Before I jump into the questions, I would like to warn everyone about this CR/IR research issue that this is a tricky and easy to fall into your own traps. As you all know that this issue has been criticized heavily, please be advised to take this issue, if you happen to be interested in conducting the research, with care!
After reading Connor (2004), I have the following questions to head the discussion up a bit.
Pedagogically speaking:
1. Where is the place for "audiences" in CR/IR research?
2. How does CR/IR help us pedagogically to teach students to compose?
3. From the CR/IR persepctive, whose "rhetoric" is being put forward - researchers or students?
4. How do you define "culture"? (researchers' or students' perspectives)
The following questions are from Connor (2008) chapter.
Research/methodological related questions:
1. "Contrastive rhetoric has always been multidimensional in its research" (Connor, 2008, p 300). What are these dimensional aspects of IR research?
2. What are problems with the IR research methodologies?
3. If the rhetorical tradition is not pure, as stated in Connor (2008), what would be the future directions of the IR research?
4. Why do you think scholars criticize IR research methodologies?
5. What research methodologies/tools would help IR research to expand its horizon?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hi Bee,
ReplyDeleteI think that in when researchers set forth to do CR/IR, they should first of all define which perspective of culture they take. We all know that culture can be and has already been defined differently. Any researcher has to provide an operational definition of culture that is adopted in the research framework used.
Also, to answer your question whether culture will be defined from the researchers’ or students’ perspectives, I think that this depends on the focus of the researcher. What does the researcher want to do exactly? Is the research focusing on the broader notion of culture being national or ethnic? And in this case I doubt that we can reach results that are representative of national/ethnic cultures. In both case there is no room for homogeneity and I have the impression that researchers are inclined to look for and find some homogeneous trends which I doubt exist. Even if we adopt the stance of a small culture such as that of age, gender, etc… I think that it is still difficult to find trends. When doing research, we may have some expectations while research is all about expecting the unexpected by focusing on students’ cultures.
Speaking from the social constructionist stance, I would say that we should start off with the small culture. The reason is that we need to pluralize students' rhetorical structures, the same concept as World Englishes.
ReplyDeleteAlso I would say that it depends on the purpose of the research. Again audience is the key concept here. If you want to analyze students' written texts, we do not want to do it nationally because it would be a "racist" act to do so. It is a simple way to "stereotype" students' writings.
Explain why we shouldn't use language as the determining factor. Race, class, age, and gender are all possible factors to keep the culture/population of your research small, but why not just use the language, as in "these writers speak X as their first language." Bear with me on this - I may be arguing Whorf-Sapir here without understanding why that's been discredited. Using the writer's 1L creates enormous challenges, but it also lets you choose a huge population and look at the aggregate of texts. Otherwise, if you're only reading 500 short letters, it's too hard to pin down which cultural factors are at play. But, if we can look at 20,000 texts, then don't those specific issues even out?
ReplyDeleteJohn, I am not sure that 20,000 would be representative enough (because many other factors, like age and gender, are involved). Besides, you do not find many studies analyzing even that many texts.
ReplyDeleteBee,
ReplyDeleteregarding the question about the audiences in CR/IR, from Connor's article it seems that even though the audience factor is not singled out, it is taken into account within genre analysis (e.g., EAP is subdivided into particular genres; business writing is mentioned as well). In addition, Connor talks about 'context-sensitive text analysis'. I think the focus is mostly on the style within CR/IR research methods.
John, let's think for this research this way. If you are writing a letter to someone that you do not know well in another language with your L1 rhetorical move, the perception of the recipient toward your L1 rhetorical move (as a straight line) might be that you are arrogant and that you are not willing to learn another culture, (for example).
ReplyDeleteAnother point is that by using language as a factor, how can you be so sure that you are not putting your own rhetorical structure to judge others?
Alyona, we need to think about the audeince and the purpose of the writing. What is the purpose of writing these assignments or papers? Or for whom these students are writing for?
ReplyDeleteHow do you define "context" here?
I might have a chance to talk about this in class. If not, I can give you more info about this.