Critical Perspectives on Contrastive Rhetoric: A Report From Iranian's EFL Reading Textbooks

The efficacy of genre-based approach to teaching writing has been regarded as an influential practice in L2 writing pedagogy (Hyland, 2007). However, there is still gap between actual structures found in reading materials recommended as textbooks and discourse patterns recommended for L2 writing in EFL contexts, the gap which would highlight the problems of genre and rhetorical patterns for teaching. The current study, therefore, is an attempt to explore the level of consistency between the rhetorical patterns found in reading textbooks and discourse pattern recommended for writing. For this purpose, a number of 22 essays selected from textbooks were analyzed to identify (1) the overall rhetorical structures, and (2) the location of main idea and opinion of writers. The results show that while some texts did not follow the three-part structure of introduction-body-conclusion, main idea was presented in the introductory parts of essays, illustrating a deductive rhetorical pattern recommended for English writing. Further research was suggested as well.