| This study investigated the rhetorical structures of 32 Korean EFL High School Students' Korean and English argumentative essays. The students wrote two essays on a similar topic in English and in Korean and filled out a questionnaire. The essays were scored by two native Korean and two native English raters and were further divided into three groups according to their holistic essay scores: high, mid, and low. Then, five students from each score group were interviewed by the raters. Later, the raters were interviewed by the researcher. The study found that this special group of Korean high school students who started their formal language and writing instruction in both languages early, used similar rhetorical patterns for both English and Korean, even though they showed more variety and higher control of grammar in their L1 (Korean). When the effect of rhetorical structure transfer on organization and holistic scores was investigated, the 14 students who used similar structures received slightly higher scores than the 18 students who used dissimilar patterns. An additional finding involved English raters in EFL versus ESL environments. The English raters in Korea appeared to score the students' writing in English with reference to the range of what is typical in that setting. Therefore, experienced raters in the U.S. rescored some of the English essays. Their holistic ratings of the English essays were lower than those of their peers in Korea. |
