Exploring the rhetorical and communicative impacts of native culture on the argumentative writing of Algerian master students of EFL

Abstract

Argumentative writing, a fundamental part of academic writing, is reported to pose problems for learners of English as a foreign language. The present study examines the factors engendering difficulties in writing an argumentative essay by a group of Arabic-speaking Master students of English in Algeria. This case study seeks to accomplish the following objectives: To explore the effect of the rhetorical patterns and communication styles of the learners’ native language and culture on their argumentative essay writing, to explore the teaching practices of argumentative essay writing in the Algerian university context, and to develop innovative instructional ways of argumentative essay writing based on understanding the nature of learners’ problems. To achieve these goals, a blend of quantitative/qualitative methods was employed. A writing test was used to elicit 104 argumentative essays from 52 Master students out of 199 registered for the academic year 2012_2013 at the Department of English at Kasdi Merbah University, Ouargla, Algeria. The participants were chosen via convenience sampling. An interview was administered to 4 teachers of writing out of 10 at the same department chosen via purposive sampling. Its aim is to explore the instruction pursued when teaching the specified genre. The analysis of the data involved firstly a quantitative treatment of the learners’ texts. The purpose of this analysis is to detect the impacts of the rhetorical patterns and communication styles of the learners’ native culture on their argumentative essays in English. The rhetorical patterns covered are excessive coordination, through-argumentation and non-deductive text development, and the communication style under investigation is indirectness. Further, qualitative techniques, based on the procedure of coding, were employed in the analysis of the teachers’ interview responses. The results demonstrate that the learners’ argumentative texts contain rhetorical and communicative features that can be attributed to the effect of their native culture, but the latter is not the sole factor leading the student writers to deviate from the discourse norms governing the construction of the genre under focus. In fact, learners’ low linguistic proficiency and the received instruction contribute equally to the problem. On the basis of the findings, a course for the teaching of argumentative essay writing to Arabic-speaking university students of English as a foreign language has been designed based on the genre-process approach. Through this study, the present researcher has attempted to aid the learners of English to write argumentative texts which respond to the standards of academic writing and to contribute to the development of current research in the field.