Analysis On The Rhetorical Features And Their Possible Factors Of Chinese ESL Students' Course Papers

This thesis aims to analyze the rhetorical features of the Chinese ESL students'English course papers (especially the expository writing) and the factors that mayinfluence ESL students' choices of rhetorical strategies. The term "rhetorical features"refers to the strategies in achieving global management of the sequence of the ideas orarguments.The study, first of all, reviews Robert Kaplan's Contrastive Rhetoric Hypothesis(CRH), which claims that each language has culturally specific rhetorical conventions,and the rhetorical conventions of students' first language interfere with their secondlanguage writing;and then a quantitative research is conducted, based on 60 Englishcourse papers of 30 English major sophomores before and after a special trainingperiod. The analysis of 30 pre-training papers indicates that in Chinese ESL students'English writing (1) both the inductive and deductive rhetorical patterns exist with theinductive pattern as the majority;(2) "chi-cheng-juan-he" pattern is apparent,especially in the four-paragraph essays;(3) the viewpoints are approached in anindirect way and most thesis statements are incomplete and inefficient;(4) informalspoken styles appear frequently;and (5) the conclusion part is filled with emotionalappeals rather than summaries. All these features prove that ESL students' rhetoricalstrategies are impacted by the writing conventions of their first language and theconventions developed in their first language context.However, by comparing the pre-training and post-training papers, it is found thatthe latter ones showed great likeness with the native speakers' writing in terms ofrhetorical features. This finding reflects that first language transfer is not the solefactor influencing the choice of rhetorical strategies. In order to uncover other factors,follow-up questionnaires and interviews to English writing instructors are conducted.Analysis of those questionnaires and interviews shows that formal (English writing)classroom instructions and ESL students' English competence are another two factorsinfluencing their rhetorical choices in English writing.The findings of this study reveal that rhetorical features can be acquired and boththe inductive and deductive rhetorical patterns exist in Chinese and English writings,which reflect CRH's limitation in explaining ESL students' rhetorical choices insecond language writing. Besides, as an attempt to study second language writing, it reveals thedeficiencies of today's English writing education and suggests that such knowledge ascontrastive rhetoric and English rhetorical patterns should be added in the classroominstructions for the beginning ESL students.