Analysis Of Rhetorical Patterns In College Freshmen's Argumentative Composition: A Contrastive Rhetoric Perspective

Contrastive Rhetoric is created by Kaplan in 1966, aiming to study rhetorical patterns for the EFL (English as Foreign Language) writing under different cultures. This theory opens up a new field of research for the study of Second Language Writing.Based on contrastive rhetoric theory, this study analyzed compositions of 35 freshmen from both the macro and micro levels by means of discourse analysis. And at the same time, a questionnaire was followed up to find out the possible reasons to the phenomenon in the previous stage. The results showed that these first-year college students have mastered the overall structure of the English argumentative composition. However, there was typical inductive rather than deductive pattern in the development of paragraph which was specifically showed by either the appearance of topic sentence at the end of each paragraph or the absence of topic sentence. From the microscopic point of view, the use of lexical cohesion was the primary means used by students. On the other hand, although the students were able to use conjunctions, there were many misuses. Other micro level rhetorical means, such as rhetoric question, figurative language, and emotional appeal were found in a small proportion.The results of the analysis from both the compositions and questionnaire can be concluded:1. Currently, college freshmen have mastered a certain amount of knowledge about English discourse structure, but not comprehensively enough. And the assumed traditional Chinese spiral-type thinking mode and the typical English linear thinking mode coexist in their composition.2. Although students have intended to use the means of convergence, problems exist.3. Small size of vocabulary is a great hinder in students'writing process which greatly affects the quality of their compositions.The significance of this study is that it provides a comprehensive description of the rhetoric patterns in college freshmen's argumentative writing, and therefore provides first-hand information for the future college English writing education. The study also suggests that in order to enhance students'writing quality, cultural awareness and discourse knowledge should be introduced in writing class.The originality of this study is that it focuses on the college freshmen and uses a multi-angle way to study their writing text to present a comprehensive rhetoric patterns and provides a practical reference for the future college English writing class.