ARGUMENTATION DIFFERENCES IN ENL, ESL AND EFL LEARNERS: IDEATIONAL GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR ANALYSIS

Abstract

Ideational Grammatical Metaphor (IGM) plays a crucial role in achieving encapsulation and objectivity in academic writing (Thompson, 2014). This research investigates the use of IGM in expository essays written by English learners from different linguistic backgrounds, namely English as Native Language (ENL), English as Second Language (ESL), and English as Foreign Language (EFL), to explore argumentative differences based on linguistic resources. The Stratal Model of IGM, proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (1999), was applied to a corpus of 15 essays, consisting of five ENL, five ESL, and five EFL essays, drawn from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) (Devrim, 2015). The results indicate that ENL, ESL, and EFL writers used IGM to nominalize their writing by 38%, 37%, and 25%, respectively. The grammatical density in ENL, ESL, and EFL essays was 36%, 32%, and 32%, respectively. These findings suggest that ESL learners, compared to EFL learners, are more argumentative and closer to ENL learners in their argumentative writing. However, the high amount of grammatical density in ENL essays indicates effective use of IGM, including nominal groups, whereas ESL and EFL essays primarily utilized relative clauses for nominalization. This research can be used pedagogically to reduce the argumentative gap between ENL, ESL, and EFL learners by utilizing IGM and emphasizing significant linguistic patterns in argumentative writing.