Abstract:

The past decade has seen a powerful trend in Russian tertiary education towards soft skills development among university students, favoring them over hand skills. The traditional Russian higher education model is characterized by focusing primarily, if not exclusively, on hard skills. However, with the pressing need to internationalize Russian universities so that they fit into the global education and research landscape, there emerged a need for a shift.

An immediate response to the challenge consisted in ‘‘importing’’ British and American curricula to introduce classes of Academic Writing and, later, Academic Public Speaking in Russian universities. However, the attempts to blindly transplant a foreign rhetorical tradition have proved to be misguided. Although both the Anglo-Saxon and Russian academic rhetorics are rooted in the Greek culture, their evolution over the centuries resulted in two separate and non-identical rhetorical traditions. The differences are particularly striking when a student, an instructor or a researcher who was raised in a Russian academic environment is taught or forced to adopt Anglo-Saxon conventions.

The resulting tension can be most efficiently addressed by an adjustment of the existing ‘‘domestic’’ conventions and creation of a customized rather than one-size-fits-all curriculum. To be able to take into account the ‘‘domestic’’ conventions, there has to be an inventory of them.

The present paper reflects research conducted within the framework of contrastive rhetoric, as proposed by R. Kaplan in his seminal ‘‘doodle paper’’ (Kaplan 1966) which threw into the spotlight a need to identify national patterns and build on them when teaching academic writing in English to international students. We start on the premise that before tackling the language issues, the course should address rhetorical strategies and argumentation patterns, as errors in these areas often prove to be a bigger barrier to understanding than purely linguistic mistakes.

We analyze a sampling of English-language argumentative essays written by an advanced English class of Russian L1 speakers before they received any instruction in academic writing. We then identify the emergent rhetorical patterns and argumentation chosen by the students. We hypothesize that students will transfer the accepted Russian argumentation patterns and rhetorical strategies into their English language essay.

Keywords:

Academic writing, rhetoric, contrastive rhetoric, argumentation, English for Academic Purposes.