Abstract
The current exploratory study focuses on classifying rhetorical patterns in expository essays by 166 Chinese English majors at two universities. The quantitative analysis shows the sampled Chinese students used four rhetorical patterns: the inductive, deductive, quasi-inductive, and non-topic sentence pattern, based on the merged framework, although the distribution of major patterns varied in the sampled subject. The qualitative analysis focuses on identifying features of the four rhetorical patterns in terms of the differing rhetorical cultures and reasoning modes between Chinese and English, in which their expository prepositions are constructed. The conclusion challenges the ‘circular pattern’ hypothesis claimed by Kaplan (1966). The paper yields a tentative conclusion regarding rhetorical patterns in expository essays, and their implications for teaching L2 writing to Chinese EFL students.
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