A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF ARAB AND AMERICAN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS' STRATEGIES IN ACCOMPLISHING WRITTEN ENGLISH DISCOURSE FUNCTIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR EFL

This is a contrastive study of the stylistic features of Arab and American university students' written English.; The study addresses the problems that Arab students encounter when trying to convey a message in written English. The researcher hypothesized that these problems are caused by the communicative strategies used by the Arab students. An example of this is that Arab students often begin their compositions with a broad statement of a general state of affairs before introducing the topic sentence. They also tend to elaborate on one constituent sub-topic at the expense of the other sub-topics in the text. Such strategies of topic introduction and topic development make it difficult for the native reader to ascertain the writer's intended message.; The data base in this study consists of 30 letters of complaints and 30 letters of promising written by two groups of students: Arab students majoring in English from Bethlehem University on the West Bank of Jordan and American students in the graduate linguistics program at American University in Washington, D.C. The study adopts a functional approach to the data analysis by utilizing insights from speech-act theory, pragmatics, ethnography of communication and cognitive psychology.; The study indicates that the Arab college students selected for this research tend to follow the following strategies: to include a broad statement in the opening sections of their compositions before the topic sentence is introduced, to elaborate in one topic frame and not the others, and to neglect to connect the constituent topic frames of the composition.; The study concludes that the strategies of composing in English used by Arab students run counter to the native reader's expectations. Thus, the message intended by the Arab writer is not clearly conveyed to the American reader.; This study reaffirms the need for research on Arabic rhetoric in written texts for the purpose of interpreting the source of such strategies.