During the last few decades, many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have witnessed a critical turn. In the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages, for instance, Kumaravadivelu (2006: 70) states that the critical turn is about “connecting the word with the world, … recognizing language as ideology, not just as system, … (and) extending the educational space to the social, cultural and political dynamics of language use.” Critical approaches have a philosophical affiliation with the Frankfurt School, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and critical pedagogies, all of which problematize the relation of domination and subordination perpetuated in social practices and structures and envision social transformation for more equitable relations of power. In the field of second-language education, investigations of the sociopolitical and ideological dimensions of the ways in which language is used, taught, and learned have provided alternative perspectives to understand language and culture. In exploring critical approaches to intercultural discourse and communication, it is important to scrutinize how we understand culture, the core concept of the inquiry area. Critical explorations of culture provide researchers and practitioners with the opportunity to reconceptualize cultural difference, identify connections between cultural representations and power, and become cognizant of broader implications of research. One field of study that exemplifies how critical inquiry can be enacted is contrastive rhetoric, or intercultural investigation of written discourse structures. This chapter explores critical approaches to intercultural discourse and communication by drawing on critical applied linguistics, outlining critical understandings of culture, reviewing contrastive rhetoric research, and offering recommendations for further inquiry.

Critical Approaches to Applied Linguistics

Within applied linguistics, critical inquiry into language use, teaching, and learning is not guided by a single approach. There are many research foci, conceptual frameworks, and methodologies. Pennycook (2004) categorizes different approaches that are often labeled as critical within applied linguistics into the following four areas: (1) critical thinking, (2) social relevance (focus on social categories and contexts), (3) emancipatory modernism (critique of ideology and politics as seen in critical discourse analysis – CDA or language policy and planning), and (4) problematizing practice (critical applied linguistics informed by postfoundational thoughts – i.e., postmodern, poststructuralist, and postcolonial perspectives). These categories demonstrate theoretically and politically different stances.

First, the term critical is often used in the context of fostering critical thinking skills or developing the cognitive ability of individuals to engage in higher-order thinking skills for being able to apply theories, analyze data, synthesize arguments, and evaluate viewpoints. In this meaning, being critical is not directly related to being able to critique sociopolitical dimensions of society or relations of power – a key focus of a transformative approach for equity and democracy.

Second, studies that embrace liberal pluralism and constructivism focus on social contexts or social categories, such as gender, ethnicity, and regional or contextual diversity. Such inquiries are sometimes considered to be critical in that they question the modernist scientific pursuit of positivism that seeks universally generalizable social facts regardless of situational and temporal factors (Denzin 2001). Yet, a focus on various kinds of diversity, such as gender, ethnicity, and language, does not in and of itself problematize issues of power in relation to ideology and politics. For instance, research on world Englishes aims to describe features of multiple varieties of English by focusing on linguistic heterogeneity in local contexts while challenging the monolingual Eurocentric conceptualization of English. Yet, this perspective, which seeks systematic descriptions of variants of English, is nothing more than pluralization of the monolithic category of English (Pennycook 2007). A focus on linguistic and social heterogeneity, pluralism, and multiplicity certainly questions monolithic and homogeneous understanding of culture, language, and society, but it does not necessarily link diversity with the politics of power.

In contrast, CDA, the third approach that involves text analysis, explicitly draws a link between language use and social inequalities of power. CDA aims to scrutinize and uncover ideologies, unequal relations of power, and various forms of social injustice behind texts. Yet, following a neo-Marxist approach to science, CDA’s ideology critique assumes that ideologies reflected in texts are false consciousness or a misguided understanding of social reality and that the goal of text analysis is to replace ideology with objective reality (Pennycook 2001, 2004). Another inquiry field that addresses power is language policy and planning, which investigates such issues as the standardization of language, language policies in educational settings (see for example Ricento 2006; Spolsky 2004), linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1992, 2008), and linguistic human rights (Skutnabb-Kangas 1998). Although language policy and planning investigates structural issues, there is nothing inherently critical about scholarly investigations of this topic; what qualifies this scholarship as critical is the exploration of how power is exercised to produce differential access and privilege (Pennycook 2004).

