7 Th Intercultural Rhetoric and Discourse Conference Concurrent Session Abstracts

One of the distinguishing features of advanced-level L2 learners is that they can “direct their writing to specific audiences, and they demonstrate an ability to alter style, tone, and format according to the specific requirements of the discourse” (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 2001, p. 2) and use “language flexibly and effectively for social purposes, including emotional, allusive and joking usage” (Council of Europe, 2001, p. 83). References to style, tone, emotion, and allusion in these widely used language proficiency scales point to the ability to encode interpersonal meanings (Halliday, 1994) in advanced-level written discourse. Important as these descriptors are, they are, however, too general to shed enough light on this layer of communication and, therefore, need to be fleshed out to better inform L2 writing research and pedagogy. Adopting the appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005) as the theoretical lens, I will share the findings of a study that explored the genre-specific writings of advanced-level American learners of Persian. I will elaborate how these developing L2 writers rely on (or fail to rely on) the interpersonal sub-systems of ‘affect’, ‘judgment’, and ‘appreciation’ in writing film critiques in a Persian-as-an-additional-language course focusing on Iranian cinema. My discussion will further detail how their use of the appraisal subsystems functions to finely differentiate the students in terms of their L2 writing proficiency and the rhetorical impact of their writings. I will end by discussing the implications of the findings for L2 writing research, pedagogy, and assessment.