Contrastive study in the perspective of didactics of writing in L2: The three axes of rhetoric

Abstract

We can now admit without theoretical constraint that speech acts, being the subject of linguistic studies, are profoundly marked by culture, as proved by many works inspired by the notion of stereotype, politeness, etc., ranging from the sentence pattern to the discursive sequential scale or from verbal materials to non-verbal materials. In doing so, contrastive linguistics opens the possibility of enlightening the similarities and differences in the realization of the speech acts of the sender with different cultural affiliations. In the field of foreign language teaching, in particular, the contrastive perspective has expanded possible models of analysis that allow better understanding of functions of compared languages and the language writing behaviors of speakers from different cultures. This work proposes an inventory of the works relating to the contrastive rhetoric, which have mainly dealt with the writings of the learners of foreign language and the native writers with the aim of highlighting the differences in the “style, argumentation and organisation” (Purves, 1986) that characterize texts produced by the writers of different discursive cultures. We set these three angles as the main research issues of contrastive rhetoric whose aim is to differentiate and to bring into consistency various discursive elements and phenomena described and analyzed so far. We consider that this approach is all the more crucial in order to take account of the results of research entitled in various ways, each of which has its own rhetorical study subjects: for example, connectors; reasoning method, the style, the writing convention, the textual organization, the question of cohesion/coherence, the argumentative structure, etc.