Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 27, Issue 1, 2004

Chen Kui was a scholar-official of the Southern Song dynasty. He published the Wen Ze (here translated as The Rules of Writing) in 1170. This book is commonly described by Chinese scholars as China’s first systematic account of Chinese rhetoric. The book comprises ten chapters, covering aspects of rhetoric and composition, including the use of rhetorical devices, the functions and methods of citation, and the importance of using everyday language. Despite its acknowledged importance by Chinese scholars, The Rules of Writing’ remains comparatively unknown, even within China. This article will focus on three topics discussed by Chen Kui that I hope will be of interest to applied linguists and to teachers of academic writing, especially those involved in the teaching of academic discourse to international students of Chinese background. The three topics are: the appropriate use of language; the sequencing of argument when writing discursive texts; and the methods and uses of citation. It will be argued that writing styles are a product of the age in which they develop, and that these styles change significantly over time, no matter in which culture they may be set. Principles of Chinese rhetoric as discussed here have their counterparts in other rhetorics. They are not uniquely Chinese.

Applied linguistics has not sufficiently addressed theories of teaching subject English in the mainstream classroom. This is unfortunate because applied linguistic theories can offer a great deal to the development of a theory of subject English. Over the last century, subject English has changed quite fundamentally, and it is increasingly in need of a theory of language to shape its future. At the end of the 19th century, English was a set of discrete English skills. Later, as literature achieved greater status at the university level, its teaching was also brought into school English, though the discrete skills and literary pursuits were at best brought into an uneasy amalgam. By the 1960s, in an effort to overcome the uneasy amalgam, “integrated” models of English teaching were proposed, and it was argued that the goal of the English program should be to promote “growth” through language. Terms like “language development” were adopted in English, though this was ironically at a time that teaching of knowledge about language became discredited. By the 21st century English had become increasingly synonymous with “literacy”, though a robust theory of knowledge about language was badly needed. Subject English needs new directions, of a kind that functional theories of language can provide.

Measures of lexical richness aim at quantifying the degree to which L2 writers are using a varied and large vocabulary. One method for calculating lexical richness is the Lexical Frequency Profile, or LFP (Laufer & Nation, 1995). The LFP, calculated by a computer programme, provides a detailed picture of vocabulary use measured against several frequency lists of words. This paper reports on a small-scale study to investigate the effectiveness of calculating the LFP of written texts of German. This study formed part of a larger study to investigate the impact of dictionaries on students’ writing. Six subjects completed two timed writing tasks in examination conditions, one with and one without a bilingual dictionary. It was envisaged that the LFP might be helpful in determining if the presence of the bilingual dictionary made a difference to students’ lexical sophistication. A calculation of the LFP was carried out using two context-specific lists. Figures were calculated for the number of word tokens and word families. It was concluded that, although using the computer programme with German texts presented some difficulties not present when using the software with English frequency lists, the LFP showed itself to be a valuable diagnostic tool that was able to differentiate between proficiency levels in German and to provide useful information about lexical richness in German texts.

This paper puts forth the need for further integration of research on writing-as-a-process in foreign language writing and teaching practices. Several problems are identified concerning the teaching and learning of writing skills, as most teachers attend to the product – its originality, clarity and correctness, and recent popular textbooks on French language and culture still focus on the product and rarely on the process. The extensive research on writing-as-a-process in both Francophone and North American applied linguistics for L1 and L2 does not seem to have had the same repercussions on foreign language teaching or material development as it did on L2 writing skills for ESL/EFL. Here, I propose an integrative approach to writing instruction comprising different findings in process writing, self- and peer-assessment and cross-cultural awareness. The design of a six-step approach stems from a recent book on the pedagogy of writing skills (Mesana-Alais, 2001) and shows how to explore and produce genre-based texts.

In this paper we examine the academic and language learning needs of Chinese international students preparing for high stakes examinations in an independent secondary school in Melbourne, Australia. We argue that the needs of these secondary students and their teachers are different from those of their tertiary counterparts, yet have received almost negligible research attention by comparison. We focus on Commerce/Economics subjects as those which many Chinese students seek to study at university, but which present particular challenges for them at school level. In particular, we analyse the linguistic and academic demands of one examination paper in this subject group in order to identify the linguistic knowledge, the disciplinary background knowledge and the cultural background knowledge students are presumed to have by the teacher. We match this analysis with the interview comments of the Commerce/Economics teacher, who, while concerned about the educational needs of these international students, struggles to learn how to meet these needs in his classroom. We conclude by arguing that more professional support needs to be made available to content area teachers of international students before the rhetoric of government policy regarding the quality of education for international students matches the reality.

This study examines similarities and differences between English and Chinese letters to the editor on newspapers from the perspectives of contrastive rhetoric and genre theory. Generic structures, rhetorical structures, and logico-semantic relations of 20 letters to the editor (10 in Chinese and 10 in English) were examined in detail. Findings of this study include: 1) there was often an editor’s preview (i.e. a brief introduction to the letters written by editors) in Chinese letters to the editor in this study; 2) Appeals to values and needs were used to support their claims in Chinese letters to the editor, whereas English writers employed evidence to do this. The study suggests that ‘evidence’ and ‘appeals to values and need’ are deeply rooted in the two cultures and societies, and hence find their place in the writers’ texts; 3) consequential and additive logico-semantic relations were often used in both the Chinese and the English letters, however, consequential relations were more frequently used in the Chinese letters to the editor than in the English ones. All the findings are discussed in relation to the different writing styles and the socio-cultural values of each culture.

English interlanguage interrogative structures examined with regard to two implicational universals were found to be supportive of predictive validity of the universals (Eckman, Moravcsik & Wirth, 1989). This study further tests the extent to which the two universals could hold for English interlanguage in a different setting. The two implicational universals at issue were formulated by Greenberg (1963) who claimed that subject-verb inversion occurs in yes-no questions only if it also occurs in wh-questions, and that subject-verb inversion in wh-questions occurs only if wh-words/phrases are fronted. Unlike Eckman et al’s study, the present study used interview and role-play tasks to collect data from fifty-two ESL learners at the Monash University English Language Centre; however, findings of this study are comparable to those of Eckman et al (1989) in that they also strongly support the observed universals. A tentative explanation in terms of fossilisation, though, seems to account more appropriately for the exception in this study.

This article discusses an issue which is of longstanding and central importance to foreign language teachers in a variety of contexts, namely teacher use of classroom language. It uses detailed qualitative case study data to explore how and why an expert practitioner uses English in her Hong Kong Primary school language classroom. Through the interplay between teacher beliefs, experiences and classroom transcript data, the paper develops a contextualised picture of classroom language use with young foreign language learners. The paper suggests that it is not necessarily the language proficiency of the learners which plays a major role in the quantity of target language use, but the teachers’ own proficiency, experience and beliefs.