How Much of an Accent? Toward a Model of Contrastive Rhetoric for Writing Centre Tutors

How Much of an Accent? Toward a Model of Contrastive Rhetoric for Writing Centre Tutors

This essay builds on research within Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) and other areas to delineate the main attributes and broad features of a model to help writing center tutors decide the kind of role they should play with second language (L₂) acquisition of their clients. The main attributes of such a model would be as follows. The clients’ discourse-level CR patterns as manifested through first language (L₁) and original culture are the dependent variable. There are three intervening variables: 1) the role of the tutor; 2) client agency; and, 3) contextual factors (client’s language skills, audience and requirements of the discipline). The independent variable is the level of accent in L₂ output. This is just the preliminary research outlining the main characteristics of the model based on work experience and the literature. The full development and testing of the model will have to come at a later point.