Abstract
In Malaysian universities, writing in English is taught in several settings: writing for general purposes, writing for academic purposes and writing for specific purposes. Writing in these settings allows learners to learn to write in different genres, such as research, reports, and persuasive writing genres. One of the standard genres is persuasive because it is used to convince readers of what is researched or reported. To be competent in persuading or arguing, using the appropriate rhetorical and linguistic structure is crucial. The appropriate rhetorical and linguistic elements will help to achieve the writers' objective and intention. This paper will examine rhetorical and linguistic structures used by the ESL writers in producing a persuasive essay. Fifteen persuasive essays written by tertiary learners were analysed in this study. The researchers employed Stephen Toulmin's Model of argument (1969) as the tool of analysis in identifying the rhetorical and linguistic structures realised in the students' essays. The analysis outcome indicates that the 15 ESL writers under investigation comply with Toulmin's model except for the rebuttal stage, which was not visible in the essays. The findings will explain the common and uncommon rhetorical and linguistic elements used based on the model that Toulmin has developed. The implications from the findings are twofold; first, academic writing teachers can focus on the necessary elements to produce competent persuasive ESL writers, and secondly, textbook developers may produce their books based on the findings drawn from this study.
Highlights
Leki (2007) has defined writing as 'the actual texts produced that are evaluated as evidence of growth and learning' (p. 234)
This paper aims to analyse tertiary learners' essay writing in Sabah through the Toulmin's model lens
One of the genres highlighted in the module was persuasive writing, where participants were exposed to persuasive writing samples, focusing on the rhetorical and linguistic element that makes a good piece of a persuasive essay
Summary
Leki (2007) has defined writing as 'the actual texts produced that are evaluated as evidence of growth and learning' (p. 234). In Malaysian universities, academic writing is a requirement to attain certificates and students are required to complete the writing task according to the instructor's instructions. Academic writing is used as an evaluation tool for offering a scholarship in many Malaysian universities as it shows a high level of a learner's capability to strive for their work and responsibility. In the academic setting, writing is an important skill to master. There are many different genres of writing, such as descriptive, comparative and persuasive. Different writing genres require different writing styles with different rhetorical structures and different linguistic elements, requiring discourse competence in writing. Developing discourse competence in tertiary academic writing is inherently complicated, among ESL learners who are the novice writers of extended written discourse (Januin and Stephen, 2015)
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