The term was first coined by the American applied linguist Robert Kaplan in 1966 to denote eclecticism and subsequent growth of collective knowledge in certain languages.
[citation needed] The change of accepting the linguistic depth of a language by negating negative social barriers has been affected by three major developments—the acknowledgment of more genres with specific textual requirements, increased awareness of the social contexts of writing, and the need for an alternative conceptual framework that takes a more critical perspective of contrastive rhetoric—have motivated scholars of contrastive rhetoric to adjust and supplement research approaches in their work.
[citation needed] First, there was a marked increase in the types of written texts considered the purview of second language writing around the world.
[10] Second, in addition to the expansion of the genre, textual analysis has moved contrastive rhetoric to emphasize the social situation of writing.
This is where contrastive rhetoric overlaps with social constructionism, which sees approaches to textual meaning as dynamic, socio-cognitive activities.
"[14] In the early 2000s, some postmodern and critical pedagogy writers in the second language writing field, began referring to contrastive rhetoric as if it had been frozen in space.
While Connor continues to use the term intercultural rhetoric, scholars outside the United States looking at specific language differences (e.g. English and Japanese[13] and English and Spanish[16][17]) consider this to be a loaded label and continue to use the term contrastive rhetoric for the distinctiveness the theory shows and for the freedom of using tools to assess and understand the field in a non-restrictive manner.