A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF INTERPERSONAL PERSUASIVE WRITING SKILLS OF PAKISTANI ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Abstract

Persuasive writing skills empower English Language Learners (ELLs) to produce, evaluate, and understand ethical, professional, and political discourse. The appraisal system provides lexical and grammatical uses in each stage and phase of argumentative writing to develop prosodies required to construct an authorial voice and enable a writer to confront diverse viewpoints to build a convincing argument and build solidarity with readers. This work investigates the uses of appraisal system choices according to each phase of the argumentative genre schematic structure to achieve persuasion in fifty Pakistani argumentative essays drawn from the International Corpus of Learners English (ICLE). The findings reveal that most undergraduate Pakistani English Learners inappropriately utilized appraisal language choices regarding stage and phase requirements which undermined the persuasiveness of Pakistani learners' arguments. It is likely to deduce that this work can explicitly assist the English language teaching and learning community using evaluative writing skills central to persuasive written discourse. Keywords: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Analytical Argumentative Essay Writing, Persuasive Language Patterns, Argumentative Genre Model, Appraisal Theory