The rhetorical organisation of Malay ESL students' argumentative essays: an exploratory study / Misyana Susanti Husin and Kamisah Ariffin

In the field of contrastive rhetoric, many studies have been done on rhetorical organisation of native English speakers with patterns of other languages. Although there are numerous published contrastive rhetoric studies comparing native English speakers to speakers of other languages, research on the rhetorical pattern of native Malay-speaking students, or Malay ESL students, writing in English has received limited attention from investigators. Thus, it is the aim of this paper to investigate the rhetorical organisation employed by native Malay-speaking students when writing English argumentative essays. The essays were analysed based on the location of the thesis statement and macro¬ level rhetorical pattern. A number of participants were also interviewed about their writings to gain insight on the reasons for the rhetorical styles. Results indicate that the most frequently employed pattern was inductive pattern, followed by the deductive, and the non-deductive and non-inductive. The findings, thus, have important implications on pedagogical practice on writing.