The influence of culture on English as a foreign language students’ writing.

Abstract

The present study aims to explore the culture-related writing problems of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in the Teacher Training School of Constantine (TTSC). Two hypotheses have been put forward: 1) The writing of advanced EFL learners at the TTSC exhibits problems to realize macro-rhetorical elements of thesis statement, topic sentence, topic and paragraph unity and development according to the English writing conventions and realize them according to the first language (L1) patterns and 2) The persistence of those culture-related writing problems until an advanced level may be related to a set of cultural and educational factors other than L1 particular rhetorical patterns influence such as writing teachers‘ perceptions of the role of culture in foreign language (FL) writing development and the amount of writing experience in the training framework. To verify those hypotheses, a sequenced mixed methods design was adopted. First, a contrastive rhetoric analysis consisting of a comparison of the products of EFL and Arabic language students on a similar task written respectively in English and Arabic was undertaken to check whether Arabic language culturally-rooted rhetorical patterns can be found in essays written by Algerian advanced EFL students. Second, an interview was conducted with three Written Expression teachers in the Department of English with the aim of exploring their perceptions of the role of culture in the FL writing class. Then, a semi-structured interview with a group of content-subject teachers in the Department of English was carried together with a content analysis of exam questions with the aim to find out the place of writing in the current educational culture of EFL teachers. The results of the contrastive rhetoric analysis revealed that the paragraph and essay writing of many EFL students was still far below the conventional paragraph and essay writing in English and exhibit many rhetorical features of Arabic language writing. The results uncovered also some factors of the educational (teaching/learning) culture that could explain the persistence of L1 culture influence on EFL students‘ macro-rhetorical skills at the paragraph and essay level. In the light of these results, some suggestions are made to revise the overall teachers training framework, including the writing curriculum, by addressing the concept of culture from three different perspectives: FL, L1 and the educational (teaching/learning) perspectives.