hybridity and fluidity, You
approaches his topic with the complex self-reflexivity that his immersion and education in both China and Anglo-
American contexts enables. Like Kirkpatrick and Xu, You aims to inform writing teachers, but he envisions his goal in
rather different terms: to open their eyes to ‘‘the diverse cultural, literary, and rhetorical traditions that their students have
to wrestle with when writing in English’’ (p. 4; see also Mao, 2005). You also hopes to challenge the colonialist mentality
that assumes English writing should be taught solely with Western rhetorical tradition in mind. The picture of Chinese
English writing and pedagogy over the past two centuries that emerges in You’s work is one in which Chinese and Anglo
traditions, and to a certain extent Russian, via Soviet-era Marxism, have been variously blended from decade to decade to
suit Chinese purposes in changing contexts. You fully acknowledges, even celebrates, the power of individual writer
agency, but he makes it clear that such agency, including negotiation of counter-discourses, is situated in historical contact
zones dominated by particular ideologies and pedagogies, such as preference for current-traditional formalist modes
starting in the early modern bourgeois capitalist era and for proletarian rhetoric in the post-1949 Maoist period. School-
based writing, You notes, never takes place ‘‘in a political and cultural vacuum’’ (p. 179).
Thus from the macro-cultural perspectives of Everett’s analysis of Pirahã culture, Kirkpatrick and Xu’s survey of
many centuries of Chinese rhetorical traditions, and You’s history of modern-era Chinese English-medium writing and
pedagogy, what comes to the fore is a stabilized-for-now (and at certain periods of time) view of cultural/rhetorical
interaction but one far from the more monolithic cultural determinism more common before the world was seen
through critical, postmodernist lenses.

Looking to the future

As DePalma and Ringer (2011) have observed, education is always about transfer, or using prior learning in new
situations, but transfer has generally been narrowly defined as reuse of ‘‘intact knowledge’’ (p. 137). There has been
little recognition, DePalma and Ringer argue, of how much reshaping transfer entails, how earlier and later contexts of
learning affect each other, not just positively or negatively, as contrastive rhetoric and contrastive linguistic analysis
had assumed, but generatively. DePalma and Ringer propose a reconceptualization of transfer that may be particularly
productive for future work in intercultural rhetoric. For them, transfer is primarily adaptive, hence transformative, and
as such calls for a framework that theorizes ‘‘both reusing and reshaping’’ (p. 135). DePalma and Ringer find
inspiration for such a framework in Matsuda’s (1997) dynamic model of second language writing and Wenger’s (1998)
communities-of-practice brokering concept. Matsuda’s L2 writing model brings to the notion of transfer an emphasis
on writers’ agency, defining success as more than meeting reader expectations, and acknowledging writers’ originary
and target contexts as far from static. From Wenger’s notion of brokering, transfer gains a mechanism for innovation,
as those with multiple community memberships are perceived as capable of bringing new approaches to a
community’s preferred genres even as they, as new members, are being socialized through them. Seen from the
 D. Belcher / Journal of Second Language Writing 25 (2014) 59–67 65

