Intercultural Discourse Patterns in Writing Argumentative Texts

This study examines the quality of the writing of Jewish (L1) and Arab (L2) first-year student teachers at Hebrew-speaking colleges. The study seeks to understand the quality of argumentative writing of the student teachers at the beginning of their studies and to expose the discourse patterns that emerge from those argumentative texts. A code book serving as a coding analysis device was developed in order to reveal the following rhetorical text features: content, structure, syntax and style. Each global feature contained a number of specific measures. The findings indicate that the writing quality of first-year L1 students is significantly higher than that of first-year L2 students on all the specific writing measures examined. The texts of the Arab students were less coherent and lacked rhetorical structure and accepted grammatical forms, whereas those of the Jewish students were more coherent and self-explanatory. The study concludes that when Arab students write in Hebrew as a second language, the linguistic and rhetorical conventions of Arabic interfere with their Hebrew writing. The results demonstrate significant and interesting differences between Jewish native speakers (L1 students) and Arab non-native speakers (L2 students). While the texts of L1 students tend to display 'explicit coherence,' those of L2 students show 'implicit coherence.'