Helen Alexander
Contrastive Rhetoric and Learning Centers: Multicultural Awareness-Raising
Activities for Tutors and Tutees
I. Exploring Students’ Expectations and Ability to Articulate Understanding
Objectives:
Provide opportunities for students to express their knowledge or preferences for writing that:
-raise awareness of possible differences between legitimate forms of organization, evidence, language, and purpose
-create artifacts that can help the students trace their own growth of knowledge and conscious acquisition of meta-cognitive strategies for control over written contexts
Activity One:
Write a paragraph (or more) about what “good” writing is, or what makes writing good. For students who are more advanced or who want to know in what context, specify that they should write about what is good writing for their field, or what makes writing good in academic contexts. For international students or 1.5 generation, have them record their other language(s) and educational/writing background. (Based on Self-as-Writer format, Severino, 1993)
Activity Two:
Give the students the following sentences and alone or in a group, have them arrange the sentences in a logical, reasonable order. Then have the students justify that order (Kaplan, 1966).
1. A jackass brays; a turkey cock gobbles; a dog yelps; a church bell clangs.
2. The narrow streets and lanes leaning into the market are crammed with Indians, their dark skins glistening like copper or bronze in the bright sun, their varicolored cloaks looking like a mass of palette colors smeared together.
3. There is the smell of animal dung mingled with the odor of carnations and heliotrope from the flower stalls.
4. In the open plaza outside the market the crowd mills about.
5. Mothers sit on the curb nursing their babies.
6. A kind of blending of Indian talk in various dialects creates a strange droning noise.
7. On the narrow sidewalks, merchandize is spread so haphazardly that in order to pass, pedestrians have to press against the wall or leap the displays.
8. Wrinkled old women squat over charcoal braziers cooking corn cakes, or black beans, or pink coconut candy.
II. Providing Contexts: Exploring What Makes Texts Readable
Objectives:
Create sites of disconnect and legitimate “right” differences to help students answer Kaplan’s questions (1997) about what can be discussed, what evidence is, how that evidence can most effectively be organized, and to whom this text may be addressed so that:
-students take control of their own writing to address the needs of their audience and the context in which they are writing by understanding what their readers perceive to be important (particularly for success in academic course work)
-students develop analytic thinking skills and an initial attitude of tolerance and willingness to find meaning in texts before addressing perceived weaknesses in writing (and why they exist)
Activity One:
Provide the students with at least two examples of student writing that reflects a different paradigm of writing than is common. The attached sample reflects two different writers for the same topic, both with higher education experience in their home countries. Papers from two different native speakers in different contexts—like business versus theater—would also work too. In fact, the more outside the tutor/tutee’s experience, the better.
Have the students reflect on what ideas the writers have presented, what the argument probably is and what the authors perceive the evidence to be, and then what the “movement” of ideas feels like: general to specific? Tangential? Back and forth? Contradictory or syllogistic? The purpose is NOT to say something is wrong but to decide how the author was trying to achieve his goal.
Once the students have analyzed the work in light of what the author’s purpose probably was and what techniques they used to try to achieve it, then the participants should be given the prompt. Then, based on the expectations of the American academic context, the participants can decide why certain elements might not work well to complete this writing task, and suggest ways to support the writers’ strengths while helping them build new skills and expectations about the context they need to write for.
The task was: Should animals be kept in zoos? Why or why not?
Activity Two:
Interpreting Tasks: The Requirements of Your Field
Here are four different writing tasks based on the needs of different fields of study (please note that, while these are upper division level courses, the students can still use contrastive rhetoric across disciplines with either a bit of scaffolding (“What do you think is important to members of the computer science field? The criminal justice field?”), or focus first on the answers to Kaplan’s questions to their own field before looking at the others below. Outlining what each might look like is also a great way to reinforce both the uniform aspects of communicating in the American academic context, as well as how writing has to change to fit the needs of the task.
What do you think the answers are to Kaplan’s questions for each task below? How will this help you determine what is required and how you could communicate your ideas accurately and appropriately within the parameters of the task? How does this differ from the answers to these questions for the kind of writing your contexts expect?
I. Computer Science (Programming)
Assignment (Final Project)
Objective: The final project for this course is a non-trivial programming assignment of your choosing in the area of computer graphics. Students are to select a topic with the advice of the instructor that fits the students interest.
Rubric: The final project is out of 100 points.
• 65 points for a working, non-trivial project
• 35 points for a project report
Not including a README forfeits 25 points. Your code is expected to be well organized and well documented. Points will be deducted for poorly structured or undocumented code.
Materials to Submit: Aside from submitting any and all source code, project resources and build configuration files, you must include a number of supporting documents. First, include a plain text file named README.txt. In this file, describe in 25 words or more what your project is and how to use the software. Second, include a copy of your project report.
From CS 566 Spring 2011 Dr. Michael Shafae’s Syllabus
II. Business (Report Writing)
Background: Generally, each team will choose a business problem, research it from various perspectives and then commit to a solution or set of recommendations. For example, you might research and discuss several concrete cases of actual or perceived corporate misconduct. Who was hurt by it and what are the consequences? What role did the media and the public play? Or you may research an issue as divisive as labor relations in the U.S. and compare it with practices in other industrialized nations.