While the third approach tends to attract attention in the current critical inquiry in applied linguistics, the fourth approach – critical applied linguistics as problematizing practice – draws on postfoundational inquiries that reject the existence of objective, transcendent, and universal truths. These inquiries also acknowledge the fluid and plural nature of language, culture, and identities, while problematizing power, knowledge, and discourse. One view that distinguishes this approach from the emancipatory modernism approach is the recognition of a non-deterministic relationship between language and language use. While critiques such as linguistic imperialism and linguistic genocide tend to fix the relationship between domination and subordination or between English as the dominator and other languages as the dominated, the fourth approach views language users as capable of appropriating the language of power to express resistance and to perform identities (Butler 1990). Put differently, it explores how identities and agencies are performed, rather than determined by closed categories of language, gender, ethnicity, culture, and sexual identities, and how plurality of meanings can be achieved in social, educational, and political contexts. It also explores how language can be appropriated and bent to express alternative meanings and identities. Thus, this approach problematizes, not just examines, the relationship between language and society and uses its analysis for social critique and transformation. As such, it raises “critical questions to do with access, power, disparity, desire, difference, and resistance” (Pennycook 2004: 797). It also echoes the postcolonial project of problematizing and recasting canonical knowledge constructed and perpetuated by the hegemony of colonialism (Luke 2004). Thus it follows that the very concepts of language and culture themselves need to be problematized. While the modernist positivistic framework views the system of language or culture as an objective reality that can be described coherently, homogeneously, and predictably, a postmodern framework views language and culture as a social and political construction, shifting the definition and boundary in time and place (Reagan 2004). As with the other three approaches, the critical approach as problematizing practice is not without limitations. It could fall into relativism in approving all views as equally valid, or into postmodernist skepticism of an extreme kind that claims that no culture exists. Furthermore, it could endorse another dogmatic commitment to a single perspective. Thus, advocates of this approach emphasize the importance of situated ethics as well as constant self-reflection through problematizing all kinds of knowledge including critical ones.

Of these four approaches, the first one on critical thinking and the second one with a mere focus on sociocultural elements involve little political commitment in their inquiries, while the other approaches share an explicit sociopolitical focus on power despite significant differences among them. Likewise, an approach to intercultural discourse and communication that integrates critical thinking or focuses on social categories to address diversity would not necessarily scrutinize sociopolitical dimensions of power – it may merely highlight an analytical inquiry or the multiplicity of social phenomena without problematizing domination, inequity, and discrimination. One important topic of critical inquiry is the concept of culture.

Critical Approaches to Culture

In intercultural discourse and communication, culture is located at the core. To critically investigate how communication takes place across cultures, it is necessary to examine how culture is conceptualized. Culture is a familiar term used in many contexts. Yet, it is an illusive and difficult concept, as “the more deeply it goes the less complete it is” (Geertz 1973: 5). Even though it is an illusive concept, culture gets embodied in many social contexts. One example is the context of teaching, as seen in foreign-language instruction in the United States. The model offered by Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century (Standards hereafter; National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project 1999) provides a concrete approach to culture. Using this model as a springboard, I present an alternative approach to culture that is more critical (see also Kubota 2003, 2004).

Cultural practices, products, and perspectives

The model proposed by the Standards provides students learning foreign languages in primary schools through higher education with learning goals in regard to the culture of the target language. The development of the model has been informed by the field of intercultural communication, as seen in the reference to some works of the field, such as Samovar and Porter (1994), Seelye (1993), and Stewart and Bennett (1991).

The model breaks down culture into three dimensions: (cultural) perspectives, practices, and products – or Three Ps. The learning goals encourage students to find links among them. As the terms indicate, cultural perspectives refer to cultural meanings, attitudes, values, and ideas, whereas cultural practices index patterns of behavior in social interactions that are accepted in the target society. Cultural products may be tangible (e.g., books, tools, foods, paintings) or intangible (e.g., oral narratives, dances, rituals, educational systems). Understanding the relationships of the Three Ps is supposed to reduce cultural misunderstandings and stereo­types, which are caused by failing to interpret the target culture from an insider’s perspective, by directly interacting with the members of the other culture in their native language. The Standards document also stresses the importance of teaching both cultural similarities and differences. It states that focusing on similarities fosters a positive mindset toward speakers of the target language, while analyzing differences helps learners understand common cultural misunderstandings and conflicts.

The interrelationship of the Three Ps is illustrated by the following example in the Standards document:

For example, in some Asian cultures members are positioned (a perspective) on a hierarchical scale based on age, social status, education, or similar variables. In those cultures, the exchange of business cards (a product) that provides key information is a helpful practice. Because these cards facilitate social interaction and are treated with respect in those cultures, one should not scribble another name or telephone number on the business card (taboo practice). The information on the card also directly affects the nonverbal behavior (practice) of those involved in the communicative interaction, as well as the choice of linguistic forms (product) that indicate status.

(National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project 1999: 50)

This example attempts to show how the Three Ps are interconnected and provide a cultural understanding beyond a superficial level. However, there are some limitations.

In the above example, an emphasis on social hierarchy as a cultural perspective is linked to the cultural practice of exchanging and handling business cards as well as the use of a certain language register as a cultural product. Here, the respect for social hierarchy is simply given as prescriptive knowledge that explains cultural practices and products. In this framework, culture is viewed as a homogeneous set of cultural practices, products, and perspectives that are interrelated in a certain predictable way. Absent from this formula are diverse situations where cultural practices and products are manifested in multiple ways. One danger of relying on a cultural formula in instructional settings is the construction of a static and essentialist understanding of culture.

