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Cultural Thought Pattern in Inter-Cultural Education

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Cultural thought patterns in inter-cultural education

In this article by the renowned Professor Emeritus of applied linguistics, he seeks to emphasize the need to have a different teaching approach to reading and composition for foreign students and a different way for American students due to the cultural differences and nature of rhetoric. Although babies do not learn languages through grammar books or dictionaries, it is a subconscious process, and they learn through exposure to the language and surrounding environment. Learners of a language are subjected to a conscious process, and have to learn the language through memorizing alphabets, grammar rules and memorizing vocabulary and common phrases.

Contrastive rhetoric as described in the article has three assumptions that; each language has a set of rules for writing unique to it that linguistic and rhetorical conventions of a first language interfere with the learning of a second language and that spoken word and written words are cultural phenomena. As rhetoric concerns itself with what goes on in the mind rather than what comes out of the mouth, we have to realize that diversity affects not only the languages, but also the culture. Language, in turn, is the effect and the expression of a certain world view that is manifested by a culture. Language presents a kind of destiny, so far as human thought is concerned, this diversity of languages leads to a radical relativism and thoughts.

Rhetoric being a means of thinking or a way of finding available means to the realization of a desired ending must be remembered that the foreign student, ideally, will go back to the home country. Hence english becomes a means to an end for him, not an end in itself. All this in retrospect, it is necessary for the non-native speaker learning English to master the rhetoric of the English paragraph. Thought patterns in

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