Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

270 Part 4: Language and Literacy
writers’ agency as refl ected in their rhetorical intentions and preferences.
L2 writing clearly involves multiple factors, of which L1–L2 transfer might
only marginally impact L2 writing.
This problem is partly overcome by examining both L1 and L2 essays
written by the same students. Some studies have confi rmed transfer of
prototypical L1 rhetorical features to ESL texts (e.g. Indrasuta, 1988;
Kobayashi, 1984; Oi, 1984; Wu & Rubin, 2000), although Kobayashi (1984)
and Oi (1984) examined L1 Japanese and L2 English essays written by different
groups of Japanese students. More recently, Wu and Rubin (2000)
compared L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English) essays written by the same
Taiwanese college students with L1 (English) essays on the same topics
written by American college students. They identifi ed a relative degree of
inductiveness and collective, rather than individualist, virtues among
Taiwanese students’ L1 essays as opposed to a prevalence of deductiveness
with personal anecdotes among American students. However, the
degree of directness was not statistically signifi cant between L2 English
and L1 English essays and the inductiveness found in L1 Chinese essays
was in fact relative to L1 English essays (i.e. 47.5% of the L1 Chinese essays
were wholly deductive as opposed to 90% in L1 English). In terms of
L1–L2 transfer, Wu and Rubin (2000) found no difference in terms of thesis
statement placement between L1 and L2 essays, thus confi rming transfer.
Yet, they did not identify transfer of certain aspects of rhetorical features,
such as the use of fi rst person singular and plural pronouns (the frequencies
of these pronouns were higher in L2 essays).
Although these studies are carefully designed and conducted, from a
perspective that views writing as an individual action for expressing the
writer’s self (Clark & Ivanič, 1997), the L1–L2 between-group comparison or
comparing L1 and L2 texts in the aggregate may not reveal actual transfer
at the individual level. A within-subject design would shed more light on
whether individual writers actually use the same rhetorical patterns in L1
and L2 and what kind of individual perceptions and intentions infl uence
the rhetorical decision (Hirose, 2003; Kubota, 1998a). These critiques
assume that features of L2 writing are related to multiple factors and
cannot be reduced solely to cultural infl uence.
As contrastive rhetoric is reconfi gured and developed into intercultural
rhetoric (Connor, 2004, 2008), the focus broadens from academic writing to
journalistic writing, grant proposals, business writing, book reviews and
so on. Choosing a specifi c genre as an inquiry focus reduces the problem
of ignoring the genre factor in cross-linguistic text comparisons. Other
more recent studies have examined the effects of instruction on students’
L1 and/or L2 essay structures (Kobayashi & Rinnert, 2007; Petrić, 2005).
Still other studies have investigated readers’ evaluation of the quality of
texts or their reading recall of texts with the assumption that expertise in