vantage point of DePalma and Ringer’s proposal, IR-informed pedagogical practice, and research in support of it,
would ideally seek to facilitate not assimilation or acculturation, but adaptive transfer, viewing student writers as
‘‘brokers’’ with ‘‘new ways of seeing, doing, or knowing,’’ and as ‘‘actors’’ with ‘‘unique language resources and
abilities’’ (pp. 141–142), potentially able to ‘‘‘transform and blend’ prior writing knowledge’’ (p. 145) as they
compose their own new texts.
While DePalma and Ringer’s adaptive transfer framework offers much-needed theorization of the role L2 writing
specialists can play in supporting novice writers’ translingual and transcultural use of all their resources, more than a
(re)focus on the individual writer (but see also DePalma & Ringer, 2013) is required for a new conceptualization of
intercultural rhetoric. So far relatively little attention has been given to the broader impact that writers from similar
rhetorical traditions may have on discursive practices in their additional language/s (with You’s work on English
writing in China one of the notable exceptions). Recent corpus-enhanced research, however, is amassing much large-
scale empirical data pointing to the possibility of consistent styles across some communities’ discursive practices as
they adapt to new contexts of use. In Friginal’s (2013) corpus-based analysis of Filipino and Indian call center
interactions with American customers, for example, the Filipino agents appear to have developed an interactional style
with shared politeness and respect markers, while the Indian agents tend to evince a more direct and efficient style of
interaction. In another corpus linguistic study, Temples and Nelson (2013) found in their analysis of Mexican,
Canadian, and American students’ English-language online discussion board interactions both a distinctive group
culture of use as well as evidence of intra-group culture-of-use differences. The online community as a whole
developed a style distinct from both formal academic writing and casual conversation, but within the online
community, there were also some consistent differences, as the Mexicans tended to use a more socially interactive
discourse style than either the Canadians or Americans. Far from providing impetus for renewed faith in sweeping
large-culture ethnolinguistic claims, however, such empirical work instead suggests the need for a much more nuanced
view of inter-group and intra-group discourse styles, one in which new cultures of use can be seen as developing new
practices inclusive of multiple community affiliation influences.
Yet whether it takes more micro or macro, individual or group perspectives on producers of discourse, intercultural
rhetoric will still need to do more if it hopes to be of both pedagogical and conceptual value. It will need to turn much
more of its attention to discourse consumers. There is no discourse, after all, without interlocutors. The work of a
number of more globally and translingually-minded scholars commenting on written discourse (Baker, 2013;
Canagarajah, 2006a, 2006b, 2009, 2013b, 2013c; Horner, 2011) has implied, if not explicitly highlighted, the need for
more accommodative reading, tolerant of wider ranges of discourse styles. Given our increased and increasing virtual
and real-life contact with the rest of the world, there is ample reason for a new reader responsibility, not in Hinds’ static
typological use of the term, but as in reading that is flexible in its expectations, willing, when needed, to accept
responsibility for constructing meaning from what may seem less-than-immediately-transparent text and be
responsive to writers’ not-always-readily-apparent aims. At this point in time, however, we know little about how to
educate readers to expect and even appreciate the unexpected,4 though Canagarajah’s (2013b) guidelines for a
‘‘practice-based’’ pedagogy (p. 223), emphasizing pragmatic strategies, contextual adaptation, and ecology as
affordance, suggest a promising way forward. Perhaps an intercultural rhetoric of the future could help move us in this
direction.
Coda

The title of this article promised to address ‘‘what we need and don’t need intercultural rhetoric research for.’’ The
question might also have been phrased as: What should or shouldn’t we expect from IR research? Those of us who
offer writing support to multilingual speakers may want IR research to provide a clear pedagogical path to broadening
novice writers’ rhetorical repertoires, but what IR has given us is abundant reason to question our assumptions about
culture and rhetoric: Why do we so often conceive of culture in static, monolithic ethnolinguistic terms? Why do we
assume that what we think of as ‘‘culture,’’ whether large or small, can be, with enough research, clearly defined and
demarcated? And what do we mean by ‘‘rhetoric’’? What constraints do we impose on this construct, and on learners,

4
IR researchers have generally not engaged in empirical reading research, but see Connor’s recent work with her colleagues on intercultural
health literacy from the discourse consumer’s perspective (Antón, Connor, Lauten, & Balunda, 2012; Connor, Goering, Matthias, & Mac Neill,
2010).
66 D. Belcher / Journal of Second Language Writing 25 (2014) 59–67

if we think of it primarily as writers meeting readers’ (often gatekeepers’) expectations? These, of course, are just
some of the assumptions that IR and related developments have encouraged us to consider. The complex chronology of
IR research tells us that the need it will not address is for easy answers to questions about the relationship between
culture/s and rhetoric. What we can expect instead from IR research is that it will continue to complicate, problematize
and enrich our understanding of what community membership means for and to writers (and readers), not just with
respect to the communities they are born into, but those they choose to join or hope to change or decide to create.

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Diane Belcher, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Georgia State University, is former co-editor of the journals English for Specific Purposes and
TESOL Quarterly and current co-editor of a teacher reference series titled Michigan Series on Teaching Multilingual Writers. She has authored a
number of articles on advanced academic literacy and last year published her seventh edited volume, on critical and corpus-based approaches to
intercultural rhetoric.