| In today's global community, the ability to write effectively in a second / foreign language is becoming widely recognized as a key skill for individuals from different cultures to communicate successfully. According to contrastive rhetoric researches, culture exerts influence on written discourse and culturally unique rhetorical conventions of students' L1 writing transfer to their ESL / EFL writing.This thesis reports a cross-cultural study carried out to explore similarities and differences at the comparable level of discourse organization between Chinese and English writing. The subjects of this study consisted of two groups, providing data for, respectively, quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. The quantitative data are 96 educational consulting and reply emails/e-messages between universities in Mainland China and U.K. and native Chinese students/graduates who want to study for a Master's degree in those universities. The qualitative data are obtained from the questionnaire survey and interviews. The 279 (valid) participants were native Chinese speakers, among which, 197 were second-year students in Zhejiang Universities, and 82 were overseas students studying for a Master' degree in a variety of U.K. universities.The results show that Chinese discourse exhibits some unique organizational patterns, however, these features were not preferred by native Chinese people. Instead, the results reveal that with the growing trend of globalizations Chinese discourse tends to show more similarities than differences with the English one at the organizational level. Such cross-cultural similarities in rhetoric may result in positive bi-transfer. Therefore, the findings of this study indicate that culturally unique features may not be prevalent, and that predominantly preferred patterns may be shared by different languages, and the dynamic language system may receive influence from other linguistic systems with which frequent contact has been made.
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