Tvärkulturella skrivstrategier : Kohesion, koherens och argumentationsmönster i iranska skribenters texter på svenska : a study of cohesion, coherence and argumentative patterns in essays written in Swedish by Iranian students

Sammanfattning: For an adult immigrant student, writing in a second language often means adapting to a new writing culture. The main research question dealt with in this dissertation is whether L1 rhetorical influence occurs in writing in Swedish as a second language (SSL).The material consists of 35 argumentative texts written by immigrant Iranians and two control groups consisting of 66 texts written by Swedes and 32 texts written by immigrant student writers of varying language background.The study tries to combine methods and concepts from both text linguistics and classical rhetoric. The text analyses include cohesion and coherence patterns, linear structure and argumentative strategies in the rhetorical parts of the text.The results show that the most salient differences between the Iranian group and the control groups concern the argumentative patterns, whereas the results from the analysis of the coherence patterns rather point to similarities between both groups of SSL writers. While the argumentation in the Iranians' texts most often follows the pattern "situation-problem" and begins with a general introduction to the problem, the texts in the control groups are dominated by the "problem-solution" pattern, and in many cases an introduction to the problem is lacking.It is argued that the argumentative patterns that distinguish the Iranians from the control groups might be explained by different writing traditions and values in the writers' cultural background. This assumption is supported in interviews with the writers and with a group of Iranian reference persons.