In the case of Japanese culture, which seems to be represented in this example, the use of honorific expressions has been viewed as a direct reflection of the social distance between interlocutors based on their age, gender, and social status. For instance, a common assumption is that a person in a lower social status (e.g., young new employee) would always use polite expressions to a person in a higher social status (e.g., older supervisor). However, recent critical research on naturally occurring interactions has questioned this static model and illuminated more complex ways in which people from various social backgrounds with multiple subjectivities use language in specific contexts and geographic locations. In other words, actual language use as a cultural product as well as cultural practices that are associated with it reflect the interaction among social categories (e.g., gender, age, occupation, social status, sexual identity), speakers’ identity and intention, social contexts, and dialects (see Okamoto and Shibamoto Smith 2004). Cultural products and practices are clearly diverse and hard to contain in neatly arranged conceptual categories.

Thus the cultural perspective used in the prescribed explanation of exchanging business cards needs to be scrutinized as well. In fact, social distance or hierarchy, along with social harmony and homogeneity, constitutes a stereotype of the Japanese character in nihonjinron or the discourse of the uniqueness of Japanese culture and language. Nihonjinron as a discourse does not reflect objective social truths but functions as an ideological device that promotes identity politics (Befu 2001; Sugimoto 1997; Yoshino 1992). This poses a question of whether cultural practices or products need to be explained by cultural perspectives at all, when very often the perceived relationships are subjective and arbitrary. Connecting cultural practices or products with cultural perspectives, as the Standards encourage students to do, could merely reinforce the dominant discourse or stereotypes.

As the above discussion indicates, cultural perspectives, practices, and products are not neutral, primordial, ahistorical, or objective facts that organize people’s behaviors and social institutions. Rather, they are diverse, dynamic, situational, and fluid, and constructed and transformed by political and ideological forces. In what follows, I present an alternative approach to culture drawing on postfoundational inquiries – postmodern, poststructuralist, and postcolonial perspectives.

Postmodern view of culture

While the modernist view of culture, represented by the Three Ps, focuses on the rational and coherent account of culture as an objective system consisting of neutral facts, a postmodern approach to culture questions this positivistic fixed view and focuses on the diverse, dynamic, hybrid, and diasporic nature of culture. Modernist cultural relativity that assumed fixed cultural difference in binary terms is replaced by postmodern relativity, or situated knowledge (Haraway 1988), that regards all knowledge, actions, and social practices as partial and situated in ever-shifting particularities. Postmodernism also focuses on multiplicity of meaning and the hybrid, diasporic, and dynamic nature of language and culture, thereby working against various forms of essentialism.

However, as discussed in the context of critical approaches to applied linguistics, a mere focus on social categories and various kinds of diversity does not escape essentialism. To take the example of business cards, one may try to capture the diverse nature of the cultural practice (e.g., behavior) and product (e.g., honorific expressions) through observations of a specific age group, occupation, gender, and so on. Yet, diversity found through such observations is still situated within the essentialist framework of viewing social phenomena. Likewise, the notion of hybridity, when conceptualized as a blend of two or more cultures, each of which is a closed cohesive system, still cannot escape an essentialist definition of culture (May 1999). Thus, it is necessary to bear in mind that theoretical limitations always exist and that situated critical reflections are required for overcoming reductionism and essentialism in order not to ignore the multiplicity, complexity, and creativity of human activities.

Discursive construction of culture in poststructuralism

The example in foreign-language teaching suggested that cultural characteristics are often viewed as a set of objective truths that can be explained by the predicted relationship among perspective, practice, and product. This model also assumes stability of culture and cultural identity. However, from a poststructuralist point of view, cultural knowledge, or the ways we understand and describe a certain culture, is constructed by discourse – a meaning/subjectivity-making system mediated by language, signs, and other modes of communication or “world-making interaction through the use of primarily linguistic symbols” (Shi 2001: 282). In the process of constructing meanings, subjectivities, and social structures and practices, multiple discourses exist; some are more dominant than others but they are challenged by counter-discourses in complex relations of power. However, this relation is not fixed – it is politically and historically situated and is in flux. This competing and shifting nature of discourses and knowledge is seen in nihonjinron; the dominant discourse that emphasizes the uniqueness of the Japanese has been challenged by counter-nihonjinron discourses which form different conceptualizations of Japanese culture. Thus, multiple meanings, subjectivities, and worldviews are constructed in shifting discourses that emerge in relations of power which themselves are not static but contain multiple points of domination and resistance.

