Native Culture's Impact on EFL Argumentative Writing: Indonesian Case Study, Slides of English Language

Download Native Culture's Impact on EFL Argumentative Writing: Indonesian Case Study and more Slides English Language in PDF only on Docsity! The 1st International Conference on Language, Literature and Teaching ISSN 2549-5607 125 THE INFLUENCE OF NATIVE CULTURE IN EFL ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING Kusumarasdyati Universitas Negeri Surabaya unfound.door@ymail.com Abstract Building a strong argument in written form could be challenging for learners of English as a for- eign language (EFL) for two reasons: they are still grappling with the target language and have lit- tle knowledge about the rhetoric in the target culture. This paper focuses on the latter, examining the problems that the Indonesian learners face when writing an argumentative text in English due to cultural differences. Twenty eight adult EFL learners who participated in a language training to improve their English proficiency were asked to write an argumentative essay consisting of an introductory paragraph, two paragraphs in the body and a concluding paragraph. In this paper the analysis was confined to the introductory paragraphs that they wrote, and the results showed that the way they organized the ideas to build an argument in the introductory paragraphs was influenced by their native culture to a certain degree. Rather than expressing their thoughts and opinions in a linear fashion like native speakers of English commonly do, some of them wrote their arguments by beating around the bush, making it harder for the readers to identify and under- stand these writers’ stance about a certain issue. Moreover, some others even avoided giving an overt argument in their paragraphs and embraced both contrasting views about a particular issue instead. Some implications for the teaching of writing argumentative text were proposed. Keywords: writing, argumentative, culture, EFL 1. INTRODUCTION Writing a good argumentative text is crucial for EFL learners at tertiary level because they gain and disseminate knowledge with others on daily basis, and in doing so need to express their stance and convince others that it is the most sensible one by providing strong evidence. The pace of change and improvement in communication technology and the knowledge in their own field has been so fast that keeping up to date to the latest information and confirming their stance need to be done quite frequently. Without good capability in writing a sound argumentative piece of writing, achieving the above goal is hardly possible. Although building an argument is a vital skill that the EFL learners must acquire to participate in the knowledge sharing in universities and colleges, informal observations and interviews indicate that some learners in Indonesia seem to encounter difficulties in doing it for two reasons. First, they are still grappling with the target language due to lack of exposure to English, little aware- ness about writing strategies or others. For them, constructing some well-formed, meaningful English sentences in sequence to discuss a particular issue from their own perspective can be a tedious task, resulting in an inadequate argumentative text. Another reason for the difficulties is little knowledge about the rhetoric of the target culture on the part of the EFL learners. As this pa- per focuses on the challenges related to rhetoric rather than language ability, the former deserves further elaboration in the rest of this section. Kaplan (1966, p. 11) defined rhetoric as ‘… a mode of thinking or a more of “finding all available means” for the achievement of a designated end. Accordingly, rhetoric concerns itself basically with what goes on in the mind rather than with what comes out of the mouth.’ In his monumen- tal work where he studied hundreds of college essays written by students with different cultural backgrounds, he concluded that rhetoric had logic as its basis, and logic was heavily influenced ISSN 2549-5607 The 1st International Conference on Language, Literature and Teaching 126 by the culture where they lived and grew up. Thus, students belonging to one culture had different thought patterns from those of another culture, producing essays which were also structured dif- ferently. He categorized the thought patterns into five types: English, Semitic, Oriental, Romance, Russian (Figure 1). Figure 1. Thought Patterns (Kaplan, 1966) Kaplan’s theory asserts that English writers tend to think in a linear fashion, stating their ideas directly. Semitic writers such as Arabic or Hebrew, on the other hand, express their ideas by pre- senting both the positive and negative ones in parallel constructions. Writers of Oriental origin (i.e. Asian, including Indonesian) tend to be indirect, working around the point rather than getting to point and addressing the topic. Romance writers—from countries speaking Latin-based lan- guages such as French, Italian, Romanian and Spanish—usually communicate ideas by perform digression by introducing different material to enrich the communication. Similarly, Russian writ- ers are digressive in communication, but there is a slight difference: they usually express parallel ideas in the digression. This seminal work triggered other researchers to investigate the rhetoric in academic writing in depth and provide empirical support to the theory. For example, Abu Rass (2011) found that teacher trainees whose mother tongue was Arabic frequently used repetition and exaggeration in writing an English text in order to convince others and make the persuasion stronger, which indi- cated influence from their native Arab culture. Even Burrough-Boenisc (2002) found a rhetorical influence from the native culture when she examined the English scientific papers written by Dutch scholars in five journals. Although English and Dutch are both West-Germanic languages, the native speakers of both languages obviously have different cultures and the cultural interfer- ence could be observed in the papers they wrote. Dutch scholars who wrote papers in English tended to construct shorter sentences and use fewer hedges (such as probably, may, and other expressions to decrease the strength of a claim) than the native speakers of English. The present paper attempts to add more empirical evidence of contrastive rhetoric by investigat- ing cultural influence occurring in the English argumentative texts written by the native speakers of Bahasa Indonesia. In line with the original work of Kaplan (1966) that aimed to describe ob- jectively the existence of thought patterns different from the English one rather than evaluating them from the point of view of the English speakers, this study only presents the thought patterns of Indonesians that could be inferred from the argumentative text they have written, without any prescriptive comments of what they should look like. 2. RESEARCH METHOD This study was approached qualitatively, using document analysis as the research design. The population of the study was twenty eight lecturers from various departments (except English Department) in Universitas Negeri Surabaya (Unesa) who attended a two-week English course held by the university in October 2015 to improve their English proficiency, and total sample was drawn from this population so the number of both were the same. While taking the course, the participants were required to write an argumentative essay—as one of the assignment in the