Intercultural rhetoric

Intercultural rhetoric (IR) is the study of written discourse between and among individuals with different cultural backgrounds. It examines the influences of first language, culture, and education on the production of texts in a second language to advance intercultural communication research, as well as informing editors, translators, and language and composition instructors and learners about reasons for variations in discourse features such as attitude markers, hedges, self-references, and transitions among writers from different linguistic backgrounds. To truly understand IR today and how it informs – and is informed by – English for Academic Purposes (EAP), one must trace its history from its beginnings as contrastive rhetoric (CR) to see how it has re-conceptualized culture as multiple and dynamic, moved from focusing on text to context, and adopted research methods from fields such as genre studies, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics to strengthen its empirical foundations. IR can also serve as a bridge between EAP and English as a lingua franca (ELF), which have often been placed at odds with one another.