Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

Rhetorical Form(s)

"Out of the Woods: Emerging Traditions in the Teaching of Writing" by Ann Raimes (1991)

7 of 11 occurences in corpus

On the occasion of TESOL's 25th anniversary, Ann Raimes (1991) reviewed scholarly and pedagogical traditions in second language writing teaching, nominating four somewhat overlapping approaches, including the field's focus on form, writer, content, and reader. Raimes described the field's traditional and ongoing preoccupation with form as one whose longevity is understandable given the field's pedagogical and scholarly imperatives. Following the prevailing audiolingual method, in which oral exercises stress target languages' spoken patterns and grammatical accuracy, form-focused approaches to writing have guided students through sentence- and paragraph-level work in more or less controlled contexts—at times in ways that pay little to no attention to meaning making. In response to formal approaches, and coincident with similar movements in L1 composition, L2 scholar–teachers' interest in student writers' composing processes beginning in the mid-1970s have opened many pedagogical and research avenues. But Raimes noted that "teachers did not all strike out along this new path" (p. 410), citing the complexities of process approaches relative to more formal teaching. A focus on content and writing in disciplines arose in the 1980s in partial response to some scholars' belief that too much attention to individual processes can trade off with attention to "demands of the academy" (p. 410), prompting the development of writing instruction embedded in or grouped with "content" classes. Around the same time, Raimes observed, a similar emphasis on potentially powerful readers of students' authentic writing was influencing standalone L2 writing courses, which were teaching according to principles of English for academic purposes.

To the extent that these approaches overlap rather than signaling paradigmatic shifts in writing instruction, Raimes argued that there are "difficult to negotiate" challenges relevant to authentic and topical writing, the application of Contrastive Rhetoric, teacher response, and whether there is anything as stable as an "academic discourse community" at all (p. 413). She went on to express concern that the field of L2 writing has had a tendency to respond to such complexities by prescribing one-size-fits-most approaches that seek to recapture the focus on form's compelling explanatory and pedagogical power. It is clear that, for Raimes, formal approaches are extremely attractive to teachers and other stakeholders seeking straightforward interventions in L2 student writing, but she concluded by claiming that the lack of a "single new approach" at the 25-year mark is the best outcome given composition's extreme complexity. In terms of "rhetoric," specifically, Raimes recognized the "consciousness-raising" value of contrasting rhetorical patterns that may have cultural foundations (p. 418), but she warned against adopting contrastive approaches wholesale. It is a short leap for Raimes from seeing differences in students' writing to quantifying and pre/proscribing them.