Writing to Cultural Others: Beyond Contrastive Rhetoric to the Dialogic Model of L2 Writing

Writing to Cultural Others: Beyond Contrastive Rhetoric to the Dialogic Model of L2 Writing

  Contrastive rhetoric (CR) has been a representative research framework for L2 writing. Yet its structuralistic assumptions of writing have been subjected to serious critiques. Despite the scholarly efforts for an updated understanding of L2 writing, few attempts were made to discuss the primacy of audience in L2 writing research and pedagogy. Through a critical review of CR literature and audience studies in composition, this paper first presented an evaluative discussion of the conceptual and methodological premises of CR. Based on the discussion, it suggested the utility of Bakhtinian notion of audience in revising the structuralistic assumptions of writing and understanding L2 writing as a cross-cultural site of writer-reader interaction. Finally, this paper proposed a dialogic model of L2 writing with audience as a guiding principle. Research and pedagogical implications drawn from the proposed model were briefly discussed.