A Comparative Analysis of American and Filipino Student’s Excuse Letters

In his work on discourse organization in the English compositions of approximately six hundred foreign students, Kaplan (1966) claims that English writing is characterized by directness and deductive reasoning, while other languages (e.g. Oriental languages and Arabic) favour indirectness and inductive reasoning. At the same time, he attempts to link th e differences in discourse organis ation between English and other languages to their respective cultures and thought patterns. This pioneering research was valuable in directing ESL teachers and students to look beyond grammar and sentence -level difficulties. More importantly, it initiated a new research area (namely contrastive rhetoric), which has expanded enormously over the past few decades.

Among various aspects of cultural difference, rhetorical patterns of written texts have been investigated for more than thirty years since contrastive rhetoric research was initiated by Kaplan (1966). Sharing a similar assumption with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis on the relationship between language and culture, Kaplan’s earlier works explored a link between culturally specific logic or thought patterns and paragraph structures in English essays written by nonnative English-speaking students.

In previous contrastive rhetorical research, most genre-specific investigations have dealt with expository prose, including journal articles, business reports, letters of application, grant proposals, and newspaper commentaries. These studies include Connor et al.’s (1995) cross-cultural analysis of U.S. and Flemish job applications; Jenkins and Hinds’s (1987) contrastive study of business letter writing in English, French and Japanese; Mauranen’s (1993) contrastive study of Finnish and English writing; Tirkkonen-Condit’s (1988; 1996; Tirkkonen-Condit & Lieflander-Koistinen, 1989) study of editorials in Finnish and English; and Ventola and Mauranen’s (1991) ‘non-native writing and native revising of scientific articles.’

These studies produced findings that explain some characteristics of processes and products of specific genres. The findings indicate, for example, that Japanese and Chinese people tend to be more indirect than Americans in their writing; Finns and English speakers tend to have different coherence conventions; and Koreans students tend not to want to take a strong position in defending business decisions. The major focus of the studies is on textual or structural regularity in relation to different genres. Contrastive rhetoric research has found that rhetorical patterns are an essential component of language. These rhetorical patterns are arbitrary yet rule-governed, and they are also socially constructed and transmitted. Contrastive rhetoric research also shows that rhetorical structures differ between languages and cultures, and these differences are dynamic and change as the society changes (Ostler, 2001).

Kachru (1995) defines contrastive rhetoric as the “comparison of the writing conventions of various languages and cultures as they differ from the perceived norms of writing in American or British English”. On the other hand,Liebman (1988), on the other hand, defines contrastive rhetoric as “the study of how rhetorical expectations and conventions differ among cultures”.

This paper aims to analyze student written American and Filipino excuse letters to find out if there are vast differences between American and Filipino student writing. More specifically, this paper looks into the organizational patterns, sequence of information presentation, directness, as well as the special features of contents of the letters.