Corpus Application to Business Email Writing:A Genre-based Approach
A wide range of ESP genres such as business English or legal English have their own specific expressions, grammatical constructions, plots, styles and structural characteristics which require students to follow and master in certain institutional communication. As indicated by Swales (1990), genre analysis has the most potential for developing genre theory in ESP. In terms of the perspectives of Martin (1984), Swales (1993, 1997) and Dudley-Evans et al. (1998), the present study integrated the genre-based instruction with the use of an online corpus to help EFL learners business email writing varied from academic papers (EAP). The purpose of the study is twofold: to raise learners awareness of the generic and structural features, and to improve their business writing through the use of the mini-corpus. A total of 81 participants were selected from two classes of applied foreign languages students in a college. The collected data primarily came from the two aspects: a English proficiency test, and the tests of business writing. Their business letters were analyzed according to shared communicative purposes and rhetorical features. The moves and steps for the generic business writing were presented. The finding has shown that the generic writing group outperformed the regular writing group with a slightly different significance, followed by discussion on the pedagogical implications.
Ching-ying Lee
Department of English Kang Ning Junior College
国际会议
2009 International Conference on Applied Linguistics & Language Teaching(2009应用语言学暨语言教学国际研讨会)
台湾
英文
360-369
2009-04-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）