An Exploratory Study Of English Argumentative Writing By Chinese College Students

The paper presents an exploratory study of English argumentativewriting by Chinese students with its focus on the rhetorical features. Areview of the literature on EFL/ESL writing in contrastive rhetoricreveals a gap in this field. Studies in contrastive rhetoric in the past havetended to be centered on linguistic phenomena or textual features such ascoherence, cohesion, and discourse organization. Limited research efforthas been devoted to treat the rhetorical features in student argumentativewriting both at home and abroad. What's more, the unsatisfactory statusquo of EFL writing in our China also suggests the urgent need for furtherresearch.The present study delves into the three analyses most pertinent to thecontent of argumentative writing—the superstructure of argument, aToulmin analysis of informal reasoning, and the persuasive appeals inChinese students' English argumentative writing by adopting adescriptive research method. Data collected from 60 non-English majorsophomore students in Beijing International Studies University throughtext analysis have shown that English argumentative writing is indeed ademanding genre in English learning at school, but not well developedamong non-English major students. Incomplete structure, shallow reasoning and lack of convincing strength are typical problems in studentEnglish argumentative writing. To be specific, the rare use of theevaluation component gives rise to the incomplete superstructure ofargument. For the Toulmin analysis of informal reasoning, the majorclaim as well as subclaims is often poorly developed with little relianceon such data as personal experience and authority. Besides, identificationis rarely established between the writer and the audience because of thefrequent absence of sound warrants. Lack of specific and authoritativedata and the absence of sound warrants mainly merit shallow reasoning instudent argumentative writing. On the persuasive appeals analysis, eventhough most students place some emphases on the rational appeal, thecredibility and affective appeals are often devalued, which consequentlydecreases the convincing strength in student argumentative writing. Apartfrom this, lack of specific and authoritative data and frequent absence ofsound warrants often lead to the lack of convincing strength to a greatextent.Student poor performance indicates that the above rhetorical featuresmost pertaining to English argumentative writing have been challengingfor Chinese non-English major students. In order to improve studentEnglish argumentative writing, the paper probes into the possible reasonsfor the results in the present research mainly from a combination ofvarious causes such as cross—cultural variations, the deficiency in student cognitive development as well as the faults in the teaching ofEnglish writing and then advances some implications for the teaching andlearning of English writing as well as suggestions for further studies. Inaddition, the findings of the study are also expected to enrich contrastiverhetoric.