Rhetorical Moves in the Learner Writings

4.2.3 Rhetorical Moves in the Learner Writings

The current research adopted the framework developed by Labov and Waletzky (1997), and identified the six rhetorical moves, i.e. Opening, Development, Transition,

Setting, Development, and Closing, in picture writings. A qualitative approach was adopted to judge whether the learners followed the rhetorical structures when composing picture writings and thus improved coherence at the discourse level. The presence and quality of each rhetorical move were analyzed. The results are presented in Table 4.5.

Table 4.5 The Use of Rhetorical Moves in the Participants’ Pretest and Posttest

Writings

Pretest Posttest

Types Frequency Percentage Frequency Percentage

Opening (Scene 30 100 % 30 100 %

96 Description)

Opening (Topic

Presentation)

3 10 % 1 3 %

Development 29 97 % 30 100 %

Transition 19 63 % 22 73 %

Setting 26 87 % 30 100 %

Development 27 90 % 30 100 %

Closing (Moral Lesson) 6 20 % 23 77 %

Closing (Summary) 0 0 % 0 0 %

Note. Percentage = frequency/ the total number of learners (30)

As can be seen in Table 4.5, the frequency of every required rhetorical structure increased after the instruction of rhetorical moves. 22 students, or 73% of them, applied all the rhetorical moves in the posttest. The opening technique, scene description, was found in every student writing and some of the students also employed the other technique, i.e. topic presentation, in their texts. Interestingly, the percentage of the second opening technique, i.e. topic presentation, declined from 10% to 3%. A possible explanation might be that introducing topics required a higher level of thinking. The learners had to summarize the event and presented the topic that

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the whole story revolved around in the beginning. It was optional, but the other opening technique, i.e. scene description, was indispensable in picture writings. After the instruction, the learners created the scene in detail, so they might not be able to step back and present the topic at the same time.

Next, every student properly developed the scene after opening. As for transition, 19 learners, or 63% of them, used the rhetorical move in the pretest. The number rose to 22, which was 73% of the students, in the posttest. The finding implied that, after the instruction of rhetorical moves, most of the learners added the transition between paragraphs, which thus helped improve coherence in student texts. A large number of the transitional techniques students adopted were to specify the chronological order of events, such as using conjunctions, “when” and “after” in clauses. Some learners employed adverbs, including “then” and “suddenly” to connect events in different paragraphs. The adverb, “unfortunately”, was also commonly found to present the twist of stories.

The next rhetorical move, setting, was identified in 26 pretest writings. Some of the students misinterpreted the picture prompts or jumping to the conclusion without creating the scene in the second paragraph. However, the percentage of setting increased from 87% to 100% in posttest writings. Except those students who misunderstood the picture prompts, most of the learners developed the setting

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adequately. The number rose from 27 people in the pretest to 30 people in the posttest with the percentage growing from 90% to 100% after the intervention.

One dramatic progress the learners made was using the closing technique by introducing moral lessons of the story, which was not found before the instruction of rhetorical moves. Only 6 students, or 20% of the students, employed the closing technique in the pretest. Almost every pretest text ended abruptly. Yet, the percentage skyrocketed from 20% to 77% on the posttest. That is, 23 students employed the closing technique. An increase of 57% was observed after the intervention.

In addition, the other closing technique, i.e. summarizing the story, was not found both before and after the instruction. It might be due to the fact that the learners had to reflect on their picture writing first and retell the story in only a few words, which was more difficult than providing the moral lesson. Therefore, no students employed the closing technique. Providing summary could be the goal that teachers worked towards when teaching picture writings.

To conclude, the learners improved the most by applying the closing technique, which was providing moral lesson at the end of the text. A possible reason was that a lesson learned usually followed the story elicited by the picture prompts. In the pretest writings, most of the learners ended the story abruptly without pointing out the moral lesson, which negatively influenced the organization of picture writings. After the

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instruction, quite a few students used sentence patterns, such as “The main characters learned that…,” to realize the rhetorical move. Although sometimes the moral lesson the learners provided might become a cliché, at least, their picture writings were complete and the instruction raised the learners’ awareness to adopt the closing technique.

Next, the learners also made progress by employing the following three rhetorical structures, setting, development and transition in the posttest. The percentage of setting increased by 13%, and 10% more learners adopted the latter two moves after the intervention. Although still eight learners did not employ the transition rhetorical move and seven learners did not implement the closing technique, the other four rhetorical structures were all identified in the posttest writings. The findings corroborated previous studies (Albufalasa, 2013; Brown & Marshall, 2012;

Chen & Su, 2012; Cheng, 2008), in which learners were observed to progress in content development and coherence.