Blog post #5 - Bethanny
I am re-posting my response since I posted about the wrong readings. So, here it goes:
When I was reading about Kaplan's project and about "contrastive rhetoric", I somehow got the feeling that it was very English-centered. While this is not a particular critique towards Casanave's chapter, I feel that statements like "cultural patterns inherent in the rhetorics of different languages cause L2 students to write in ways that are not "English"-like" (27) make me wonder whether or not it is possible to consider English speakers as L2 learners as well in the field. Perhaps this is because I am teaching English speakers a foreign language.
After reading the chapter, I think Casanave does a good job at looking at the language used to discuss CR and IR. While older language from the the time of Kaplan (1966) states that a language prefers X, Casanave points out that nowadays such a language does not make sense because "languages and cultures cannot prefer anything...it is people who prefer things" (54). I think this is very important, because while we are influenced by our languages and our origins, we still have agency and we make our decisions. Thus, as Casanave has stated, perhaps the better question to ask is where our decision-making-mechanism come from. We can certainly ask students how their backgrounds (not their "culture") influence them as people and writers, but it is not the only deciding factor.
When I was reading about Kaplan's project and about "contrastive rhetoric", I somehow got the feeling that it was very English-centered. While this is not a particular critique towards Casanave's chapter, I feel that statements like "cultural patterns inherent in the rhetorics of different languages cause L2 students to write in ways that are not "English"-like" (27) make me wonder whether or not it is possible to consider English speakers as L2 learners as well in the field. Perhaps this is because I am teaching English speakers a foreign language.
After reading the chapter, I think Casanave does a good job at looking at the language used to discuss CR and IR. While older language from the the time of Kaplan (1966) states that a language prefers X, Casanave points out that nowadays such a language does not make sense because "languages and cultures cannot prefer anything...it is people who prefer things" (54). I think this is very important, because while we are influenced by our languages and our origins, we still have agency and we make our decisions. Thus, as Casanave has stated, perhaps the better question to ask is where our decision-making-mechanism come from. We can certainly ask students how their backgrounds (not their "culture") influence them as people and writers, but it is not the only deciding factor.
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