A Contrastive Rhetorical Analysis of L1-L2 Organizational Patterns In Argumentative Writing of Iranian Students

This study seeks to discover whether Iranian students use similar rhetorical structures in their Farsi and English argumentative essays. To this end, 40 Iranian senior BA students majoring in English at Azad university of Shahre-Kurd, Iran were selected. They were asked to write an argumentative essay in L1 first and then with an interval of one month write another one on the same topic in L2. Also, another group of 40 senior students majoring in Persian Language was selected and asked to write an argumentative essay on the same topic. Their writings were considered as a criterion to specify any possible transfer from Farsi to English. The essays written by both groups were analyzed for their overall organizational pattern based on two criteria of location of main idea and macro-level rhetorical structures. The results revealed that Iranian EFL students used more similar patterns in their Farsi and English argumentative essays by putting main idea in initial position and using deductive, especially explanation macro-level rhetorical structure. Also, argumentative essays written by EFL students were more similar in case of, again, initial use of main idea and deductive macro-level rhetorical structure. The result showed that EFL students apparently used their learned knowledge of stating main idea initially and using deductive macro-level rhetorical structure, inother words, they have over-generalized the rules of composing argumentative text.

کلیدواژه ها:

contrastive rhetorical ، argumentative compositions ، organizational patterns