The flexible notion of meaning/subjectivity/world-making process of discourse provides possibilities of a performative dimension of culture and language (Pennycook 2007). Judith Butler’s (1990) notion of performativity suggests that cultural and linguistic expressions, just like expressions of gender identities, are performed by members of a community, rather than simply being dominated or controlled by external objective mechanisms called language or culture. Thus, the practice of exchanging business cards in Japan, for instance, is a repeated performed act constituting a social practice, rather than an embodiment of a fixed cultural attribute such as respect for social hierarchy. In this view, what structures social practice and perspective is not a preexisting system of culture or language but people’s acting on symbols and not only iterating actions but also appropriating, resisting, bending, and inventing language and culture.

Postcolonial critique

The term postcolonial does not imply that colonialism is over and a new era without domination/subordination has begun; it signifies that colonial relations of power are sustained with new political, economic, and cultural configurations of power and that a new history of resistance and transformation has begun. Postcolonial perspectives critique the hegemony of the language, culture, knowledge, and social structures of the colonizer as well as the oppression and Othering of the colonized.

Colonialism created a rigid boundary between the colonizer and the colonized, or Self and Other (Said 1978). Construction of a binary cultural difference between the West and the East, for instance, is part of the legacy of colonialism. The colonial dichotomy positions the West as superior for being inventive, rational, intellectual, progressive, and capable of abstract thought and theoretical reasoning, and the East as inferior for being imitative, irrational, emotional, stagnant, and capable of concrete thought and practical reasoning (Blaut 1993).

This type of cultural dichotomy is indeed observed in academic discourse. Partly overlapping with contrastive rhetoric research, which will be discussed in more detail, a number of publications in the 1990s in the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages highlighted cultural difference between Asia and the Anglophone world and its implications for teaching English for academic purposes (e.g., Atkinson 1997; Ballard and Clanchy 1991; Carson 1992; Carson and Nelson 1994; Fox 1994; McKay 1993; Ramanathan and Kaplan 1996). These scholars argue that Asian culture values collectivism and discourages individual self-expression, creativity, and critical thinking, whereas Western culture displays opposite characteristics and that such cultural difference needs to be taken into account in instruction. The field of intercultural communication has described perceived differences in national cultures, using such terms as high-context (reliance on the context in linguistic expression and comprehension) versus low-context (reliance on an explicit exchange of information) (Hall 1976) and categories that sort national cultures on dimensions such as power distance (perception of authority), individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, and uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede 1997). These cultural categorizations in the postcolonial era closely resemble the colonial representations of the Other. However, they are challenged by scholars who problematize the essentialist approach to culture and the patronizing view of the Other (Kelly 2008; Kubota 1999; Chang and Holt 1997; Pennycook 1998; Said 1978). At the core of the problem lie issues of power.

Power, culture, and race

In proposing an alternative model for intercultural training for business expatriates, Chang and Holt (1997) argue that the traditional model, which primarily focuses on static cultural differences and predetermined do’s and don’ts, should be replaced by a model that integrates issues of power and how they are enacted in situational dynamisms. Whereas the cultural difference approach to intercultural communication assumes that participants from different cultures share an equal power status in intercultural encounters, actual intercultural interactions are largely influenced by where one is positioned in the power hierarchy in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, age, language, physical ableness, sexual identity, and other social categories. In a poignant essay Kelly (2008) critically reflects on his own experience of teaching English in Japan in the 1970s and 80s. He argues that his intercultural experiences with Japanese people reflect unequal relations of power/privilege rather than cultural difference (see also Asante 1983). For instance, Kelly recalls the time when a student invited him to go visit an old town with him/her. He replied that he had already been there and he wanted to go somewhere new. This could be interpreted as an inappropriate behavior caused by a lack of knowledge about cultural difference – i.e., importance of face-saving in Japan. However, Kelly (2008: 269) states:

But my behavior could also be interpreted as the kind of arrogance often displayed by those occupying dominant positions within a colonial-type relationship. It could be interpreted in terms of my enjoying power and privilege rather than as a failure to acknowledge cultural differences. Since I felt that I was a kind of minor star in Japan as a white American and that Japanese were interchangeable as acquaintances, I think that arrogance of power is a more accurate explanation of my behavior.

Kelly’s experience demonstrates that the ways in which people act in intercultural encounters and interpret such actions may not be mediated only by an elusive notion of cultural difference but also by invisible relations of power with regard to race, nationality, and language. Moreover, the power attached to Whiteness and English is not always overtly imposed onto the non-White nonnative speakers of English – hegemonic power obtains consent from the marginalized. In fact, the unequal relation of power between Self and Other is often accepted and internalized by the colonized (Fanon 1967), creating symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1991).

In Kelly’s example, racial difference produced a particular relation of power, influencing the ways in which intercultural communication took place. Yet, the notion of racial difference, which is often associated with inequality, injustice, and discrimination, is rarely discussed in relation to intercultural encounters. Conversely, the notion of racial difference in contemporary discourse is often masked with cultural difference – a more neutral and acceptable term (Bonilla-Silva 2003; May 1999; van Dijk 1993). For instance, Bonilla-Silva (2003) illustrates how the “culture of poverty” argument in the United States developed by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis in the 1960s mainly refers to working-class Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and their minority standing resulting from inferior qualities such as “their lack of effort, loose family organization, and inappropriate values” (40). It is clear that racial difference is masked by cultural difference, while the underlying legacy of colonialism is kept intact.

