A Genre-Based study of Argumentative Essay The Case of First Year Master Students in Translation and Traductology at KMUO

Abstract

This research is a genre analysis study that focuses on argumentative writing. This specific genre differs from Arabic to English at cultural and linguistic level. These differences are directly responsible for problems of EFL students’ argumentative writing in L2. The corpus of the present study consists of 23 first year master students of translation and traductology at KMUO; 10 are male and 13 are female. The adopted research methods are corpus analysis and genre analysis. The findings indicate that EFL students respect the structure of English argumentative essays whereas they still have serious problems concerning linguistic patterns that derive from L1 transfer. The suggested remedy for these problems are adopting genre based approach in teaching EFL writing, connecting writing to reading, using authentic materials, and supporting students with feedback and commePnt.