A contrastive rhetoric of students’ arabic and english compositions

Abstract

Students’ first language has always a role to play in second language acquisition. In writing, the first language influence is manifested at different levels beginning with vocabulary, grammar and mechanics and ending up with discourse organization and rhetorical devices. The present research work aims to investigate the issue of rhetorical transfer as reflected in the writing of second-year students at the Department of Letters and English, University of Constantine 1. It carries out a contrastive rhetoric analysis of students’ Arabic and English expository compositions for the sake of identifying their stylistic deviations and enhancing their academic writing in the target language. Therefore, it is hypothesized that differences between Arabic and English have a negative impact on students’ rhetorical writing in English and that awareness-raising about discourse differences will enhance students’ writing quality. Three main research tools have been used to test out the hypotheses: a students’ questionnaire, a comparative analysis of Arabic and English compositions, and a quasi-experimental research design. The results corroborate the research hypotheses in a sense that rhetorical differences between the first language and the target language lead to difficulties and that students’ lack of awareness about these differences results in first language negative transfer and target language rhetorical deviation at the levels of connectivity, repetition, collectiveness and transculturality. As long as the experimental group participants recorded a significant statistical progress as measured through the student t-test, it could be concluded that Arabic exerts an apparent negative influence on shaping students’ thoughts and that awarenessraising about contrastive rhetoric represents an effective means to boost up their writing performance. Eventually, since this conundrum usually yields some communication breakdowns, teachers should introduce their students to different aspects of rhetoric in order to improve their general intercultural communicative competence.