Exploring the Rhetorical Devices in the Egyptian University Students’ Argumentative Essays

Abstract

This chapter presents the conclusions to the answers of the four research questions discussed in chapter four. In addition, this chapter presents some practical implications for ESL teachers, students, and academic writing courses designers. This is followed by the limitations of the present study, as well as recommendations for future research. 5.1Main Findings After conducting this research, the following conclusions can be reached from the discussion in chapter four: 1- Argumentative writing is a cognitively demanding task that requires good planning, drafting, and revising before it is ready for the intended audience. The EUS selected for this study have moderate knowledge of the organization of the argumentative essay, in which they present claims supported with data, and involve opposition together with refutations. Nevertheless, their claims are mostly inconsistent and force the reader to infer, their data is weak and incomplete, their warrants do not exist for the most part, their oppositions are not enough to convince their audience, and their responses to oppositions are mostly incomplete or irrelevant. Students should be taught how to defend their own arguments in relevant plausible reasoning. They should also be directed to being objective by involving multiple counter arguments in their essays together with relevant refutations. 2- It is also concluded in relation to the EUS use of opposition and response to opposition, that these two variables are not correlated with each other's. Interestingly, the high score on the response to opposition does not necessarily correspond to a similar high score on the opposition.This is due to the students’ weak essay organization in relation to the opposing arguments and their refutations, as they either refute one opposing argument, or they list two different sides of the argument without referring to their position towards the issue of dispute. 3- It is worth noting that awareness of the metadiscourse markers and how to effectively use them in a written text is highly important, especially within an argumentative genre. Employing appropriate metadiscourse markers will help the EUS communicate effectively with their readers, and thus increase the quality of their writings. It can be concluded that the use of appropriate transitions in addition to conscious recognition of counter-arguments would enhance the writing quality and level of persuasion in the students’ argumentative essays. 4- EUS persuasive adaptiveness to their audience can be enhanced by assigning a specified audience in the essay prompts to be addressed by the students, instead of addressing the teacher in every argumentative topic. Addressing audience needs and perspectives, together with sufficient use of data, and including multiple counter-arguments would enhance the writing quality. 5- It can be further concluded that, it is difficult for the EUS to achieve coherence, because of their inability as L2 learners to find the right words that would help them organize their ideas in their essays.