Week 6

In the article Differences in ESL and Native English Speaker Writing by T. Silvia, there was a study which had two groups- native English speakers and English as a second language subjects write expository or argumentative essays in 30-60 minute sessions as a placement exam.  Overall, the study showed that the ESL writer’s texts were shorter in word count than NES, and they made more errors overall (including morphosyntactic errors, lexicosemantic errors, spelling and punctuation errors, more errors in cohesive device use, and more verb, noun-pronoun, article, and preposition errors).               

I thought it was interesting that the NES subjects preferred writing how something happened, using detail and organizing information in a text to form a theme-rheme pattern and that they strongly preferred to reintroduce information from earlier in the text to develop another aspect of it.  This is compared to the Japanese students, who preferred to explain why something happened, immediately repeating facts or ideas for emphasis, and to include only logically related information.  These are examples of how there is a culture difference in the way that people learn to write.  In my opinion, this has nothing to do with the fact that the Japanese students are not native speakers, but rather that they were brought up learning a different way to get the point across in writing essays.

What my questions is on this, is how much of the writing style is influenced on culture, and how much of it is influenced by school?  For example, I have never really taken any classes on “how to write an exository or argumentative paper” since I was probably in middle school.  Therefore, I have a very different writing style than another NES who is for an example a psychology major.  In the current psych class that I’m in right now, we are taught to write papers a very specific way, which is not something that I am used to.  Therefore, I think that we can say that where a person got their schooling has a large imapact on the way they learn to write, as well as how much of a concentration that that person had on writing essays growing up.