A Contrastive Rhetoric Study in Discourse Organization of Chinese and English Educational Emails

This paper explores similarities and differences in discourse organization between Chinese and English educational email writing. The results reveal that a culturally unique organizational pattern in Chinese email discourse is not preferred by native Chinese people, and Chinese email discourse tends to show more similarities than differences with the English at the organizational level. Such cross-cultural similarities in rhetoric may result in positive hi-transfer. The fmdings of this study indicate that culturally unique features may not be prevalent, predominantly preferred patterns may be shared by different languages, and the dynamic language system may receive influence from other linguistic systems with which frequent contact has been made.