Contrastive Rhetoric: How Native is our "Native" Languages

This week's readings introduce us to the concept of contrastive rhetoric, that is, the analysis of the writing of second language writers from the perspective of L1 interference. In other words traditional contrastive rhetoric worked on the assumption that the mistakes made by second language learners happens because of L1 interference. However, this theoretical position has been critiqued by recent contrastive theorists in favor of a contextual analysis of language performance. As noted by Canagarajah last week, it is not all mistakes in the writings of ESL users that is derived from L1; sometimes they are intentional and driven by certain ideological and identity issues. It has also been noted that the traditional contrastive approach tended to compartmentalize cultures, and looked at them as exclusive from each other. However, even with more current approaches of contrastive rhetoric that looked at language performance in specific contexts and for specific purposes, there is still a unidirectional analytical approach - that is, how ESL students with a native language (which is fixed) perform in the acquisition of the standard variety of English. The question that confronts us then is how native is our "native" language? In this age of globalization and transcultural flows, our native languages are affected by  lexical changes, code meshing, and even certain rhetorical strategies from the standard variety of English which in turn influence ESL writing. My point is our native languages are not as "native" as they were before language contact with standard varieties of English. Thus, there are noticeable changes in both our native languages and interlanguages from this contact.