How Japanese ESL writers begin sentences in academic writing.

摘要

How one starts a sentence is very important in academic writing because sentences not only connect grammar to discourse but also create overall cohesion, stylistic variation, and rhetorical effects. This study investigates the similarities/differences in the sentence-initial features used by Japanese ESL writers (ESL) and native English-speaking writers (NES) at the university level.{09}The main areas of concern identified as problematic are the ESL writers' overuse/underuse/misuse of sentence-initial adverbials; in particular, one can observe the ESL writers' overuse of logical connectors and underuse/misuse of stance adverbials. Other problematic ESL areas include the students' use of constructions affecting the sentence initial elements (e.g., underuse/misuse of the non-referential there construction, possible overuse of non-referential it with extraposed complements, and overuse of I + verb expressions) as well as some discourse-level difficulties that they experience in academic writing (e.g., underdeveloped content, unclear references, obscure logic, ambiguous writers' stance). The findings also demonstrate that these ESL problem areas are consistent with the text features salient in a set of essays written by native speakers of Japanese in Japanese (NJS), suggesting the likelihood of transfer from the students' L1 to their L2 writing. Additionally, the reformulation samples used in this study demonstrate how native-speaking ESL instructors deal with those ESL problems and with L1 transfer when transforming original ESL essays to essays of native-like quality. These reformulation samples provide solutions to problems, and they also provide revision samples which may be incorporated into composition instruction.