The Asian ESP Journal June 2006 Volume 1. Article 2  

Oleh:

Arvani, Mansour

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: The Asian ESP Journal vol. 2 no. 1 (2006), page 12-23.
Topik: discourse analysis; business letters; interpersonal language; pragmatic aspects of language
Fulltext: 24-50.pdf (80.0KB)

Isi artikel

he advent of the 21st century has accompanied globalization in scientific, technical, and economic activities on an international scale, which has magnified the role of English language in international communications. Hence, in order to achieve better and more effective results in international trade, the relevant authorities in non-native companies should be proficient in using business English. To conduct a discourse analysis of business letters written by native English speaking and non-native Iranian communicators, 25 authentic follow-up letters written by Iranians in four big companies in Tabriz, Iran, and 25 authentic letters written by native English writers were sampled. Through Halliday’s (1985) notion of lexical density, the number of lexical and grammatical words was computed. Then, on the basis of the model of schematic structure, the “moves” and “steps” of letters were specified and, finally, the politeness strategies used in the letters were analyzed. The analysis of corpus showed that the Iranian business letter-writers mostly focused on surface linguistic aspects of English language while pragmatic aspects of language, such as using politeness strategies, were ignored in their letter writing. Since the social and interpersonal aspects of language are of great significance for native speakers of English, any mismatch of linguistic forms such as interferences caused by Iranian writers may lead to misunderstanding and annoyance. Consequently, ESP (English for Specific Purposes) teachers should try to familiarize the learners of business English with social features and interactional aspects of the language and direct the learners to use the social sub-skills and pragmatic elements in their business letters.

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