This study investigated EFL college students’ culture-related templates of written texts along the possibility of inter-cultural transfer. We designed a case study to explore how certain cultural assumptions contribute to EFL students’ rhetorical decisions while writing an argumentative writing. The participants were four EFL college students. Multiple data sources include background questionnaires, argumentative essays, and in-depth retrospective interviews. To analyze rhetorical choices in the participants’ writing, we identified choices of argumentation subtypes, and introduction and conclusion components. We also categorized the location of the writer’s main claim and thesis statement. The interview data were qualitatively analyzed to see what rhetorical resources participants draw from the cultural/educational contexts, and which factors had influenced the participants’ rhetorical strategy. Data analyses indicate that each participant manipulated different rhetorical structures to strengthen the rhetorical impact of their writing. Indeed, the complex constellation of individual participants’ cultural resources was at play in their L2 writing. This study contributes to our understanding of the rhetorical templates of L2 texts as constructs that are always in process, and therefore adaptable and negotiable.

Although the use of Grammatical Metaphor (GM) has been regarded as one of the representative features of academic writing in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), not many studies have explored its role in second or foreign language writers’ writing quality. This study aimed to discover the potential relationship between GM development and argumentative writing quality of advanced Korean EFL learners, while controlling for their overall language proficiency and reading comprehension ability. The findings from this study unveiled significant contribution of the use of both premature and mature GM and also identified transcategorization as the specific GM that has relatively stronger predictability of writing quality. The results from current research yield meaningful pedagogical implications for writing instruction in Korean EFL contexts.

In argumentative writing, writers are expected to use hedged expressions and stance devices through specific linguistic expressions to convince their proposition effectively. Yet little research attention has been paid to whether the inclusion of such devices is related to the overall quality of second or foreign language learners’ argumentative writing. In this study, hedges and stance devices that are included in 28 advanced Korean EFL writers’ argumentative writing were analyzed to identify their potential relation to the overall writing quality. Analyses demonstrated that although hedges and stance devices were related to argumentative writing quality in general, the specific linguistic forms that predicted two different aspects of writing quality – formal and content quality – were different. Specifically, hedges played a significant positive role in only content quality of writing, and the specific stance devices that significantly predicted formal quality did not contribute to the content quality, and vice versa. The findings from this study provides important pedagogical implications for EFL writing instruction.

Despite extensive research attention that has been paid to second language (SL) or foreign language (FL) learners’ argumentative writing, most research has focused on the structural features characteristic of such writers. There have not been many systematic attempts to identify the quality of argument features SL or FL writers rely on, and how they contribute to the overall writing qualities. This study was designed to examine the relationship between the Toulmin elements, widely used measures of content qualities in arguments which include claims, data, warrants, rebuttals, qualifiers, and backings, and the overall qualities of advanced Korean high school EFL learners’ argumentative writing. Each of the thirty three participants’ argumentative writing was analyzed, applying the Toulmin model, and the results demonstrate that their overall argument qualities were closely related to the uses of the fundamental Toulmin elements, especially data and predicted best by the degree to which each claim was supported with relevant and sufficient data. These findings shed light on the need for instruction on the use of Toulmin elements in enhancing the overall quality of Korean EFL learners’ argumentative writing.

The present study investigates Korean university EFL students’ use of conjunctive adverbials (CAs) in argumentative writing. The data for the study consist of a Korean university students’ writing corpus that is divided into three different subcorpora based on proficiency levels, and a reference corpus of American students’ writings. The results show that the nonnative writers in all three groups greatly overused CAs. Examination of their overuse patterns according to different taxonomic types indicated that sequential and additive types were mostly overused, as much as six times more than those by the native writers. In addition, several characteristics of the nonnative writers’ CA usage are discussed, including their heavy dependence on sentence-initial positioning, and both form-related and usage-related misuses of CAs, especially among the lowest-level learners. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications and suggestions.

This paper examines how Korean college EFL students use contrastive conjunctions in their argumentative writing in comparison with native speaker college students’ use of them. The data consists of a Korean college students’ writing corpus, which was divided into a lower proficiency group and a higher proficiency group, and an American and British university students’ writing corpus. The findings reveal that the first two most frequently occurring forms are but and however in all four groups,although the usage patterns such as positioning differ between the NS and the NNS groups. The third most frequent form is on the other hand in both NNS groups and yet in both NS groups, which shows an interesting difference in that the NNS groups hardly use yet in their writing. Both NNS groups also show frequent misuses of conjunctive adverbials such as in contrast, on the contrary, and on the other hand. The paper concludes with some pedagogical implications and suggestions.