Book Reviews w 299

Ulla Connor, Ed Nagelhout, and William Rozycki (eds.), 2008,

Contrastive Rhetoric: Reaching to Intercultural Rhetoric. John
Benjamins, viii + 324 pages, ISBN 978 90 272 5413 9

Reviewed by Will Baker University of Southampton

This edited volume presents current perspectives, research, and pedagogic

applications in the field of contrast rhetoric (CR). While acknowledging CR’s
debt to the work of Kaplan (1966), many of the articles in this book attempt
to move on from his original framework, and in so doing avoid the types of
criticism the field has attracted (e.g. Scollon 1997), in particular concerning
the essentialist and binary views of different languages and cultures. To
facilitate this process the editors propose a new term for the field,
‘intercultural rhetoric’ (IR). According to the editors’ introduction, IR builds
on Kaplan’s initial notions of the importance of difference based on culture
and language in ESL writing patterns, but incorporates a more dynamic and
pluralistic perspective on cultures and writing structures. They believe the
field of CR/IR now examines a wider range of genres – academic,
professional, and most recently web-based. Research methodology, the
editors claim, has also changed to incorporate both corpus linguistics, for a
more rigorous analysis of texts, and ethnography, for a more extensive and
through understanding of writing contexts.
The overall aim of the volume is to develop a theoretical base for IR and
evaluate its applicability to the ESL writing classroom, with the latter
seemingly the primary goal. The book is then divided into four sections: I,
‘Current state of contrastive rhetoric’, II, ‘Contrastive corpus studies in
specific genres’, III, ‘Contrastive rhetoric and the teaching of ESL/EFL
writing’, and IV, ‘Future directions’. However, it should be noted that the
overlap between sections I and IV is quite considerable, with both focusing
on theoretically based discussions regarding the roots of CR/IR and future
developments in the field. Likewise, section II and III are connected through
an overarching interest in pedagogic applications of CR/IR research.
Section I begins with an overview of CR/IR’s achievements by Xiaoming
Li. In doing so she presents perhaps the most convincing argument in favour
of CR/IR. Drawing on personal experience of CR, she feels it is valuable as
‘an institutional space’ where ‘non-native’ English speakers’ knowledge and
experiences are valued, authoritative, and seen as an asset. As Li puts it: ‘It
is a rare, comfortable place to hang out our shingles’ (p. 12). She adds further
support for CR/IR as a field by claiming that it gains credibility as being a
research approach indigenous to ESL pedagogy. However, her effort to
refute more post-modernist criticisms of the field, through maintaining that
the aim of CR has always been more practical than theoretical, is less
convincing, particularly given the need (raised in the Introduction) to
incorporate more dynamic, critical perspectives on culture and difference.

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Will Baker
Makoni

Moreno attempts to provide a solid foundation for CR/IR by proposing

more rigorous research approaches especially in relation to cross-cultural
corpora comparisons. In particular she stresses the need to ensure that what
we compare is really comparable. To do so, Moreno employs quantitative
statistical analysis of differences, which she hopes will then allow more
qualitative studies into the causes of those differences – although, as she
admits, such statistics will be based on manual (and some might say more
qualitatively based) interpretations of text to determine the precise rhetorical
context in which language features occur.
The theoretical discussions continue in the final section (IV) of the book.
Paul Matsuda and Dwight Atkinson employ the novel format, in applied
linguistics at least, of the academic conversation to discuss both the history
and future of CR, and focus on many of the criticisms that it has attracted.
They believe, like other authors in this collection, that the roots of CR are as
a pedagogic tool rather than a theory itself, and that the research interest
came later. This has resulted in a weak theoretical basis and a relatively
unexamined, overly essentialist and positivist bias, especially in relation to
the language–culture connection. They conclude that CR needs to undergo a
paradigm shift and expand its field of study more widely than just the
written text – something some of the studies in this volume have started
to do.
Finally, Ulla Connor presents her vision for the future of the field. She
agrees that CR needs to move on from only investigating written texts, thus
expanding the definition of rhetoric to include situation, and that CR studies
should avoid the binary distinctions it has tended towards in the past. To
achieve this, Connor advocates using a mapping methodology with three
overlapping areas of study. The first is to see writing as a socially constructed
activity and to study both text and social context. The second is the
recognition of small and large cultures. The third is an understanding of
intercultural and cross-cultural communication, with writers interacting in
the production and comprehension of texts, and with accommodation an
important feature of writing in intercultural communication. IR, Connor
proposes, is a term that incorporates all of these.
The core of this book, though, is formed by the ten empirical studies
comprised by sections II and III. These deal with a wide range of writing
genres, contexts, and research approaches, and provide an overview of the
depth and variety of CR/IR studies. Alongside the more traditional focus
on academic writing, other genres such as newspaper editorials and
commentaries, business correspondence, and websites are included. These
are drawn from contexts in North and South America, Europe, Asia,
and Australia. Furthermore, both qualitative and quantitative research
approaches are apparent, with some attempts at ‘richer’ ethnographically
situated understandings of texts. There is still a tendency in some of the
studies to defer to English native speaker norms as the baseline against
which to compare other writing. Nevertheless, many of the studies take more

