Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

Rhetorical Use

"NNS Students' Arguments in English: Observations in Formal and INformal Contexts" by Antonia Chandrasegaran (2008)

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In this 2008 article based on research in Singapore, Antonia Chandrasegaran (2008) was interested in comparing the discursive strategies appearing in "friendly arguments" in online social forums with strategies of argument in formal academic texts. Data included messages posted online by three male secondary school students plus a female master's student's academic essay. All student participants came from similar educational backgrounds in English-medium schools. In both contexts, Chandrasegaran noted that writers were likely to introduce and deploy familiarizing "topic knowledge" for a range of expository purposes. One of her research questions specifically targeted the "rhetorical use" of topic knowledge, which she defined as a writer's application of information to "explaining, maintaining focal attention on, or supporting [her/his] position on the issue of discussion or argument" (p. 245). Sharpening this implicit definition of rhetoric, Chandrasegaran went on to explain that she excluded topic knowledge passages from the category "rhetorical use" where those passages did not show either an "explicitly indicated purpose with reference to the writer's overall intention in the argument, or an implied purpose and relevance which a reader can retrieve from context" (p. 245).

As a general principle here, rhetoric appears to name a writer's explicit or implicit purposeful connections; however, Chandrasegaran's analysis and conclusions point to her preference for overt signaling. In online postings about the value of military aircraft, she found students' inclusion of topic knowledge "easily discernable" through conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs ("but," "moreover," etc.) that point to a goal of providing counterarguments to an opposing view. She also noted in the online posting the presence of a cohesive chain that indexes the issue of the cost of the aircraft—a controversy among the students participating in the forum—while it simultaneously rebuts claims. Specifically, one student employed lexical repetition to repeat the term "cost" in successive sentences (p. 247). In contrast, in the example of master's-level academic writing she analyzed, the student writer cohesively discussed scholarly literature relevant to the topic of schema in reading comprehension but delayed the connection of that literature to her own explicit claim. Only at the end of her literature review did the student writer connect relevant scholarship to her own emerging argument: the student wrote, "this [schema knowledge] thus allows students to perform evaluative acts," such as assessing the quality of source material—a focus of the master's student's research (quoted in p. 249). Chandrasegaran argued that the forum postings she analyzed displayed "overt rhetorical deployment of topic knowledge for stance support"—a skill that did not seem to her to transfer automatically to even advanced academic writing tasks given the graduate student's "rather understated and indirect signalling" (pp. 249–250). Ultimately, Chandrasegaran concluded that the differences between the written arguments she analyzed may point to a difference between personally motivated claims (in the informal setting) and claims that treat academic literature as unquestionable facts rather than as rhetorical information to be manipulated.