A focus on racial relations of power raises the issue of racism, which produces and perpetuates racial hierarchies through placing the colonized Other in an infer­ior position to the colonizer Self. Racism is often understood only as individual prejudice and bigotry. However, besides the individual level, racism also exists in institutionalized and epistemological forms (see Kubota and Lin 2006). For example, the action that Kelly (2008) took in his example could be interpreted as individual racism based on a historically constructed superior/inferior racial relation of power. In contrast, the privilege that White native-speaking English teachers have in Japan, as Kelly describes by drawing on Lummis (1977), indexes institutional racism. By virtue of being a White speaker of English, even if not a native English speaker, one has the privilege of obtaining employment to teach eikaiwa [English conversation] without professional qualifications or an ability to speak Japanese. The discourse of eikaiwa, which emphasizes the usefulness of English as an international language and yet associates the use of English only with White native speakers of English, compels students to simply want to spend time with an English-speaking White foreigner. Thus, hardly any preparation for lessons is needed on the part of the teacher. Lummis (1977) in fact calls the world of eikaiwa racist.

Beyond the institutional level, racism is also manifested in our knowledge. Epistemological racism refers to the knowledge that privileges European modernist White civilization (Scheurich 1997). It is represented by the fact that virtually all influential philosophers, scientists, and educators have been White males. Scheurich (1997) argues that the knowledge that we use to think, analyze, socialize, and educate has been largely developed within this racial and cultural tradition. It is important to note that all the theories, concepts, and ways of conceptualizing that have been discussed so far in this chapter are part of such Western knowledge. To challenge Eurocentric ways of knowing, some scholars have proposed Afrocentric and Asiacentric ways of understanding intercultural communication (Asante 1983; Miike 2008). For instance, an Asiacentric vision highlights communication principles based on Asian values such as harmony between people and spiritual liberation, as opposed to the egocentric, logocentric, and materialistic Eurocentric worldview. Miike (2008) argues that these principles should be used to theorize Asian communication practices. However, these categories resemble the classification of cultures constructed by the Eurocentric colonialist discourse and share the problem of cultural essentialism. At the best, this approach could be interpreted as identity politics of postcolonial resistance by means of the appropriation of the dominant discourse of cultural difference. Nonetheless, the cultural essentialism demonstrated in this view prevents a dynamic and diverse understanding of culture.

In contemporary discourse, cultural difference, which constitutes an important conceptual dimension of intercultural discourse and communication, has both replaced the idea of racial difference and made racism obscure. In the past, discourses of racial difference as well as racism sustained colonial domination and subordination. As Asante (1983: 12) argues in reference to anthropology, “classification of humans was initially done for racist reasons: to try to show white supremacy and the inferiority of every other people.” I would add that colonial racist relations exist not only between Whites and non-Whites but also between other races or ethnicities. The prevalent way in which cultural difference is conceived is indeed part of the perpetual discourse of colonialism that classifies groups of people into a fixed racial hierarchy of power. In the next section, I will turn to the politics of cultural difference as demonstrated in an inquiry area called contrastive rhetoric – cross-cultural investigations of the ways in which written texts are structured.

Critical Approach to Intercultural Investigations of Written Discourse

Contrastive rhetoric addresses intercultural dimensions of written discourse and its inquiry focus overlaps with broader fields such as intercultural communication, composition studies, and applied linguistics, as well as more specific inquiry areas including second-language writing, text linguistics, and genre analysis (Connor 1996). The field was initiated by an applied linguist, Robert Kaplan, in response to the need to accommodate a rise in the number of international students in US universities in the 1950s and 1960s who faced difficulties in acquiring written academic discourse in English (Kaplan 1966). The main argument is that specific cultural thought patterns associated with language influence the ways in which students write in their first and second languages (L1 and L2) and that cultural difference should be taken into account in teaching academic writing to international students. It was assumed that discovering cultural differences in rhetoric and making them explicit in instruction would help these students to acquire the target-language discourse organization more efficiently. Since the initiation of the field, various researchers have investigated cultural differences in rhetorical organization manifested in written texts in many languages. Yet the focus on cultural difference has produced essentialized images of English and non-English languages as well as users of these languages. A critical review of contrastive rhetoric would provide insights into the politics of investigating intercultural discourse and communication.

