Abstract
The present research aimed to study the rhetorical patterns in students’ writings, whether they follow a deductive pattern or an inductive pattern, and whether the pattern is similar when writing in English and the Indonesian language. The sample for this study was 20 undergraduate students from the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education majoring in English Education in several universities in Indonesia. Participants were requested to write two essays and two email-format letters, one of each was written in English, the other in the Indonesian language. The results showed that all students preferred the deductive pattern for their two types of essays. However, for the letter writing, students preferred the inductive pattern more than the deductive one, with 12 students using the inductive pattern in their letters in English and 16 students using the inductive pattern in their letters in Indonesian. It is suggested that the Indonesian culture and the teaching instructions received in the classrooms may influence students’ choice of the patterns they use in different types of writings. The findings should give valuable information for the design of teaching writing courses in English Education majors in Indonesia.
Highlights
Producing an academic paper in English is a formidable task for students with English as a foreign language (EFL), including EFL students in Indonesia
For e-letters, the locations of the main idea were much more varied, but the largest number of students presented the main idea in the middle of the Indonesian letter (50%) compared to at the end of the English letter (35%)
The present study revealed that Indonesian undergraduate students could use the deductive pattern in composing their essays
Summary
Producing an academic paper in English is a formidable task for students with English as a foreign language (EFL), including EFL students in Indonesia. The difficulties with academic writing in English involve different linguistic and cognitive strategies that students are not familiar with (Rao, 2007). Ariyanti (2016) had claimed that the most challenging part of EFL writing was the influence of students’ first language and cultural background, which caused them to ‘sound’ different from texts written by native English speakers. According to Kaplan (1966), the founder of Contrastive Rhetoric, even advanced EFL students can write ineffective papers. He states, “the foreign student who has mastered the syntax of English may still write a bad paragraph or a bad paper unless he masters the logic of English” “the foreign student who has mastered the syntax of English may still write a bad paragraph or a bad paper unless he masters the logic of English” (Kaplan, 1966, p. 15)
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