Argument and support: The best papers will demonstrate thoughtful analysis: they will be thesis-driven, provocative, compelling, and provide relevant, up-to-date, and well-documented examples from the business world. Make it interesting!
Cross-cultural perspective: Attitudes toward ethics and values vary internationally and culturally. Your paper may compare business practices in the U.S. and a country of your choice.
. . .
Guidelines and Student Outcomes
Group projects, length of report: Groups of up to three students will independently research and review relevant literature about a chosen subject and then write a report of about 15 pages total. Quantity is no indicator of quality, however. A short, but well-focused paper is preferable to a long and rambling one. This is why a specific number of pages is not required. Discounting front and back matter, you may be looking at about 10 pages for the body of the report.
From BUAD 501 Dr. Teeanna Rizkallah’s Syllabus
III. Communication (Historical/Critical Research)
Response Papers (RP - 100 possible points): . . .[Y]ou will be required to post a brief (250-500 word) response paper (PP) . . . that responds to the week’s assigned topic by posing a substantive question that cuts across multiple readings. Each paper counts 10 possible points toward your final grade.. . Each position paper examines the value of a significant critical or historical issue covered in the week’s assigned reading. This examination should 1) identify a key concept central to the reading or readings; 2) consider any potential conflicts, either with regards to the concept itself or with other communication theories you have encountered; and 3) propose a broad-based question or problem relevant to the concept identified to which there is no easy answer or solution. These papers should show engagement with the assigned reading by employing specific terminology used and by paraphrasing and quoting from significant passages.
From COM 584 Spring 2009 Dr. Steven Carr’s Syllabus, Indiana University/Purdue University Fort Wayne http://users.ipfw.edu/carr/courses/com584/sp09/index.htm
IV. Criminology, Law, and Society (Research Methods)
The research of Carsten Andresen on police stops is briefly described in the course file . . . . The description illustrates deductive reasoning—he uses theory from which testable hypotheses may be derived.
A deduced hypothesis, for example, is: “The more a driver protests the ticket (denies wrong doing) to the police officer making the stop, the more likely the driver will receive a ticket.”
>The theory behind the hypothesis is based in psychological theories of interaction and negotiation.
Using only the descriptive material in the course file,
1. What do you think of the research and its conclusions?
2. Is the motivating theory supported?
3. If you were stopped by a police officer for speeding, would the results of the research convince you to behave in a contrite way?
From C214 Summer 2011 Dr. Victoria Basolo’s Class, University of California at Irvine, conveyed via email
III. Refining and Revising: Controlling Readability and Comprehensibility in Context
Objectives:
Offer opportunities for guided and self-evaluation of written artifacts that:
–enable students and tutors to treat their own work as a legitimate source of insight into the writing and thinking process of themselves as individuals as well as members of a context
–reinforce meta-cognitive and cognitive strategies that inform flexible, adaptive writing processes that are both sensitive to context while shaped by the author’s voice
Activity One:
Reverse Outlining
After the students have begun to feel confident in their analytic abilities, have them choose at least three texts, including the first text describing their ideas about good writing, and have them reverse outline their work.
They should first separate the ideas into levels as is standard in most outlining structures in American English, but then they will need to go back and describe what that idea is doing just there: is it supporting? Explaining? Contradicting? Denying? Acting as part of the reasoning structure? The support for a minor idea? An aside to the reader? A tone element? Why do they think they did it that way?
Activity Two:
The student should then take the piece of work that he thinks best reflects both his rhetoric structure and his own voice within the context and present what his work shows about his background, his major, his language, his culture, his social group, his expression, etc. to either his tutor or to a group of his peers. His answers to Kaplan’s questions can be used as a foundation structure if the student still feels he needs a scaffold to help express his work.
The strongest presentations of insight, awareness, and analytic ability can be combined into a presentation or workshop for new students or other students who are working through their process. The students can be encouraged to use their work to present at conferences or on-campus multi-cultural events as well.
IV. References
Jones, A. (2007). Multiplicities or manna from heaven? Critical thinking and the disciplinary context. Australian Journal of Education, 51(1), 84-103.
Kaplan, R. B. (1966). Cultural thought patterns in intercultural communication. Language Learning, 16, 1-20.
Kaplan. R. B. (1997). Contrastive rhetoric. In Tom Miller (Ed.), Functional approaches to written text: Classroom applications (pp. 18-32). ERIC. Washington, DC.: United States Information Agency.
Leki, I. (1991). Twenty-five years of contrastive rhetoric: Text analysis and writing pedagogies. TESOL Quarterly, 25(1), 123-143.
Scollon, R. (1997). Contrastive rhetoric, contrastive poetics, or perhaps something else? TESOL Quarterly, 31(2), 352-358. DOI:10.2307/3588051
Severino, C. (1993). The doodles in context: Qualifying claims about contrastive rhetoric. Writing Center Journal, 14(1), 44-62.
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