Genre Analysis and Cultural Variations: A Cognitive Evaluation of Anglo-American Undergraduate Personal Statements
This chapter is a contrastive genre study that investigates the rhetorical structure of the British and American personal statements (PSs) written by undergraduate students. The corpus consists of 60 PSs (30 British and 30 American) selected from three di
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Abstract This chapter is a contrastive genre study that investigates the rhetorical structure of the British and American personal statements (PSs) written by undergraduate students. The corpus consists of 60 PSs (30 British and 30 American) selected from three different disciplines: Business, Physics and Psychology, and they were collected from four websites. The genre analysis of the collected data has been based on Ding’s (2007) model as an analytical framework. This study seeks to test the applicability of this model on the corpus and examine the rhetorical and the linguistic resemblances and variations found between both cultures. Results of the genre analysis indicate that the analysed statements have revealed some rhetorical and linguistic similarities and differences between both corpora. The divergences and convergences between both corpora were attributed to certain socio-cultural and academic factors. The findings of the present study offered valuable insights regarding the genre features of PSs. Further, this research may fill in the gap in the rhetorical studies of the British and American academic genres. Keywords Contrastive rhetoric statement Cognitive evaluation
Genre analysis
New rhetoric
Personal
1 Introduction The pupils’ educational assessment can be achieved through the analysis of certain academic genres as they may reflect their rhetorical, linguistic and stylistic abilities. After much research on published academic texts, recent studies in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) have expanded to students’ writings, focusing mainly on culminating genres of graduate students such as master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, and to a lesser extent on undergraduate writings (Samraj & Monk, 2008).
G. Hajji (&) Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Tunis, Tunisia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 S. Hidri and C. Coombe (eds.), Evaluation in Foreign Language Education in the Middle East and North Africa, Second Language Learning and Teaching, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43234-2_8
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Nonetheless, the genre of PSs has not been sufficiently addressed by previous genre research despite its significance in the evaluation process of the students’ interests and writing skills. Indeed, analysing such an academic genre helps teachers to identify the kinds of problems students may be having in their writings (Hyland, 2007) and assess to what extent the applicants’ interests correspond to the courses provided by the targeted program. In addition, this genre is poor in terms of comparative studies. In fact, no study has been carried out, as far as the literature consulted, to compare and contrast the generic and linguistic features of the British and American PSs. By reviewing the current literature, it is noticeable that there is a remarkable paucity in research on this genre’s content and structures.
2 Theoretical Background Contrastive research investigates differences and similarities in writing styles across cultures and disciplines. “I
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