THE RHETORICAL STRUCTURE AND COMMUNICATIVE STRATEGIES OF THESTUDENTS’ REQUESTS IN THE WEB DISCUSSION FORUM

Abstract

This paper is to describe the rhetorical structure and the communicative strategies that students use in the web discussion forum of Ma Chung University. This web discussion forum allows the participants, especially students, to share their ideas, opinions about the current issues in the campus in the form of written texts. Among 11 students who get involved in discussing two issues, the campus bell and hair coloring, they are most likely to attend to directive based rhetorical structure when they have the same opinions. By contrast, representative based rhetorical structure becomes more obviously apparent when they have diverse opinions among themselves. In order to strengthen the perlocutionary force of the utterance, the students are also most likely to use some communicative strategies such as a colloquial and native language, abbreviation, capitalized letters and emoticon.