Cultural Attitudes in Discourse Analysis

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Abstract
Complex communication difficulties involving stylistics, logic and clarity in the discourse structures of advanced English compositions by writers from another language and culture cannot be explained as merely insufficient knowledge of English grammar, diction or idiom. Such problems do not only involve linguistic differences in the native (NL) and target language (TL) but encompass different stylistic habits, different ways of thinking, and different cultural values. Robert Kaplan has frequently argued that the rhetoric and logic in ESL English compositions vary according to the native language and culture of the writer. In one of his early essays he states:I have tried to demonstrate on the basis of the Arabic language and on the basis of my single example, that rhetoric, the method of organising syntactic units into larger patterns, is as much a culturally coded phenomenon as the syntactic units themselves are (Kaplan 1967:15).

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