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 Book Reviews w 301

pluralistic perspectives, recognising second language writing as legitimate in

its own terms. Furthermore, there is also recognition of the need for
negotiation and accommodation in intercultural communication through
writing. Similarly, while some of the studies still make use of somewhat
wide-ranging cultural generalisations, there are also attempts in others to
identify locally relevant contextual factors rather than employing large-scale
cultural assumptions.
Although it is unfair to single out particular studies at the expense of
others, two good examples of the more post-modernist approaches, which
the introduction to this book claims are needed in CR/IR, are Xiaoye You’s
study of Chinese composition writing and Joel Bloch’s article on plagiarism.
You undertakes a socio-historical analysis of Chinese composition writing
that emphasises fluidity and complexity. Through an examination of theme
rather than rhetorical structure, he identifies the development of three
themes of relevance in his study: Confucianism, followed by socialist
ideology, and the current hybrid system, containing elements from
Confucianism, Marxism, and market economics. You ends by calling for
more of this type of historical analysis of writing contexts, which brings out
the rich and diverse literary and rhetorical traditions of EFL writers. The
controversial subject of plagiarism is dealt with by Bloch in a similarly
post-modernist fashion. He rejects the usual East/West dichotomous
approach to plagiarism as simplistic and essentialist, and one that usually
entails an impoverished view of Chinese traditions. Bloch believes it is
necessary to take a synchronic and diachronic perspective on plagiarism,
which recognises changing traditions in the US and China over time, and the
different conventions in different fields and different contexts. He feels that
students need to be made aware of different plagiarism conventions, and the
reasons for them, in order to be able to negotiate this complex process.
Overall, the strengths of this volume are the variety of text types
examined, the range of research approaches employed, the diversity of
contexts in which the studies are undertaken, and the direct links to
pedagogic application. Despite the aims expressed in the beginning of the
book, however, the theoretical basis still appears underdeveloped. Although
some of the studies have begun to look at wider socio-cultural, political, and
historical contexts, what is meant by culture or intercultural is as yet
relatively unexplored. While it may be unfair to have expected this in the
empirically focused studies, the first and final sections dealing with the
theoretical orientations of CR/IR would have been the ideal place for such a
discussion. Indeed, Matsuda and Atkinson’s conversation concludes with
the point that, although culture is ‘in the background of everything’ in CR
(p. 297), it is never discussed.
It is also disappointing that few of the studies have attempted to make
links to the extensive work concerning intercultural communication (e.g.
Byram 1997; Scollon and Scollon 2001), the relationships between language
and culture (e.g. Kramsch 1998; Risager 2006), and English as a lingua franca

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MakoniJohannes Eckerth

(e.g. Jenkins 2007), which are of obvious relevance to this field. Despite
these criticisms, this volume will be of use to those working in the CR/IR
tradition in offering a comprehensive current ‘state of the art’. Moreover,
the book should also be of interest to anyone concerned with English for
academic purposes and intercultural communication, on account of the
diverse and wide range of studies examining texts across a large number of
cultures.

References

Byram, M. (1997) Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence.

Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Jenkins, J. (2007) English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kaplan, R.B. (1966) Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education. Language and
Learning 16: 1– 20.
Kramsch, C. (1998) Language and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Risager, K. (2006) Language and Culture: Global Flows and Local Complexity. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters.
Scollon, R. (1997) Contrastive rhetoric, contrastive poetics, or perhaps something else?
TESOL Quarterly 31: 352 – 63.
— and Scollon, S.W. (2001) Intercultural Communication. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

e-mail: wmlb@soton.ac.uk [Received July 8, 2008]

Patricia Duff, 2008, Case Study Research in Applied Linguistics.

Lawrence Erlbaum, ix + 233 pages, ISBN: 978-0-8058-2359-2 (pbk),
978-0-8058-2358-5 (hbk)

Reviewed by Johannes Eckerth King’s College London

Case Study. The detailed examination of a single example of a class of

phenomena, a case study cannot provide reliable information about the
broader class, but it may be useful in the preliminary stages of an
investigation since it provides hypotheses, which may be tested
systematically with a larger number of cases.
(Abercrombie et al. 1984: 34)

The quote above, taken from a dictionary of sociology (and only slightly
revised in the 1994 third edition), can be taken as representing a common
understanding of case study methodology which, until not that long ago,
was prevalent in social sciences. Such a conception of case study research, if
not completely wrong, might at least be seen as an extreme simplification
and therefore misleading, in that it confines the role of a case study to a sort

© 2008 The Authors

Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd