Abstract

Since the first contrastive rhetoric study by Kaplan in 1966, many studies have been produced, and over several decades of development, there have been many contributions gained from previous contrastive rhetoric studies. Some researchers summarized and made critiques about certain studies. Stapleton (2002) claims the differences between academic writing in an L1 and an L2 are often misrepresented and overstated. The study disagrees with Stapleton. The study believes that there are differences between academic writing in L1 and L2. Results of many studies support my argument that there do exist differences between academic writing in L1 and L2 in various aspects and they are not overstated. The study will categorize the differences in three major parts as following: differences in the level of lexicon, differences in the level of sentence, and differences in the level of passage. Besides, one point worth’s further consideration, that is, languages is dynamic and they will change with many factors such as time, cross-cultural communication, etc. The dynamic development of language could push contrastive rhetoric studies to go further and wider and then help people understand each other better in the cross-cultural communication.

Key words: Contrastive rhetoric studies, differences between academic writing, English and Chinese.