The identity of ‘the English writing teacher’ is increasingly important in Asia. Influenced by disciplinary and professional discourses, English teachers in this region tend to develop a monolingual orientation that leads their students towards native speaker norms. However, globalization requires a fluid, less-bounded perspective on nation, culture, and language, that is, a more multilingual orientation to English teaching. This essay argues that an historical perspective on teaching second language (L2) writing in Asia has the potential to reinvent writing teacher identity by challenging teachers’ monolingual assumptions. I will first review historical accounts of teaching L2 writing in Asia, showing that this history is multilingual and transnational. Next, drawing on historical examples related to the teaching of English writing in China, I demonstrate that Chinese students and teachers have struggled with a monolingual ideology endorsed by the state ever since English became a school subject. Recent scholarship in applied linguistics and literacy studies has suggested ways to embrace multilingualism in teaching and research. Coupled with such scholarship, historical knowledge may encourage writing teachers to construct a multilingual, transnational identity by designing teaching materials, writing tasks, and pedagogical techniques in a multilingual framework.

The history of American imperialism, as well as China’s strong presence on the contemporary global scene, should encourage American scholars of rhetoric to look beyond the nation-state and study other rhetorical traditions such as Chinese practices of argument. A debate during the Western Han dynasty over the country’s economic policies illustrates how official-orators discursively engaged one another while representing various philosophical orientations. This debate also reminds us of how important the values of humanity, empathy, and responsibility should be in contemporary rhetorical education.

Asian rhetoric has drawn much attention in American academia over the last three decades. Still, studies of Asian rhetorical traditions were often initiated from a “deficiency” model, in which the ...

Most rhetorical readings of Confucius's Analects have focused on his views on eloquence, reflecting an insuppressible impulse among comparative rhetoricians to match Confucian rhetoric to Greco–Roman rhetorical framework. My reading of the text argues that Confucius was more concerned about the suasory power of the multimodality of ritual symbols than narrowly verbal persuasion. To achieve the Way for restoring social unity and peace, Confucius emphasizes the ritualization of both the self and the others through studying history and performing rituals reflectively. I suggest, as the first Chinese rhetoric par excellence, the Analects shares some similar features with epideictic rhetoric.

Xiaoye You is a Ph.D. student in the English as a Second Language (ESL) programat Purdue University. He isinterested in comparative rhetoric and issues of Englishwriting instruction in international contexts. Currently he is working on his dissertation, exploring the intersections of Anglo-American and Chinese rhetorical traditions in the historical evolution of English writing instruction in Chinese colleges.

Abstract In his recent studies on classical Chinese text structures and contemporary Chinese composition textbooks, Andy Kirkpatrick claims that Mainland Chinese students are taught to write Chinese compositions in contemporary "Anglo-American" rhetorical style. This paper examines the historical formation of modern Chinese writing instruction and argues that the introduction of Western rhetoric into China in the beginning of the twentieth century did enrich modern Chinese rhetoric through, for example, Western scientific rhetoric(s); but more importantly, together with other historical forces, it helped to revitalize and retrieve the extremely rich Chinese rhetorical tradition in modern Chinese writing instruction.