| The present study investigates Chinese EFL students’rhetorical features in their English expository writing, and has testified the effectiveness of explicit instruction in Chinese EFL students’ acquisition of rhetoric in terms of textual and paragraphic organization. The term "rhetoric" refers here specifically to the rhetorical patterns of both the overall text and the paragraph in the text. To be exact, the rhetorical patterns in this study are delimited as the placement of the thesis statement of a text and that of the topic sentence of each paragraph in the text.60 first-year English majors from Nanjing University of Finance and Economics and 60 second-year English majors from Xi’an International Studies University constituted the data source.60 students from two classes in Nanjing University of Finance and Economics were used as the experimental group (i.e. the explicit group), to receive the teaching experiment of explicit instruction; the other 60 students from two classes in Xi’an International Studies University were intended as the control group, which received non-explicit instruction. The experiment was conducted in a period of eight weeks, two 45-minute sessions each week for each class. A pre-test and a post-test were conducted in the first and the last week of the experiment respectively, between which there were the six weeks of the explicit instruction for the experimental group and the non-explicit instruction for the control group respectively.Pearson Chi-Square Test or x2 Test was conducted via SPSS 19.0 to analyze the data collected in the pre-test and the post-test. The tests in the thesis included four groups of comparisons:the horizontal comparisons between the experimental group and the control group in the pre-test and in the post-test; the vertical comparisons between the pre-test and the post-test in the experimental group and in the control group.The test results show no significant difference but great similarities between the two groups in the pre-test. The rhetorical features of Chinese EFL students’ expository writing were thus obtained from the two groups in the pre-test. It is obvious that Chinese EFL students tend to place their thesis statement and topic sentence in either the medial or the final part of a text or a paragraph, which demonstrates great indirectness and an inductive rhetorical pattern in paragraph and passage writing.Besides, the results of Pearson Chi-Square Tests have revealed significant differences between the pre-test and the post-test in the experimental group, and between the experimental group and the control group in the post-test while a great similarity between the pre-test and the post-test in the control group. The three groups of results have attested the positive effect of explicit instruction on Chinese EFL students’learning of rhetoric. To be specific, a noticeable change has taken place in the placement of the thesis statement and the topic sentence:the thesis statement and the topic sentence were placed much earlier in a whole text or in a single paragraph, which led to a more frequent use of deductive rhetorical pattern and an increase in directness.This study manifests some pedagogical implications for teaching and learning EFL writing, and facilitating cross-cultural communication. To be specific, the instructors should place more emphasis on rhetoric when teaching English writing, enhance students’ rhetorical awareness and guide them into meeting the rhetorical expectations of native English speakers through systematic and well-organized explicit instruction (E1). As for Chinese EFL learners, they should realize the important role that rhetoric plays in English writing, comply with the shared norms of the English language, try to meet the native English audience’s rhetorical expectations in terms of the target culture and thus develop their writing skills for cross-cultural contexts. Besides, in textbook compilation, rhetoric also deserves more emphasis. |
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