A Contrastive Rhetoric Study Of The English Compositions Of Chinese And American College Students

ESL writing occupies a significantly important position in English learning. In the traditional English writing classes, teachers are more concerned about grammar, vocabulary, and genre teaching, thus neglecting the positive role of rhetorical knowledge in English writing. Consequently, college students'essays are influenced by L1 transfer in regard to the field of discourse structure, the choice of words and so on in our country. This lays restrictions on the improvement of college students'writing competence.This thesis examined the discourse differences of Chinese and American college students in English writing from the perspective of contrastive rhetoric and discourse analysis. The Chinese and American college students'English essays are studied quantitatively and qualitatively within the framework of contrastive rhetoric and discourse analysis method, with the aim of enriching contrastive rhetoric study in the respect of cross-cultural study of the essays of college students.60 college students'essays (including 30 essays of Chinese college students and 30 essays of American college students) are included in this study. Among them, the English essays of American college students are chosen from Wang Qiuhai's (1999), American College Compositions; the English essays of Chinese college students are selected from WECCL (Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners) of SWECCL (Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners) (Wen, Wang, Liang 2005).Through analyzing 60 English compositions written by Chinese and American college students, we found that there is significant difference between the English essays of Chinese and American college students in terms of conjunction using, marked theme, paragraph organization and text pattern. This paper argued that reasons for these rhetorical differences are various. On the one hand, these differences are caused by the complexity and variety of each specific rhetoric convention across languages and cultures. On the other hand, they are influenced by one's developmental factors, instructional system of school and insufficient writing experience, this different rhetorical tendency is a writing strategy of ESL learners employed to overcome the above difficulties. The author suggested, teachers in ESL writing classes should give sufficient emphasis on the differences across languages and cultures. The writing teaching is an activity not only involving the linguistic knowledge, but should take the cultural variables into account as well.