Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Cross-cultural Perspectives on Writing 269
textual structures. Moreover, rhetorical genre studies (e.g. Coe, 2002;
Miller, 1984), which emphasize genre as social action rather than as a mere
system of structures, shift our attention from static and neutral textual
forms to a view of writing as social action through which writers conform,
appropriate or bend textual expectations to express their meaning. As
such, social, political and ideological contexts infl uence genre to be always
(re)constructed and they make textual structures fl uid and generative (see
more discussion later). In this perspective, analyzing a text without taking
into consideration the complexity and dynamics of genre produces
limited insight.
Other studies conduct more careful comparisons of published texts
within the same genre in two languages. They reveal some similarities as
well as differences in cross-cultural rhetorical structures. For example,
Taylor and Chen (1991) compared Chinese and English academic papers
published in China in related fi elds of science to English papers in the same
fi elds published in English-speaking countries; they found that the papers’
introductions share similar rhetorical moves across cultures, although the
Chinese-based papers tended to summarize the literature less frequently
than did English papers, which the authors attributed to a reluctance to
expose others’ work as a source of shortcoming. Investigating the method
of citation in Chinese and English academic papers, Bloch and Chi (1995)
compared English articles published in Science magazine with Chinese
articles published in equivalent journals. They found that Chinese authors
use citations with varied functions, including critical ones, as English
authors do, although they use them less frequently than English authors.
Partly because of the pedagogical focus and availability of data, other
studies have examined students’ ESL essays and made claims about culturally
specifi c rhetorical structures and L1–L2 rhetorical transfer by
implication (Kaplan, 1966, 1967, 1972; Ostler, 1987, 1990; Söter, 1988). For
example, Kaplan (1966) supported cultural differences in thought patterns
by comparing excerpts of L2 essays written by ESL students from different
L1 backgrounds with a prototypical English essay. The identifi cation of
culturally specifi c rhetorical organizations leads to a claim for L1–L2 transfer
of rhetoric. The underlying assumption is that ESL essays written by
students from different L1 backgrounds exhibit unique group features
because the students use L1 rhetoric in their L2 writing. However, this
assumption is problematic; without knowledge about students’ writing in
their L1, L1–L2 transfer can only be speculated on. In addition, multiple
factors besides L1 rhetorical features affect L2 writing process and products.
These factors include L2 profi ciency (lexical, syntactic and semantic
competencies), L1 writing expertise (e.g. Cumming, 1989; Kubota, 1998a;
Sasaki & Hirose, 1996), developmental issues including instructional focus
(e.g. instructional tendency to focus on the sentence level rather than text
organization in L2 classrooms – see Mohan & Lo, 1985), and individual