General Findings of Contrastive Rhetoric

Contrastive rhetoric research has endorsed the view that rhetorical features differ across languages and this difference causes written communication problems. These problems are demonstrated in English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ inability to effectively structure their arguments using appropriate rhetorical conventions of English and in native English-speaking readers’ difficulty in comprehending texts organized by structures different from conventional English rhetoric. Typically, written English discourse is depicted as linear, direct, deductive, and assertive, whereas the written discourse of other languages is characterized as nonlinear and indirect. More specifically, East Asian languages such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are typically described as circular and digressive, whereas Romance languages such as Spanish are characterized by long sentences, digression, and loose coordination (see Connor 1996, 2002; Kubota 2010). As the original impetus of contrastive rhetoric suggests, the field has paid attention to the diverse ways in which texts are organized according to presumed cultural expectations. In this sense, the original intention of contrastive rhetoric could be viewed as progressive because it challenged the intellectual establishment in the 1960s. A more detailed historical overview of the development of this field helps us understand the epistemological context.

A historical overview

Research in linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s was predominantly focused on the structures of a sentence or smaller units observed in spoken language. In the field of second-language research, a common approach to investigating language acquisition was contrastive analysis, which compared and contrasted language structures of the learner’s L1 and L2 to predict areas of difficulties (Gass and Selinker 2001). The mainstream conceptual paradigm at that time was behaviorist psychology, which viewed language learning as automatic habit formation involving sets of stimulus and response. Although contrastive rhetoric is consistent with this comparative method, its focus on texts beyond the sentence level in written language with cultural explanations was quite radical. Arguing that cultural differences exist and that they influence the ways in which people use language, contrastive rhetoric proposed a radical hypothesis. In 1947, the field of intercultural communication was initiated with the birth of a US government organization called the Foreign Service Institute, which aimed to train Service officers who were assigned for duties overseas. Edward T. Hall, an anthropologist who joined the staff in 1951, developed a training program to transform the prevalent attitude of “people are the same wherever you go” – a commonly held view that ignored cultural difference in the context of interacting with people across cultures (Moon 2008: 12). Thus, both contrastive rhetoric and intercultural communication directed people’s attention to cultural difference and advocated attending to the role that culture plays in cross-cultural communication. In this sense, both inquiries were perhaps viewed as progressive at that time.

It is also interesting to draw a parallel between contrastive rhetoric’s main assumption (i.e., each language or culture has unique rhetorical conventions reflecting a culturally specific thought pattern) and the theory of Whorfian linguistic relativity proposed in the 1930s by Benjamin Whorf, a linguist known for his work on Hopi, one of the Native American languages. Whorfian linguistic relativity postulates that different language systems shape different thought patterns or worldviews. Although his hypothesis has often been criticized as pro­moting linguistic determinism, his original intent was to critique the narrow Eurocentric views of language and culture of that time by looking at worldviews and linguistic systems different from the European tradition. As such, Whorf celebrated the plurality of languages and multilingual consciousness (Schultz 1990; Kowal 1998). However, the subsequent dominance of Chomskyan generative linguistics, which emphasized linguistic universals and innateness, deemphasized cultural implications in language analysis. Whorfian linguistic relativity and contrastive rhetoric share a focus on the close relationship between language and worldview. They provided a new perspective of cultural difference that challenged the dominant academic trend of the time. Nonetheless, the focus on cultural difference as seen in contrastive rhetoric, intercultural communication, and Whorfian linguistic relativity can lead to an essentialist and static view of culture and language.

Politics of contrastive rhetoric: discursive construction of difference

Despite the well-intended emphasis on cultural difference, contrastive rhetoric has produced and endorsed the discourse that draws a rigid cultural boundary between English and other languages (as well as Anglophone culture and other cultures). This discourse gives English the privileged position and denigrates all other languages. The labels that are used to describe written discourse as well as approaches to writing in English – i.e., linearity, directness, logic, self-expression, audience awareness, critical thinking – all index a positive and superior quality. In terms of cultural orientation that could influence writing instruction, scholars have argued that East Asian cultures value collectivism and harmony rather than individualism, while teaching approaches emphasize memorization and drilling rather than creativity and innovation (Carson 1992; Carson and Nelson 1994). Ballard and Clanchy (1991) argue that Asian cultures emphasize conserving knowledge, placing importance on a reproductive mode of learning such as memorization and imitation, whereas many Western cultures favor extending knowledge with an emphasis on analytical thinking and hypothesizing. It has also been argued that critical thinking is a Western cultural tradition and thus East Asian students are incapable of engaging in this activity because of cultural difference (Atkinson 1997; Ramanathan and Kaplan 1996).

Furthermore, some languages other than English are characterized by classical rhetorical styles, such as the eight-legged essay in Chinese, which was used for the civil service examination during the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), the four-unit pattern used for classical Chinese poetry (qi-cheng-zhuan-he in Chinese, ki-sung-chong-kyul in Korean, or ki-shô-ten-ketsu in Japanese), the Qur’an for Arabic, and the Old Testament for Semitic languages in general (Hinds 1987, 1990; Kaplan 1966, 1972). These forms presumably represent the general characteristics of texts in these languages. While acknowledging contributions of Orientalism or the knowledge developed by the Western study of the Orient, Said (1978: 96) critiques how Orientalism has described an entire cultural group with a broad stroke based on a past cultural icon:

As a system of thought about the Orient, it [Orientalism] always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran would be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Muslim sensuality. Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch) from the West.

