Introduction

[Jonathan Benda]

Hello, everyone:

My name is Jonathan Benda, and I'm a lecturer in the Foreign Languages and
Literature Department at Tunghai University in Taiwan. At some point in
the near future, I hope to be a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Composition
at a university somewhere in the United States--right now I'm busy writing
applications.

My interests are in cross-cultural communication, rhetorics of the Web,
the rhetoric of English as an International Language (both in the sense
of rhetoric *about* EIL and in the sense of rhetorical practices of users
of English around the world). I'm hoping that in my Ph.D. studies I can
somehow combine these interests and also come to some conclusions about
how these issues can/do/should influence how I teach English composition
in Taiwan. I'm not exactly a productive scholar on any of this, yet, but
I'm reading a little in these areas in my spare time.

So far I've read a lot of posts that are very interesting to me--especially
the ones about public oratory in different cultures and the ones about
the Internet and this concept of minimal units of hypertext--but since
I'm supposed to be grading papers (it's the end of the fall semester
here), I'm just going to lurk for a week or so...

Nice meeting you all,

Jonathan Benda
Dept. Foreign Lang. and Lit.
Tunghai University
Taichung, Taiwan, R.O.C.
http://mail.thu.edu.tw/~benda/
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Field/6185/