Rhetorical Structures Of L2 Writing Of College Students With Different L1 Backgrounds: Hierarchy, Relation, And Function

Under the influence of globalization,communicating in English effectively plays an important role.Writing in a second or foreign language is more complex and comprehensive than other three language skills which are listening,speaking and reading.Thus,the teaching of English writing is a key but also a difficult point in English language teaching.Particularly,many English learners are lack of how to connect their ideas and expressions when writing in English.Their writings have such problems as unclear writing intentions,implicit main ideas and disordered or misordered paragraphs.The present study focuses on a comparative analysis of eight English writing texts written by college students from different first language backgrounds on the basis of Rhetorical Structure Theory.The purpose of the study is to find the similarities and differences of rhetorical structures in the English writings written by speakers of different native languages.It is expected to arouse attention to rhetorical structures among English learners and English writing teachers,and make implications for how to organize one's writing in the teaching of English writing.Contrastive Rhetoric(Kaplan,1966)states that the textual structures are influenced by the thinking patterns of their native languages.For instance,English writing patterns are linear,while the writing patterns of oriental languages,such as Chinese,are indirect.Generalizing the writing pattern reflects the implied thinking pattern specific to a certain culture.Problem-solution pattern,general-specific pattern and matching pattern are the three dominant thinking patterns in English writing which reflects the direct thinking pattern of English(Hoey,1983).Focusing on the macro structure helps learners form the logical reasoning in their EFL writings.Stringent logical reasoning enhances the effects of persuasion and justification on the readers,especially in L2 academic writing.Rhetorical Structure Theory,as a theoretical framework describing the textual structures,analyzes the textual integrity and connectedness,and further reveals the writers' intentions of writing.Rhetorical Structure Theory,going beyond the lexical and grammatical analysis,mainly focuses on the analysis of the overall textual structure.It includes three main components,namely hierarchy,relation and function(Xu & Webster,1999).According to Rhetorical Structure Theory,logical stringency in writing is realized by the rhetorical relations and the overall organization of the text.The present study addresses the following three questions:1.What are the rhetorical relations preferably used in the English texts written by speakers from different language backgrounds?2.What are the similarities and differences in terms of rhetorical relations used by native and non-native English speakers?3.What are the similarities and differences of the overall organization of the English writing texts written by native and non-native English speakers?The present study's data is collected from eight college students of four different L1 backgrounds.Rhetorical Structure Theory Tool(RST Tool)software is adopted as a research instrument to make contrastive analysis of the eight English writing samples written by these eight participants.After transcribing the texts,the entire text is segmented into minimal units for RST analysis.The tree-diagram as the overall rhetorical structure of the text,is generated after analyzing the rhetorical relations between units and paragraphs.The frequencies of each rhetorical relation occurring in the texts are calculated,and an overall analysis of the textual structure is conducted with the help of the tree-diagram.An RST tree-diagram is the figure generated from the RST Tool after the analysis,which shows the hierarchical structure of the text as stated."A top-level relation covers other relations of its lower level(Taboada & Mann,2006:428)." The writing samples are analyzed in two groups,namely,native English speakers and non-native English speakers,and contrast and comparison of the findings are made according to the two categories.Meanwhile,samples are analyzed according to the four language backgrounds,in order to conduct micro analysis of the findings.The analysis of the writing samples leads to the main findings.Firstly,among all the writing samples regardless of the writers' L1 backgrounds,the most frequently occurred rhetorical relation is Elaboration.Besides,Contrast,Evaluation,Antithesis,Background and Summary are also the preferably used rhetorical relations among the samples.No distinct difference is found in terms of the frequencies of rhetorical relations between native and non-native English speakers.Secondly,there is no clear distinction of overall structures of the English writing texts between native and non-native English speakers.Participants incline to construct their writings in a deductive pattern,placing the thesis statement in the opening paragraphs.The general-specific pattern as one of the typical English writing pattern is generally applied by all the participants regardless of their native language backgrounds.Their writing samples do not show obvious thinking pattern of their native languages.For instance,the writing samples written by native speakers of Chinese show the direct pattern,rather than the spiral pattern which is specific to oriental languages according to previous contrastive rhetoric study.Implications of the present study can be made for the instruction of L2 writing and cross-cultural communication.On one hand,the application of rhetorical structure analysis of L2 learners' writings enhances the teaching of L2 writing.By making contrast and comparison of textual patterns to find out the features and rules of paragraphing and the theme of the texts from a macro perspective,learners would understand the organization of paragraphs and the overall structure of the texts,and in turn learn the logical relations between sentences and paragraphs from the hierarchical structures.Moreover,from the contrastive analysis,learners would master the essence of regular English writing pattern and in turn avoid the distractions from the thinking pattern and discourse pattern of their native language.Furthermore,learners would pay attention to the rhetorical relations among individual sentences and among paragraphs,and the rhetorical relations between paragraphs and the entire text.On the other,from the perspective of cross-cultural communication,the contrastive analysis of rhetorical structures helps learners experience cultures which are different from their own,and realize the understanding of cultural gap between the two cultures,which in turn arouse the awareness of cross-cultural communication.The present study is a contrastive analysis on rhetorical structures involving limited amounts of participants and writing samples,and limitations of the present study are inevitable.Hopefully,despite the existing limitations,the findings of this study can make certain implications for the future related research.Future contrastive analysis on rhetorical structures of L2 writings should not only include rhetorical relations and overall organization of the texts,but also should take the expected effects of the reader and main writing purpose into consideration.