Jan 30 Hirose (2003)

Despite the initial stance of contrastive rhetoric, this paper actually sheds more light upon the notion of intercultural rhetoric in L2 writing. According to contrastive rhetoric, the organizational patterns of argumentative writing are unique to L1 and L2, but a majority of participants in this study employed deductive type organizational patterns in both Japanese (as their L1) and English (as their L2). Additionally, the validity of the so-called “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” was also challenged. Instead of being determined by different language cultures, the perceptions of participants’ persuasive writing could be partly explained by their previous L1 writing backgrounds, L2 writing instructions, and different reader expectations in both languages. These are what the advocators of contextualized intercultural rhetoric call for in analyzing L2 writing texts. Last but not least, the lack of deductive argumentative writing could be due to developmental problems rather than transfer matters in L1 and L2, which was reflected on the wide ranges of organizational scores in these two languages.

Nevertheless, the results of this study hinted at some very interesting issues that need further exploration. To begin with, L2 writing instruction and experience may be transferable to L1 writing, especially in the same genre such as argumentative writing in this study, where the instructions of L1 expository and persuasive writing were almost non-existent. Moreover, the mastery over L1 writing does not necessarily lead to proficient L2 writing, and vice versa. This could be owing to the validity and the reliability of rating in this study, but more research needs to be carried out to address the discrepancy between the perception of good writing strategies and its practical application, which has been a long-standing issue in the field of second language acquisition. Finally, the standard deviation of L1 writing scores was larger than that of L2 in the study. This can remind us of another enduring effect, that is, acquisition versus learning, on language performance.

When it comes to the weaknesses of this study, the scaling of writing scores should be the first and foremost. Although using the same scale might have inflated the L1-L2 correlations, differential rating criteria plus different raters in L1 and L2 writing made the scores almost non-comparable. Genre concern is another one. It was more likely for participants to adopt a deductive organizational pattern in writing opinion letters. The conventions of good writing strategies and personal styles in specific genres should also be controlled for in the future research. Perhaps researchers can diminish the interference of those confounding factors by varying the genres within certain ranges, such as argumentative writing plus expository essays, or the topics, for instance, opinion letters in the industrial workplace plus academic grant application.