This study aimed to explore adolescent second language (L2) writers' composition across media (text-based writing and digital multimodal composing). The goal was to investigate how and under what conditions these writers used semiotic resources when they engaged in both text-based writing and digital multimodal composing. Grounded in the concept…

Writing is considered an essential learning tool for all content areas. However, to master and have excellent writing skills for EFL students of undergraduate programs is challenging. Cohesion and coherence are both crucial textual elements to master writing. The present study examined coherence in English essays written by 46 female Saudi EFL…

Characterized by specific and rigid boundaries of institutional practices and expectations in the academy, student writing is a synergistic literacy practice where students are required to construct generically diverse texts by yoking concepts with appropriate linguistic resources. This empirical study involving 196 first-year ESL students at a…

Drawing on the cultural background of the East (i.e., Korea) and the West (i.e., U.S.), I aimed to investigate the influence of L1 culture on L2 writing by focusing on the usage of "I" and the logical structure in the participants' English writings. Ten Korean university students learning English as a foreign language (L2) participated…

Cross-cultural study of rhetorical traditions as they exist or have existed in different societies around the world has been the focus of contrastive rhetoric. Studies in contrastive rhetoric in the past years confirm that culture is reflected in rhetorical patterns. Using the argumentative essays of 55 students from a state university in Central…

The debate around student personal essays has dissipated in recent scholarship, though it still remains a highly contested subject. This dissertation study examines three main criticisms surrounding student personal essays from the theorists James Berlin, Lester Faigley, and David Bartholomae. These critiques are that students don't attend to…

This study investigated the extent to which results of rhetorical comparisons of persuasive essays by Moroccan students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) would provide empirical evidence for Kaplan's (1966) contrastive rhetoric hypothesis. This is especially regarding the fact that EFL students-writing problems are a byproduct of…

Although Error Analysis (EA) has been broadly used in Foreign Language and Mother Tongue learning contexts, it has not been applied in the field of engineering and by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) students in a systematic way. In this interdisciplinary pilot study, we applied the EA methodology to a wide corpus of…

This article advances film as worthy of rhetorical inquiry and deserving of more sustained attention in the advanced composition classroom. The first section identifies various approaches to the "language" of film, which can be adopted to navigate the technical, rhetorical, and cultural concerns needed to compose informed multimodal…

To date, very little research on L2 peer review of L2 essay composition has focused on the issue of whether the choice of L1 or L2 use in the peer review process facilitates or hinders students' transmission and reception of productive commentary on their essay drafts. This study was designed to ascertain the impact of language choice in written…

Whether L1 (first language) rhetorical transfer affects L2 (second language) writing remains a controversial issue. Based on Hyland's move theory, this article focuses on the moves and the quality of wrap-up sentences in essay conclusions, exploring the impact of L1 rhetorical transfer. One hundred eighty-four expository essays written by Chinese…

An essay's motive or research problem consists of the rhetorical moves illuminating why that essay matters--what puzzling elements of a primary source it resolves, which contradictions in the data it explains, or what gaps in the literature it fills. This article invites college instructors to dedicate some of their classroom time to teaching…

Bruce Pirie offers the following criticism about formula essays: "What does a five-paragraph essay teach about writing? It teaches that there are rules, and that those rules take the shape of a preordained form, like a cookie-cutter, into which we can pour ideas and expect them to come out well shaped." He goes on to discredit such essays as being…

This article presents a pedagogical model for a sequence of first-year composition (FYC) assignments that encourages students' first-hand interpretations as insiders into the workings of educational meritocracy. I focus on how students negotiate the personal statement, an institutionally privileged genre for the discovery and definition of…

Problem Statement: In this qualitative small-scale study, I aimed at investigating why students have difficulties in adjusting themselves to English writing conventions. I also examined the possible bilateral effects of Turkish and English writing conventions to determine whether engaging learners in contrastive rhetoric exercises can elucidate…