An Analysis Of Evidence Use In Argumentative Essays By Non-English Major Graduate Students

The argumentative essay is a dominant genre practiced in college academic writing in the EFL context in China.Previous studies on argumentative writing have mainly focused on language expression and structural organization,especially in L1 contexts.However,little research has been conducted on the content and argument elements in L2 argumentative writing.Meanwhile,few studies has concentrated on graduate students’ writing.Therefore,this study investigates the relationship between the use of Toulmin elements,namely,claim,data,counterargument claim,counterargument data,rebuttal claim and rebuttal data,and the overall quality of argumentative essays written by graduate students.Furthermore,it examines different types of evidence and their effectiveness in argumentative writing.In this study,the researcher identified the six Toulmin elements in argumentative essays written by 125 non-English major graduate students from a key university,graded the papers based on a holistic scoring rubric,and then analyzed the argument elements in their essays.Moreover,different types of evidence were classified and analyzed in their writing to investigate the features of evidence used by students from different writing levels.After investigating the features of students’ use of the Toulmin elements and different types of evidence,the following conclusions can be drawn: most students’ argumentative essays included the fundamental elements of Toulmin argument model,namely,claim and data,but very few presented other secondary elements such as counterargument claim and counterargument data.In particular,the use of claim and data was moderately correlated with the overall quality of the essays.Besides,with regard to the use of evidence,the top three frequently used types of evidence were reasoning & logic,examples,known facts & shared beliefs.Essays of the high-score group exhibited more variable use of evidence and more elaborate argumentation,thus turning out to be more substantial and persuasive.Moreover,some problems exist in students’ uses of evidence,which violate the criteria of effective evidence by Packer and Timpane(1997),namely,relevance,representativeness,accuracy,detail and adequacy.Those problems were more evident in low-score essays,which turned out to be improper in evidence use and ineffective in persuasion.The findings provide both theoretical and pedagogical implications.Theoretically,this study probes into evidence use in graduate students’ argumentative writing,which has been seldom investigated in previous studies,thus providing a relatively new subject in the research field of L2 argumentative writing.Practically,for EFL teaching,more emphasis can be laid on the quality of evidence,especially on the importance of distinguishing facts from opinions which helps to promote students’ critical thinking.As for EFL learners,they should raise the awareness of making arguments and providing sound supports by using more varied and effective evidence.