| ESL or EFL students always bring their cultures into the classroom. Therefore, when they write in English their culture is also emerged in their style of writing. This theory was firstly introduced by Kaplan in 1966. Ever since that, many researchers have been arguing about this theory. This theory is called contrastive rhetoric. However, there is another view from other researchers that education plays a major role in English writing not cultural ackground. Therefore, the researcher does this study to know whether student who has been exposed to English for a long time can still be influenced by his L1 style when he writes in English. The purposes of this study is to know to what extent cultural and educational background affect somebody’s writing especially in argumentative essay which already has a pattern in it. The participants come from Australian International School. They are two Japanese students, two Korean students, one Thai student, and five Indonesian students.In order to do this research, the researcher needs to know the preferred English style of writing because it is needed to compare those essays written by ten Asian students. Another element that is important in this research is the meaning of culture itself and how culture related to writing. Therefore, the researcher shows the culture from Japan, Korea, Thai, and Indonesia in this study. This explanation about the four cultures gives a general view about those cultures that can help the researcher to analyze the cultural background affecting students’ writing performance. The next information needed is of course from contrastive rhetoric itself. Basically contrastive rhetoric is a theory which says that “any given language is likely to have written texts that are constructed using identifiable discourse features, and these features may differ across languages or coded using different linguistic configurations.” (Connor, 2003). From the time the theory was introduced by Kaplan, there have been numerous linguists who did research on contrastive rhetoric. All of them compared the writing from various cultural backgrounds to English style of writing. There are contrastive rhetoric study on Japanese writing, Korean writing, Thai writing, and Indonesian writing. Since this study focuses on one type of writing, Argumentative writing, there are several previous studies that would give valuable insight to this study. Those previous studies are done by Choi (1988 as cited in Connor 1996), Connor (1987), Arsyad (2000), and Hinkel (1999). Information from English style of writing to previous studies on contrastive rhetoric study helps the researcher to do the research about contrastive rhetoric on argumentative essays written by international school students.The data for this study come from two Japanese students, two Korean students, one Thai student, and five Indonesian students in Australian International School. They were in their eleventh and twelfth grade. They were asked to write an argumentative essay. They were also asked by the researcher to fill a two-page questionnaire. From the questionnaire, the researcher could find out about students’ experience in studying English and students’ preferences in culture and in writing an argumentative essay. The last data taken by the researcher was an interview with the English teacher in that international school. The result of this gives insight about Asian students’ behavior in writing and the cultures that emerged in the writing product. And then, the argumentative essays written by these Asian students were analyzed using the problem-solution pattern of argumentative essay or dialogic process that was proposed by Tirkkonen-Condit (1984) and those essays were also analyzed using a speech act theory or monologic process which was proposed by Toulmin (1958).The findings show that most of them can follow the pattern of English argumentative essay and the speech act theory. However, there is significant difference between what the researcher calls as a non-native speaker and a near native speaker learners. In this study there are four near native speakers of English learners and six non-native speakers of English learners. Although almost all of them could follow the argumentative pattern, the non-native speakers show that their cultural background still affect the way they write in English and the near native speakers show that their educational backgrounds have more effect on their performance in writing argumentative essay. However, the researcher finds that near native speakers still have little influence from their culture. Therefore this finding does support the theory from Kaplan and at the same time it proves that educational background also plays a major role in EFL students’ writing performance.In conclusion, the researcher finds that most of the ten Asian students in Australian International School who come from Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia still write in a circular way because they are affected by their Asian culture. However, some of them indicate that they could write in a style that is similar to linear style. This happens because of the influence of their educational background in English language. Apart from all of these, they could follow the preferred English argumentative pattern and the speech act of argumentation. They can follow the pattern because the teacher of Australian International School had already prepared them with knowledge of how to make an argumentative essay before she told them to write an essay. This study can give insight not only to the teacher in Australian International School but also to teachers of ESL or EFL students. This study can make them more aware of their students’ behavior and cultural influence in their students’ writing. |