Academic Writing and Culture: A Corpus-based Study of Rhetorical Features of Korean EFL Learners' Academic Writings
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This paper aims to discover how cultural factors such as face and indirectness can affect rhetorical features of Korean L2 writers' academic essays and explore in what ways their sociopragmatic transfer from L1 to L2 occurs. It comprises two empirical studies. The corpus-based analysis focuses on identifying culture-related patterns in four different rhetorical functions by using two different corpora from non-native speakers at higher education level (NNS) and from English native speakers at UK universities (NS). The recall interviews shed light on the corpus data by reasoning behind their rhetorical choices and their transfer. All of the findings indicate that the Korean student samples showed pragmatic transfer from culturally preferred convention from L1 to L2 in several areas: they showed a preference for using rhetorical questions in introducing new ideas, if-clauses in examplifications, and point-of-view distancing devices in expressing personal opinions and views. However, such culture dependent transfer did not occur in the use of other indirectness markers indicating possibility and probability among epistemic devices. They even showed a higher level of directness by overusing certainty markers. This can be explained by their lack of awareness of appropriate level of indirectness across genres in English written discourse. The findings thus can contribute to giving some pedagogical implications for teaching alternative strategies to raise both culture and genre-specific awareness in the areas of second language pragmatics.
Abstract
This paper aims to discover how cultural factors such as face and indirectness can affect rhetorical features of Korean L2 writers' academic essays and explore in what ways their sociopragmatic transfer from L1 to L2 occurs. It comprises two empirical studies. The corpus-based analysis focuses on identifying culture-related patterns in four different rhetorical functions by using two different corpora from non-native speakers at higher education level (NNS) and from English native speakers at UK universities (NS). The recall interviews shed light on the corpus data by reasoning behind their rhetorical choices and their transfer. All of the findings indicate that the Korean student samples showed pragmatic transfer from culturally preferred convention from L1 to L2 in several areas: they showed a preference for using rhetorical questions in introducing new ideas, if-clauses in examplifications, and point-of-view distancing devices in expressing personal opinions and views. However, such culture dependent transfer did not occur in the use of other indirectness markers indicating possibility and probability among epistemic devices. They even showed a higher level of directness by overusing certainty markers. This can be explained by their lack of awareness of appropriate level of indirectness across genres in English written discourse. The findings thus can contribute to giving some pedagogical implications for teaching alternative strategies to raise both culture and genre-specific awareness in the areas of second language pragmatics.
참고문헌 (44)
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