Abstracts

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Rhetorical education through writing instruction across cultures: A comparative analysis of select online instructional materials on argumentative writing (pp. 1-18)

LU LIU
Purdue University, USA

Recent studies on Chinese–English contrastive rhetoric have argued that there is actually little to contrast and the traditional qi (beginning), cheng (transition), zhuan (turning), he (synthesis) structure has little influence on contemporary Chinese writing. A comparative analysis of select online instructional materials on argumentative writing for American and Mainland Chinese school writers reveals that although the two groups agree on the purpose, tripartite structure, and the use of formal logic, they differ in the discussion of some fundamentals for argumentative writing. Specifically, the American group considers anticipating the opposition a must while the Chinese group demonstrates epistemological and dialogical emphases and highlights the need to use analogies. The importance of analogies and epistemological and dialogical emphases can be traced to ancient Chinese rhetorical theories. This paper argues that the findings may help us to understand the assumptions and beliefs that underlie rhetorical conventions or textual features. Further comparative research on Mainland Chinese and American pedagogical materials on argumentative writing is suggested.

Linguistic correlates of second language literacy development: Evidence from middle-grade learner essays (pp. 19-45)

DUDLEY W. REYNOLDS
University of Houston, USA

This paper compares the development of linguistic fluency in the writing of 5th–8th grade, U.S. students enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL, n = 189) and regular language arts (RLA, n = 546) classes. Linguistic fluency is defined as the use of linguistic structures appropriate to rhetorical and social purposes and is measured using five sets of features shown by Reppen (1994, 2001) [Reppen, R. (1994). Variation in elementary student language: A multi-dimensional perspective. Doctoral dissertation, Northern Arizona University.] [Reppen, R. (2001). Register variation in student and adult speech and writing. In S. Conrad & D. Biber (Eds.), Variation in English: Multi-dimensional studies (pp. 187–199). Harlow, UK: Longman.] to vary in relation to age and topic differences in a large corpus of texts produced by and for 5th grade English L1 writers. The same broad variational patterns found by Reppen in her corpus are shown to exist in the writing of the ESL and RLA students; however, more careful analysis of the individual features associated with each set indicates that the RLA students hold stronger associations between the features and the rhetorical and social functions identified for the set as a whole. It is suggested that the ESL students’ lack of fluency results from both limitations in grammatical competency and a lack of practice in writing for varying purposes and audiences.

Editing contributed scholarly articles from a language management perspective (pp. 47-62)

ROBERT B. KAPLAN
University of Southern California, USA
RICHARD B. BALDAUF, Jr.
The University of Queensland, Australia

Taking language management as its initial perspective, this paper examines some of the sorts of linguistic problems that second language writers of English face when contributing to scholarly journals and some of the issues that editors face when working with authors on those problems. Language Management Theory (hereafter LMT) is briefly explained. Drawing on a substantial corpus (slightly less than 500,000 words), illustrations of various categories of problem types are provided. One finding shows that it is difficult, in practice, to differentiate between simple language management issues and organized language management issues, because what may appear to be simple management issues may in fact have extended implications. Some problem types are not unique to non-native speakers, but appear with different frequency and distribution in non-native speaker texts as compared with native-speaker texts. Some ethical questions implicit in editing non-native speaker texts are explored.