Recent Trends in Contrastive Rhetoric and Their Pedagogical Implications for ESL/EFL Writing Instruction

This paper addresses pedagogical implications of contrastive rhetoric by focusing on recent trends in the field of contrastive rhetoric. The paper first addresses traditional contrastive rhetoric and highlights major issues along the way. It then focuses on recent diversification of and challenges to traditional contrastive rhetoric. For this purpose, the paper takes a close look at a) contrastive rhetoric s recent focus on rhetorical similarities rather than differences, b) its examination of ESL/EFL learners perspectives, c) the introduction of critical contrastive rhetoric, and d) the most recent challenges based on the English-as-an-international-lingua-franca perspective. The paper concludes with a discussion of pedagogical implications of such diversification efforts and challenges. The discussion covers contrastive rhetoric s contribution to the increased awareness of ethnocentrism underlying traditional contrastive rhetoric, the need to study about actual impact of teaching rhetorical differences and/or similarities, and the necessity of investigating ESL/EFL learners’ beliefs about writing in English, which is believed to have a filtering effect on ESL/EFL learners acceptance of contrastive rhetorical information.