Reflection on Robert Kaplan's Cultural Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education (1966)

Contrastive rhetoric started with Kaplan’s seminal work on “Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education.” He focused on the problems ESL student writers had and traced them mainly to the students’ culture and L1 transfer. Of course by transfer he refers to negative transfer or interference of students’ L1 in the written production of their L2.

Kaplan focused on the rhetorical differences of ESL students’ writings in relation to the rhetorical characteristics of the English paragraph development. By studying the paragraph development for five cultural groups of ESL students, he concluded that each paragraph development reflects a particular cultural thought pattern. Surely, Kaplan initial work (1966) privileges the NES and above all considers them as homogeneous. He also categorized many ethnic groups all together in one cultural group to which he imposed a thought pattern. Theo raised the question of which Semitic language Kaplan was referring to on page 47. There isn’t one Semitic language but there may Semitic languages which are Arabic (spoken mostly in the Middle East and North Africa), Hebrew (spoken by northern Semitic people and it has many forms or varieties), Amharic (spoken in Ethiopia), Tigrinya (spoken in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea). These are all Semitic languages and I don’t think ESL writers from these varied Semitic languages are homogeneous.

Furthermore, even within NESs don’t we have students who come from different habitus and who often display so many differences in the language norms, language use, etc. So considering any homogeneity within NESs is simply a myth. We don’t even need to consider the varieties among NESs of World Englishes and that is why Kaplan’s work was criticized for being ethnocentric although he revised his work later. That is why I think that Kaplan’s original work may be thought to look at the ESL students from a deficit perspective. These ESL students cannot write the way they are expected because of their L1 and culture.

Lastly, in terms of literacy in general and academic literacy in particular we should not be looking exclusively at the students’ rhetorical structures which are the end product. For such academic literacy to develop, there are so many factors that interact such as students’ interaction with written texts, with teachers, with other students, their schemata knowledge, their voice etc. When we talk of L2 students’ voice for instance, we should not consider them as having no voice. These students have an already existing voice in their L1 and if they are multilingual students, they may have more than one voice.