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- Title
Linguistic, Ideological, and Cultural Issues in Chinese and English Argumentative Writings.
- Authors
Zhang, Jie
- Abstract
Social and cultural differences underlying people's ideology exist not only in daily oral communications but also in formal written texts. This study focuses on the use of support and the presentation of personal voice in Chinese and English argumentative writings respectively to investigate the influence of Chinese collective culture and English individualistic culture upon their writing. Contrastive textual analysis was conducted on a sample of Chinese argumentative essays and English argumentative essays. Analysis of the use of support shows that Chinese writers extensively provide examples and direct quotes with less effort to elaborate on them, whereas English writers use fewer examples but elaborate them in details. Chinese writers frequently use direct citations, whereas no direct citation was found in English essays. The analysis of first person pronoun use reveals that the use of first person singulars is more frequent among English writers. English writers use "I" to put forward their arguments, while Chinese writers use "I" to make a modest suggestion. The use of first person plurals displays an opposite tendency. Chinese writers use much more first person plurals than the English writers. The findings suggest a need for incorporating social conventions and cultural thinking in ESL/EFL writing instruction to Chinese learners.
- Subjects
SOCIOCULTURAL factors; IDEOLOGY &; society; CHINESE essays; ENGLISH essays; COLLECTIVE representation; METHODOLOGICAL individualism; CONTENT analysis
- Publication
Journal of Language Teaching & Research, 2011, Vol 2, Issue 1, p73
- ISSN
1798-4769
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.4304/jltr.2.1.73-80