"Voice" In The Argumentative Writing: A Comparative Study Between Chinese College Students And English Native Writers

The paper is a corpus-based comparative verification and theoretical explanation, aiming to explore the Voice varieties in argumentative writings between Chinese college students and English native writers.Traditional ESL writing research has been focused on subjects like vocabulary and grammar, while the interests in the cultural level have emerged since 1980s, especially the thorough research and discussion of the notion of voice in L1 and L2 writing pedagogy. Matsuda (2001) defines voice in the L2 writing community as the amalgamative effect of the use of discursive and non-discursive features that language users choose, deliberately or otherwise, from socially available, yet ever changing repertoires. Ivanic (1994; 1995; 1998) argues that the lexical, syntactic, semantic and organizational aspects of writing construct identity just as much as the phonetic and prosodic aspects of speech do, and thus writing always conveys a"voice"representing the self of the writer (Ivanic & Camps, 2001).It is noticed that in the English writing studies, culturally based issues are currently dominating discussions about voice. Atkinson (2001) claims that the version of voice is socially and culturally situated and constructed. Because individualism is a widely spread and established ideology in western countries, voice, as an important component of self-construal, has been inevitably affected by individualism, so the writing pedagogy in Western countries, assumes that individuality is the fundamental fact of our human being, and therefore the fundamental purpose of writing instruction should be to allow for the full expression and further development of that individuality (e.g., Berlin, 1988; Bowden, 1995; Li, 1996).Chinese culture, entitled as interdependent culture (Markus & Kitayama, 1991), construes the self as sociocentric, collective, and relational. In the writing conventions social morality is encouraged, and the style tends to be implied. The central point is conveyed cautiously, and canonical expressions are quoted frequently. By those means the voice expression and transmission might diverge in many aspects.Matsuda (2001) points out that if the conceptualization of voice privileges a"Western"or a romantic or individualistic notion of voice, students from other cultures may not share such a background in classroom situations. According to the dissimilarities of self-construal in two cultures, the present study puts forward a hypothesis that cultural factors influences the voice in the written discourse, or voice has a cultural attribute. Culture may construal its own unique voice types in the written discourse, so the Chinese student are likely to perform a negative transfer from their native culture if they do not fully understand the verified representation of two cultures. The present paper sets forth four linguistic features of voice realization: assertiveness, authoritativeness, the quotation of canonical expressions and directness.A small corpus of argumentative writings from both cultures is constructed and the four variables are searched and examined respectively. The statistical results prove the above hypothesis that there are many differences in the use of voice devices between the Chinese students and English native writers. In addition, the language proficiency, which the students are holding, affects the quality of voice not much. The divergence in cultures has a holistic influence in the self-construal in the discourse, and the voice is a cultural phenomenon by nature. The investigation highlights the writing convention and genre awareness in culture that teachers should concern seriously.The paper is divided into five parts. The first Chapter introduces the concept of voice and its research background, and then points the relevant deficiencies, so two main research questions are raised consequently. Chapter Two reviews the literature on voice, culture and self-construal, which set up a theoretical framework for the present study, and the cultural theory held by Markus and Kitayama (1991) is explained in details. Chapter Three constructs a small corpus of 60 English argumentative writings, including 30 Chinese students'compositions and 30 English native writers'essays. Two contrasting groups are designed, and the four linguistic features are examined in the data process, and significance analysis is processed with the help of relevant tools. Chapter Four details the explanations of each variable functionally and culturally. Chapter Five concludes the research and points the implications in the writing pedagogy, and also the further expectations are shown in the end.