Kaplan - Cultural Thought Patterns (1966)
Kaplan - Cultural Thought Patterns (1966)
INTER-CULTURAL EDUCATION
Robert B. Kaplan
University of Southern California
central idea and relate that idea to all the other ideas in the whole
essay, and to employ that idea in its proper relationship with the
other ideas, to prove something, or perhaps to argue something.
A piece of writing may be considered unified when
it contains nothing superfluous and it omits nothing es-
sential to the achievement of its purpose. . . . A work
is considered coherent when the sequence of its
parts. . .is controlled by some principle which is
meaningful to the reader. Unity is the quality attributed
to writing which has all its necessary and sufficient parts.
Coherence is the quality attributed to the presentation of
material in a sequence which is intelligible to its reader?
Contrarily, the English paragraph may use just the reverse pro-
cedure; that is, it may state a whole series of examples and then
relate those examples into a single statement at the end of the
paragraph. These two types of development represent the com-
mon inductive and deductive reasoning which the English reader
expects to be an integral part of any formal communication.
For example, the following paragraph written by Macaulay
demonstrates normal paragraph development:
Whitehall, when [Charles the Second] dwelt there,
was the focus of political intrigue and of fashionable
gaiety. Half the jobbing and half the flirting of the me-
tropolis went on under his roof. Whoever could make
himself agreeable to the prince or could secure the
good offices of his mistress might hope to rise in the
world without rendering any service to the govern-
ment, without even being known by sight to anymin-
ister of state. This courtier got a frigate and that a
company, a third the pardon of a rich offender, a fourth
a lease of crown-land on easy terms. If the king noti-
fied his pleasure that a briefless lawyer should be
made a judge or that a libertine baronet should be
made a peer, the gravest counsellors, after a little
murmuring, submitted. Interest, therefore, drew a
constant press of suitors to the gates of the palace,
and those gates always stood wide. The King kept open
house every day and all day long for the good society
of London, the extreme Whigs only excepted. Hardly
any gentleman had any difficulty in making his way to
the royal presence. The levee was exactly what the
%chard E. Hughes and P. Albert Duhamel, Rhetoric: Principles and Usage (Engle-
wood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1962), pp. 19-20.
6 LANGUAGE LEARNING, VOL. XVI, NOS. 1 & 2
9From The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (London,
1849-61).
1OThe following examples were discarded: Afghan-3, African-4, Danish-I, Finn-I,
German-3, Hindi-8, Persian-46, Russian-I, Greek-I, Tagalog-10, Turk-16, Urdu-5; Total-99.
11Tbe papers examined may be linguistically broken down a s follows: Group I-
Arabic-126, Hebrew-3; Group 11-Chinese (Mandarin)-I 10, Cambodian-40, Indocbinese-7,
Japanese-135, Korean-57, Laotian-3, Malasian-I, Thai-27, Vietnamese-I; Group In-(Span-
ish-Portugese) Brazilian-19, Central American-10, South American-42, Cuban-4, Spanish-8,
(French) French-2, African-2 (Italian) Swiss-I. Group I total-129; Group 11 total-381; Group
I11 total-88; TOTAL-598. These papers were accumulated and examined over a two year
period, from the beginning of the Fall 1963 semester through the Fall 1965 academic
semester.
CULTURAL THOUGHT PATTERNS 7
130riental here i s intended to mean specifically Chinese and Korean but not Japanese.
CULTURAL THOUGHT PATTERNS 11
central idea of the paragraph in the sense that they are parentheti-
cal amplifications of structurally related subordinate elements.
There are, of course, other examples that might be dis-
cussed as well, but these paragraphs may suffice to show that
each language and each culture has a paragraph order unique to
itself, and that part of the learning of a particular language is the
mastering of its logical system.
.
. .One should join to any logic of the language a
phenomenology of the spoken word. Moreover, this
phenomenology will, in its turn, rediscover the idea
of a logos immanent in the language; but it will seek
the justification for this in a more general philosophy
of the relations between man and the world. . . .
From one culture to another it is possible to establish
communication. The Rorschach test has been success-
fully applied to the natives of the island of Alor.16
i
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0
0
f
Much more detailed and more accurate descriptions a r e required
before any meaningful contrastive system can be elaborated.
Nonetheless, an important problem exists immediately. In the
teaching of English as a second language, what does one do with
the student who is reasonably proficient in the use of syntactic
structure but who needs to learn to write themes, theses, essay
examinations, and dissertations? The "advancedtt student has long
constituted a problem for teachers of English as a second language.
This approach, the contrastive analysis of rhetoric, is offered as
one possible answer to the existing need. Such an approach has
the advantage that it may help the foreign student to form stand-
ards of judgement consistent with the demands made upon him by
the educational system of which he has become a part. At the
same time, by accounting for the cultural aspects of logic which
underlie the rhetorical structure, this approach may bring the stu-
dent not only to an understanding of contrastive grammar and a
new vocabulary, which are parts of any reading task, but also to a
grasp of idea and structure in units larger than the sentence. A
sentence, after all, rarely exists outside a context. Applied lin-
guistics teaches the student to deal with the sentence, but it is
necessary to bring the student beyond that to a comprehension of
the whole context. He can only understand the whole context if he
recognizes the logic on which the context is based. The foreign
student who has mastered the syntax of English may still write a
bad paragraph or a bad paper unless he also masters the logic of
English. !Zn serious expository prose, the aragraph tends to be a
logical, rather than a typographical, unit.'dt The understanding of
paragraph patterns can allow the student to relate syntactic ele-
ments within a paragraph and perhaps even to relate paragraphs
within a total context.
Finally, it is necessary to recognize the fact that a
IsEdward P. J . Corbett, Classical Rhetoric /or the Modem Student (New York, 1965),
p. 416.
19Importantwork in the rhetoric of the paragraph i s being done by Francis Christensen,
among others. See especially "A Generative Rhetoric of the Paragraph," College Composi-
tion and Communication (October, 1965). pp. 144-156.
CULTURAL THOUGHT PATTERNS 17
B. Special Features:
4
B. Situational Comedies:
1.
2.
C. Adventure Tales:
1.
n
III. Advertising:
A.
1.
B.
1.
r)
Iv. [~onclusion:]
taught to him. The English class must not aim too high. Its func-
tion is to provide the student with a form within which he may
operate, a form acceptable in this time and in this place. It is
hoped that the method described above may facilitate the achieve-
ment of that goal.