To challenge the view that the Chinese English learners show almost no significant difference in discourse rhetoric from the American native speakers,this paper applies the rhetorical structure theory to investigate the rhetorical relations in the compositions written by the Chinese and the American college students. One hundred movie reviews have been selected from the Chinese Learner Corpus of English Argumentative Essay and American Corpus of Native English Argumentative Essay. The results show significant differences in discourse rhetoricity between the two groups although both of them rel...
