1.2 Difficulties Experienced by Second Language Wr...
In regard to the learning and use of academic genres,L2 students seem to experience more difficulties compared with their native speaker peers.Unlike native speakers who have typically been only exposed to English genre knowledge,L2 students,especially those who have done substantial academic writing in their home community,need to acquire English genre conventions as an addition and may have difficulties in adjusting to new conventions.
There is evidence showing that non-native graduate students,compared with their native peers,experience more difficulties in understanding and meeting supervisors’expectations in thesis writing and both supervisors and non-native graduate students suffer from difficulties in communication.Jenkins,Jordan,and Weiland(1993)surveyed 176 supervisors on the amount of time expended in supervising graduate students in thesis writing.The results revealed that the average time supervisors spent on the drafts of non-native graduate students was nearly 40% more than that of the native students.Even so,supervisors were not happy with the writing produced or redrafted by non-native students.To bridge their“high”expectations and the non-native students’“low”performance,many supervisors felt the need to help students rewrite major parts of thesis.Jenkins et al.(1993)found that supervisors drafted a much larger proportion of the theses written by non-native students than those written by native students.About 25% of the faculties surveyed were willing to rewrite for non-native students compared with 11% for native students.Supervisors were so frustrated that they felt that“it is easier to do the writing for the students”than to coach the students to write.Although supervisors spent more time on non-native graduate students,the latter were less satisfied than their native peers.Dong(1998)surveyed 137 native and non-native graduate students and found that non-native graduate students were less satisfied with the supervision they received than the native students.The difference is statistically significant(p＜0.05).The non-native students expected to get“explicit corrections”and“reasons behind the revisions”from their supervisors.Clearly,the communication between the two parties was less efficient than that between supervisors and native students.
The difficulty in communication can be partly attributed to the fact that both supervisors and non-native graduate students have a limited understanding of the differences in writing conventions between the English academic community and the academic community of the students’home countries.On the students’part,by surveying 106 non-native graduate students from 25 different countries,Dong(1998)found that about 60% of the non-native graduate students“were not aware of”or“could not explain”the differences in writing between their native languages and English.Even if the differences have been pointed out by supervisors in feedback,students may not be willing to change their writings accordingly.Belcher(1994)conducted a case study on three non-native graduate students.One of the participants was a Chinese student of Chinese Literature who got“extensive critical commentary”from his supervisor(p.27).Instead of following his supervisor’s suggestions,the student insisted on using his old way of writing which he acquired in the Chinese academic community since he was not convinced that the supervisor’s way of writing was better than his own.In this extreme case,the student left the university because the conflict could not be resolved.
Among the 176 supervisors surveyed by Jenkins et al.(1993),64% used the same standards in evaluating the writings of native and non-native graduate students.For those that evaluated the writing of non-native students differently,the more lenient standards were most often used on sentence level features,including grammar,vocabulary use,punctuation and spelling.The findings indicate that the majority of supervisors expected non-native students to follow their norms of writing.Naturally,conflicts and difficulties in communication would occur when supervisors want to make non-native students conform to their genre conventions while non-native students mount some resistance to changes(e.g.Belcher,1994).To resolve this conflict,both parties need to gain a better understanding of the differences in their writing,including what the differences are,and reasons for those differences.
In this study,I propose that the differences in genre practices between L2 students’former and current communities and the differences between national disciplinary cultures that may have caused the variation in genre practices are also a vital component of genre knowledge for the purpose of intercultural communication.An understanding of genre differences can prepare L2 students and their supervisors to accept different ways of writing.Openness in attitude is one of the bases for successful intercultural communication(Byram,1997).In the next section,a framework for genre knowledge of intercultural communication is developed,guiding the empirical investigations of the present study.