The discourse constructed by contrastive rhetoric research essentializes textual features as well as cultures behind the act of writing in various languages, while constructing a power hierarchy between English and other languages and determining which language is more prestigious and attractive than others.

The discursive nature of cultural difference produced by contrastive rhetoric research is also demonstrated by counter-discourses that challenge such knowledge. In fact, the whole notion of cultural difference between the West and the East in general has been questioned from various fronts – from postcolonialism and poststructuralism to comparative education, sociology, anthropology, and applied linguistics (Befu 2001; LeTendre 1999; Pennycook 1998; Rohlen and LeTendre 1996; Said 1978; Sugimoto 1997; Yoshino 1992). For instance, scholars who investigated through qualitative inquiry the nature of teaching and learning in schools in Japan identified counter-examples of stereotypical images, such as lack of problem-solving, higher-order questioning, and creative manipulation of materials and the emphasis on rote memorization and social order. Similarly, the representation of teaching and learning in the US classroom demonstrates a discursive contradiction (Kubota 2001); the discourse of education crisis in the 1980s and 1990s constructed images of American students as lacking critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and active class participation, whereas the teaching approaches are described as largely teacher-centered. Interestingly, these images are replaced by an ideal image of US education (i.e., focus on critical thinking, creativity, assertiveness, and student-centered instruction) when American education is contrasted with East Asian education. Such ideal images are promoted by so-called revisionists who criticize the discourse of education crisis as being manipulated for a right-wing attack on the nation’s public school system that promoted a neoconservative educational agenda. These competing discourses suggest that our knowledge about the culture of Self and Other does not reflect objective universal truths but rather gets constructed by discourses situated within political struggles of power.

Discourses do not only get constructed but also shift over time. For instance, Weedon (1999) shows how the discourse of gender difference in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century shifted from a biological difference of gender (the different-but-equal argument), to an argument for gender sameness in liberal feminism, and to radical feminism that reasserted authentic womanhood along with a critique of patriarchy. This indicates that meanings attached to a certain label, such as woman, gender difference, cultural/linguistic difference, and English rhetoric, are dynamic in discursive formation.

Contrastive rhetoric indeed demonstrates discursive shifts. As many critics problematized the essentialist and deterministic view of language, culture, and students (e.g., Kubota 1999; Leki 1997; Spack 1997; Zamel 1997), an increasing number of studies have revealed a shifting nature of rhetoric. For instance, some recent studies on Japanese students’ writing have identified a trend to use a deductive rhetorical structure and an emphasis on clarity and explicitness – features similar to English rhetoric (Hirose 2003; Kobayashi and Rinnert 2002, 2007; Kubota 1998a, 1998b; Kubota and Shi 2005; Rinnert and Kobayashi 2007). This brings up the question of what role research plays in discursive construction.

Research constructing cultural homogeneity

As discussed so far, contrastive rhetoric research has constructed a particular understanding of cultural difference in rhetoric and writing. One significant issue is that the constructed knowledge is not neutral; it conveys the implication that English is superior to other languages. At the same time, contrastive rhetoric has made pedagogical recommendations on how to integrate ESL students into academic English discourse by highlighting the need for explicit teaching of the rhetorical conventions of English. One consequence of this scholarship is the influence of Anglo-American conventions of academic writing on other languages. It is important to note that the knowledge constructed by contrastive rhetoric is consistent with the broader discourse of colonialism that draws a boundary between the West and the East. Thus, the representations of linguistic features similar to what has been produced by contrastive rhetoric can be found in many texts. For instance, some Japanese scholars in their Japanese publications support cultural difference in rhetoric between Japanese and English. While some of them quote Kaplan (1966) to underscore cultural difference, others further recommend that Japanese writing should adopt the direct and unambiguous communication mode of English (see Kubota 2002 for more details). In teaching Japanese language arts in schools in Japan, the curriculum and textbooks have increasingly promoted clear and explicit expressions of opinions (Kubota and Shi 2005). It is no wonder some recent studies of contrastive rhetoric have identified a trend toward Anglicization.

This indicates that research on cultural difference with colonialist undertones could compel the inferiorized Other to improve their perceived deficit by narrowing the gap represented in the cultural dichotomy. Ironically, the superior Self continues to endorse the discourse that represents the East and the West in a binary way, which is still demonstrated to some extent in the most recent development of contrastive rhetoric research.

