Contrastive rhetoric provides a variety of perspectives because it allows for a wide range of research methodologies to compare and contrast the practices of groups or individuals to reveal what is uniquely characteristic of them, and what are universal features. The major types of research employed by contrastive text linguistic studies include, among others, quantitative descriptive research (e.g., Biber, 1991; Hinds, 1990; Grabe & Kaplan, 1998), case studies and ethnographies (Nelson & Carson, 1992; Murphy, 1991), and classification studies (Reid, 1992).

The shift of general interest towards social and cultural issues in contrastive rhetoric from the 1980s to the present seems to reflect the actual developmental issues that need to be considered in teaching EAP. Although not necessarily in a fixed order, a successful EFL/ESL learner of a genre is likely to have to cope with differences between composition in their native and the English language systems, understand cross-cultural differences, and finally, become familiar with several genres towards understanding, entering, and possibly shaping the ‘target’ discourse community. Since the 1990s, contrastive studies of academic and professional genres have become concerned with the “initiation and socialization processes that graduate students go through to become literate professionals in their graduate and professional discourse communities” (Connor, 2002). Reflecting the changes in the field of contrastive rhetoric, Connor (2004) proposes the term intercultural rhetoric to describe “research that will be faithful to the rigorous empirical principles of the area of study but still consistent with postmodern views of culture and discourse” (ibid., 292). In this article, a strong case is made for the relevance of intercultural rhetoric by placing it in a coherent framework with influential text and discourse analysis approaches (Flowerdew, 2002; Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993; Hyland, 2000, etc.), thus showing its centrality and interdisciplinary nature in the field of analysis (EAP). She identifies text, genre and corpus analyses as necessary tools for an intercultural rhetoric researcher and stresses the importance of context-sensitive qualitative comparison based on quantitative information obtained through meticulous data collection.