2.3 L1 Discourse Interference
As specific differences in rhetorical organization have been examined for many non-English languages, Kaplan
(1966) also proposes the notion of contrastive rhetoric on written discourse influenced by oral, culture and social
value. As influenced by L1 acquisition, studies of non-native English writing indicated that many students use
writing conventions more differently than native-speakers do. McDaniel (1994) proposed that many Thai student
writers do not use paragraph structure in their writing. Sometimes the writers don’t build up a new paragraph for
the additional idea created. It is generally accepted that the sources of writing errors made by L2 learners are
various. Based on overall patterns of errors found in Thai EFL students’ written products (Thep-Ackraraphong,
2006), it is proposed that these deviate forms of writing can be found in both the rhetorical and typological
differences between the L1 learners and L2 learners. It is revealed that for rhetorical pattern, Asian writers seem
to have a general topic which is “loosely” (p. 95) supported in their writings. Also, the real purpose is often
found at the end of the piece. This feature contrasts with English-speaking readers who have a different
expectation from writers. They expect to find a coherent text in which each supporting sentence directly supports
the topic sentence or controlling idea.
This coincides with Sattayatham and RatanapinyowongIn (2008). It is found in students’ paragraph writing that
most students do not present “a reasonable connection or relation” (p. 30) between ideas in their paragraphs
which cause incoherence. These student writers cannot create connected thought and do not tie prose together
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and make the words and sentences in their writing unified and comprehensible for the reader. Consequently, their
paragraphs are considerably short and unclear.
Some writing problems at discourse level in Thai context can be found in paragraphs which are disunified
because the topic sentence, which contains the topic and controlling idea, are often unclear and sometimes
appear at the end of the paragraph. As a result, supporting sentences loosely support the topic sentence. However,
when compared with the concept of discourse rhetoric based on the growing evidence that different cultures and
language communities lead to different conventions and expectations about maximizing rhetorical effectiveness,
discourse error found in some EFL writings seem to be open to question. Based on Austin (1962 cited in James,
1998), he is not certain to define this difference as error, but addresses this phenomenon as “infelicity” (p. 163).
It can be seen that the deviance of writing output of L2 learners is not always wrong, but it is different from the
standard of the target language.
It can be seen that interlingual errors are normally found in EFL writing. This is because when writing in the
target language, the writers rely on their native language structures to produce their written tasks. As the
structures of L1 and L2 have differences, there is a relatively high frequency of errors occurring in the target
language, therefore, indicating an interference of the native language on the lexis, syntax and discourse of the
target language.