Limitations of the renewed approach – intercultural rhetoric

Contrastive rhetoric scholarship has recently responded to growing criticisms by reviewing its conceptual framework. A leading scholar, Ulla Connor (2002, 2004, 2008) proposed to move beyond cultural and linguistic binaries (e.g., deductive versus inductive, linear versus nonlinear, individualism versus collectivism) and instead investigate complex factors affecting a writing situation by focusing on small cultures that are observed in immediate contexts as opposed to large cultures of nation-states (Holliday 1999). Advocating a postmodern focus on the diverse and dynamic nature of rhetoric, Connor further renames the field as intercultural rhet­oric in order to reflect a focus on contextual and interethnic inquiry as opposed to an interest in distinct large cultures. Nonetheless, some of the publications in Connor’s recent edited work – a special issue of a journal (Connor 2004) and a book (Connor 2008) – continue to support distinct difference between large cultures, use conceptual binaries such as Hofstede’s (1984), and uncritically promote English discourse conventions in cross-cultural settings.

To apply this new approach to the divergent meanings of critical in applied linguistics discussed earlier, the renewed intercultural rhetoric seems to belong to the social relevance category in that it attempts to address the diverse, dynamic, and situated nature of rhetoric. Its inquiry focus has been broadened from academic writing to other genres such as journalistic writing, grant proposals, business writing, and book reviews. Comparisons are made not only across languages but also across varieties within a language. Nevertheless, the conceptual framework of intercultural rhetoric lacks a critical edge – it does not explicitly focus on the politics and power involved in the use and analysis of written discourse conventions. Although Connor (2008) refers to Fairclough (1992), a leading scholar of CDA, to address the importance of sociopolitical contexts, she never mentions CDA’s aim to expose the power and ideologies behind discourse for social transformation. In this sense, the renewed approach, despite its focus on socially relevant issues, does not critically scrutinize essentialism, Othering, and perpetuation of unequal relations of power.

Toward Critical Approaches to Intercultural Communication and Discourse

Investigations of intercultural discourse and communication can involve problematic consequences of cultural essentialism and perpetuation of unequal cultural and linguistic relations of power, despite their good intention to promote mutual understandings across cultures. Discussions of cultural differences carry undertones that legitimate racial superiority and inferiority. This, however, does not deny the entire legitimacy of the field of intercultural communication or the concept of cultural difference as an academic inquiry. Rather, it indicates the need to critically reflect on taken-for-granted ideas about culture and language in order to uncover unequal relations of power, reveal the mechanism of domination/subordination, and recognize strategic essentialism for resistance (Spivak 1993). Critical approaches to intercultural discourse and communication, thus, need to embrace the vision of problematizing and challenging a status quo that elevates certain cultures, languages, and groups of people while denigrating others by attending to such dimensions as the politics behind cultural difference, issues of power, and the ideological implications of research.

First, cultural differences do not reflect objective or scientific facts; rather they are constructed by discourses that are historically and politically located in human experiences. Familiar representations of culture, language, and ethnicity are discursive constructs; they require an approach that uncovers the politics behind taken-for-granted assumptions of how people communicate across cultures and languages. Focusing on the politics and discourse behind cultural difference allows us to explore an underlying purpose of asserting cultural difference. While a dominant group can exploit cultural/racial difference to legitimate their own privilege, a subordinate group can also appropriate it to assert their unique identities, as seen in identity politics. As Said (1993: 314) argues, “The job facing the cultural intellectual is therefore not to accept the politics of identity as given, but to show how all representations are constructed, for what purpose, by whom, and with what components.”

Second, cultural difference in intercultural communication cannot be separated from issues of power. It is important to bear in mind that the discourse of cultural difference carries a legacy of colonialism and that the relations of power between the colonizer and the colonized both continue and are transformed in contempor­ary globalization and neoliberal politics that legitimate newly configured political and economic hierarchies of power. While the Civil Rights Movement and global awareness of human inequalities have reduced racism to a certain degree, it is still sustained in various forms. Combating racism and other forms of injustice should constitute an important goal of critical investigations of cultural/linguistic differences.

Third, scholars should be aware that their work is part of not only the construction of cultural knowledge but also the formation of cultural practice. The knowledge constructed by intercultural communication research could endorse the notion of which language/culture is more sophisticated, advanced, and superior to others, thereby motivating the users of the inferiorized language to fix the perceived deficit by adopting the dominant language and culture. This further promotes cultural and linguistic shifts. Awareness of the ideological influence of research on cultural transformation should be an important part of critical scholarship.

Research on intercultural discourse and communication has challenged the monolingual monocultural view of the world by addressing the importance of being aware of cultural difference in interacting with people from diverse backgrounds. Nonetheless, the discourse of cultural difference has unfortunately reinforced a fixed monolithic view of culture, divorced from politics and ideologies. Critical approaches to communication across languages and cultures allow us to diversify, politicize, and problematize ossified knowledge of language and culture and at the same time transform the status quo of power relations with a vision of creating more just intercultural relations.

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