Abstract
Postcolonial critiques of contrastive rhetoric (CR) have called our attention to epistemological theft and appropriation in the field of second language (L2) writing. Published in Anglophone venues in the Global North, these critiques reveal that early contrastive rhetoricians dispossessed non-Western people from their ownership over certain knowledges, methodologies, and practices by normalizing their language, fixing their culture, and speaking for them. These critiques have contributed to a decolonial reckoning in L2 writing. To understand how the reckoning has impacted L2 writing in the Global South, this paper examines CR scholarship published in Chinese-language venues. The study reveals that while Chinese scholars are not unfamiliar with the decolonial reckoning, they have continued to embrace the traditional CR framework. By doing so, they took part in the epistemological theft and appropriation by reenacting the appropriation of students’ writings and narratives and interpreting them in ways that fit Western knowledges and perspectives. Their acts of epistemological theft and appropriation include racializing Chinese students as inferior to White native speakers, portraying Chinese language and culture as static and inferior, and celebrating CR as a means to solving students’ problems in English writing. Chinese scholars’ acts were motivated by their national identity being defined in opposition to the West and the complicity of capitalism and nationalist discourse in China, a reality that poses challenges in decolonizing L2 writing.
Funding source: The Humanities and Social Science Research Project of the Ministry of Education, China
Award Identifier / Grant number: No. 21YJC740008
Funding source: The Humanities and Social Science Research Project of the Education Department of Jilin Province, China
Award Identifier / Grant number: JJKH20190309SK
Acknowledgment
The research was supported by the Humanities and Social Science Research Project of the Ministry of Education, China (No. 21YJC740008) and the Humanities and Social Science Research Project of the Education Department of Jilin Province, China (JJKH20190309SK).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Issue: Tribal Epistemologies and the discursive construction of COVID-19 knowledge; Guest Editor: Rodney H. Jones
- Disciplinary tribes and the discourse of mainstream media expert opinion articles: evidencing COVID-19 knowledge claims for a public audience
- Ways of seeing and discourse strategies of naming the novel coronavirus in the US and Hong Kong
- Who is our friend and who is our enemy? The enregisterment of tribalising digital discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic
- “By the way I want to give you some masks”: exploring multimodal stance-taking in YouTube videos
- Affective geographies and tribal epistemologies: studying abroad during COVID-19
- Editorial
- Tribal epistemologies and the discursive construction of COVID-19 knowledge
- Special Issue: Against Epistemological Theft and Appropriation; Guest Editors: Othman Z. Barnawi and Hamza R’boul
- The myopic focus on decoloniality in applied linguistics and English language education: citations and stolen subjectivities
- The bidirectionality of epistemological theft and appropriation: contrastive rhetoric in China
- Attempts at including, mediating and creating ‘new’ knowledges: problematising appropriation in intercultural communication education and research
- Epistemological theft and appropriation in qualitative inquiry in applied linguistics: lessons from Halaqa
- Can the subaltern speak in autoethnography?: knowledging through dialogic and retro/intro/pro-spective reflection to stand against epistemic violence
- The violence of literature review and the imperative to ask new questions
- Editorial
- Against epistemological theft and appropriation in applied linguistics research
- Special Issue: Art as social practice: language and marginality; Guest Editors: Roberta Piazza, Birgul Yilmaz and Charlotte Taylor
- ‘Art as social practice: language and marginality’: Special Issue of Applied Linguistics Review
- Objects are not just a thing – (re)negotiating identity through using material objects within the Kurdish diaspora in the UK
- “I am surprised they have allowed you in here to do this”: women’s prison writing as heterotopic space of narrative inclusion
- Walking with: understandings and negotiations of the mundane in research
- Translanguaging art – Questioning boundaries in Monika Szydłowska’s Do you miss your country?
- Reinventing the self through participatory art: writing and performing among rough sleepers
- Research Articles
- Expectation-practice discrepancies: a transcultural exploration of Chinese students’ oral discourse socialization in German academia
- Perceived teacher feedback practices, student feedback motivation and engagement in English learning: a survey of Chinese university students
- Incidental vocabulary learning from listening, reading, and viewing captioned videos: frequency and prior vocabulary knowledge
- A longitudinal study on lecture listening difficulties and self-regulated learning strategies across different proficiency levels in EMI higher education
- Secondary students’ L2 writing motivation and engagement: the impact of teachers’ instructional approaches and feedback practices
- Marked on the voice: the visibility experiences of Russian heritage migrants following the war against Ukraine
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Issue: Tribal Epistemologies and the discursive construction of COVID-19 knowledge; Guest Editor: Rodney H. Jones
- Disciplinary tribes and the discourse of mainstream media expert opinion articles: evidencing COVID-19 knowledge claims for a public audience
- Ways of seeing and discourse strategies of naming the novel coronavirus in the US and Hong Kong
- Who is our friend and who is our enemy? The enregisterment of tribalising digital discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic
- “By the way I want to give you some masks”: exploring multimodal stance-taking in YouTube videos
- Affective geographies and tribal epistemologies: studying abroad during COVID-19
- Editorial
- Tribal epistemologies and the discursive construction of COVID-19 knowledge
- Special Issue: Against Epistemological Theft and Appropriation; Guest Editors: Othman Z. Barnawi and Hamza R’boul
- The myopic focus on decoloniality in applied linguistics and English language education: citations and stolen subjectivities
- The bidirectionality of epistemological theft and appropriation: contrastive rhetoric in China
- Attempts at including, mediating and creating ‘new’ knowledges: problematising appropriation in intercultural communication education and research
- Epistemological theft and appropriation in qualitative inquiry in applied linguistics: lessons from Halaqa
- Can the subaltern speak in autoethnography?: knowledging through dialogic and retro/intro/pro-spective reflection to stand against epistemic violence
- The violence of literature review and the imperative to ask new questions
- Editorial
- Against epistemological theft and appropriation in applied linguistics research
- Special Issue: Art as social practice: language and marginality; Guest Editors: Roberta Piazza, Birgul Yilmaz and Charlotte Taylor
- ‘Art as social practice: language and marginality’: Special Issue of Applied Linguistics Review
- Objects are not just a thing – (re)negotiating identity through using material objects within the Kurdish diaspora in the UK
- “I am surprised they have allowed you in here to do this”: women’s prison writing as heterotopic space of narrative inclusion
- Walking with: understandings and negotiations of the mundane in research
- Translanguaging art – Questioning boundaries in Monika Szydłowska’s Do you miss your country?
- Reinventing the self through participatory art: writing and performing among rough sleepers
- Research Articles
- Expectation-practice discrepancies: a transcultural exploration of Chinese students’ oral discourse socialization in German academia
- Perceived teacher feedback practices, student feedback motivation and engagement in English learning: a survey of Chinese university students
- Incidental vocabulary learning from listening, reading, and viewing captioned videos: frequency and prior vocabulary knowledge
- A longitudinal study on lecture listening difficulties and self-regulated learning strategies across different proficiency levels in EMI higher education
- Secondary students’ L2 writing motivation and engagement: the impact of teachers’ instructional approaches and feedback practices
- Marked on the voice: the visibility experiences of Russian heritage migrants following the war against Ukraine