As Ulla Connor mentioned in her essay Changing Currents in Constractive Rhetoric: Implications Teaching and Research that the phrase was first coined by Robert Kaplan in 1966, we can assume that the term has some pedagogical import in that Kaplan was an applied linguist. Along with defining the term, Ulla has provided a background history as to how the term has evolved in the U.S over the last 30 year as well as how the term is applied in EFL context. What drew my attention was the comment that “Oriental languages prefer an indirect approach and come the point at the end” (P.223). I am persuaded to think that it is broad-brush generalization, for the Orient does not mean an individual country with homogeneous culture. Instead it’s a group of countries and each individual country has its own cultural conventions which are reflected in their oral and written discourses. This assumption sounds antithetical to her previous assertion in the same essay that different cultures have different rhetorical tendencies (p. 219). Then how could she lump all the oriental together to make such a broad base generalization?
Perhaps, it is against this background both Atkinson and Matsuda have proposed in their essay, A Conversation on Contrastive Rhetoric, that since the term ‘culture is so complex and fuzzy, it should be dropped out from this traditional phrase. They proposed the term ‘inter-rhetoric’ since they claim the intercultural rhetoric only focus on the texts for teaching and learning English. But texts are, as they claim, one of the social activities, it does not captures the whole scope of social activities. In each and every culture there are non-rhetorical activities which inform how people perceive and produce their discourses. If one attempts to come up with a pedagogical approach just by analyzing written discourses which show similarities and differences among different cultures, one will definitely by pass some of the most significant characteristics of individual cultures which shape the way how people define education and get educated. I would fairly disagree to consider Intercultural Rhetoric as a potent pedagogical approach to enhance ESL or EFL learning unless the following questions are addressed:
1. Does not a pedagogical approach premised on intercultural rhetoric presuppose the fact that we know about other cultures as much as our own culture? How valid is this assumption since culture is not a static phenomenon; instead , it is dynamic and evolves with the passage of time? Then what are the modalities we can apply to know other cultures so that everyone’s cultures is equally recognized and valued to inform a standard pedagogical approach for ESL or EFL context?