Writing Personal Statements With Chinese Characteristics

This study investigates the organizational pattern and reasoning strategy used in Chinese EFL students' argumentative writing. Conceptualized personal statement as an argumentative discourse, we use the schematic structure of genre analysis proposed by Bhatia (1993) and Swales (1990) to measure the organizational and strategic differences between the PS written by Chinese EFL students and English native speakers, which is theoretically underpinned by contrastive rhetoric (CR). A theoretical framework of Chinese socio-psychology in communication adopted in this study views the PS written by Chinese EFL learners as an expression of Chinese communicative characteristics (Bond 1991;Hall 1976;Hofstede 1980).Three parts of data are collected in this study, including PS written by 9 Chinese senior students majoring in English in the Faculty of English Language and Culture (FELC) in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS);9 PS written by English native speakers selected from the sample PS provided by western guidebook of PS writing;western writing principles in textbooks of writing and feedbacks given by the admissions officers of western universities;and rationales beneath the Chinese style of PS writing collected from teachers, MA students and PhD students in FELC by interviewing and group discussion.We reconfirm the culture-specific writing pattern raised in CR with the findings of genre analysis that Chinese EFL students tend to use specific-to-general pattern and emotional appeal in PS writing which is strikingly different from the western preference of general-to-specific sequence and logical appeal. However, according to the western writing principles and the admissions officers' feedbacks, this Chinese writing style is not desirable in the eyes ofwestern readers on the textual level. Furthering our analysis on the socio-psychological perspective, we find out the Chinese style of writing is affected by high-context, high-power-distance and affective communicative function in Chinese communication. Under the cultural influence which emphasizes interpersonal harmony and face saving, Chinese EFL students seem to naturally take the indirect and implicit way of communication into their PS writing.By enquiring the reasons why Chinese EFL learners write PS with Chinese style on a socio-psychological level, we hope to shed light on exploring some second language writing problems beyond a pure textual analysis.