Section outline
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Introduction
For most students writing a research paper is difficult, partly because it takes critical thinking to analyse and organize other people’s information into a new entity: their personal approach to a topic in their papers. In addition, English writing requires a specific logical flow of information, which is planned into the document before it is written.
According to Kaplan (1966), most students from non-English-speaking cultures speak and write in different patterns which are culturally based. In his landmark article, he presented these five diagrams to illustrate this point. Although there has been much further discussion on cross-cultural communication since this time, the basic general patterns are still widely accepted. Look at the diagrams below. Do you recognize yourself?
Kaplan, 1966, p.1 KAPLAN, R. B. 1966. Cultural Thought Patternsin Inter-Cultural Education. In LanguageLearning, 16, p. 1-20.