Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

Rhetorical Function(s) and Process(es)

"Rhetorical Function-Shifts in EST Discourse" by Larry Selinker, Mary Todd-Trimble, & Louis Trimble (1978)

Function(s): 41 of 54 occurences in corpus

Process(es): 11 of 15 occurrences in corpus

Part of a span of close textual studies by Selinker and several colleagues, this article focused attention on paragraph development in instances of "English for Science and Technology" (EST). In previous work (Lackstrom, Selinker, & Trimble, 1973; Selinker, Todd-Trimble, & Trimble, 1976; Trimble, 1977), co-authors had articulated the paragraph as the primary site of rhetorical development based on the common pattern of core generalization plus support, which was constrained by "total discourse" objectives (such as "detailing an experiment" or "presenting new hypotheses or theories") and which, in turn, constrained syntactic decisions (such as tenses in verbs of report) (Selinker, Todd-Trimble, & Trimble, 1978, p. 312). That is, earlier work sought to describe and exemplify paragraphs as primary drivers of more-or-less linear "rhetorical process development" (p. 313) In contrast, Selinker and colleagues here related their discovery of "rhetorical function-shift development," in which paragraphs replace hierarchical claim-support structures with discourse signaling a higher-order shift in "function" (p. 314). For instance, successive sentences in a sample paragraph shift from a technical description of a specific engine to a theoretical statement about fluid mechanics and then back to the specific description, thus potentially upsetting a reader's expectation that a single paragraph will contain only one primary rhetorical fuction.

The authors expressed concern that L2 students in particular may confront this difficulty even when they fully understand a given document's lexis and syntax. Indeed, they expressed belief that L2 readers of EST may over-rely on discrete shifts in verb tense to signal shifts in rhetorical function—a connection the authors disproved with EST examples showing functional shifts with no change in tense as well as tense changes with no functional shifts.

In attempting here to refine their "rhetorical function"-based program in light of divergent published examples of EST paragraphs, Selinker and colleagues recognized the limits of a pedagogy that relies on explicit definitions of rhetorical functions at discrete levels. "In our teaching," they related, "we obviously start with unambiguous examples of the various rhetorical functions, but as soon as students move from these to look for fresh examples in their own science textbooks they find paragraphs which are less easy to analyze" (p. 318). The authors then noted that distinctions among functions themselves may break down. For instance, an "example" may bleed into an "illustration," and a "definition" may nest conceptually and organizationally within a broader/higher-level chronological description. While they confidently stated that students can surmount the arbitrary nature of these initial function definitions as they gain fluency in reading EST, the function-shift paragraphs present a different problem—not overlapping function labels so much as a sudden shift in function mid-paragraph that may, in the authors' words, seem "jarring [and] unprincipled" (p. 319). The authors were clearly puzzling through how to refine their approach to EST, which focuses on the paragraph as the site of the most significant rhetorical work, in light of L2 students' apparent difficulty with identifying just what kinds of work EST paragraphs may be doing. In shoring up the exigence and potential payoff of these studies, they concluded by reiterating H. G. Widdowson's (1974) speculation that scientific and technical communication includes "universal modes of thought and practice" (p. 40, quoted in p. 320), with paragraphs serving as such modes' best representatives.