Developing Genre Awareness for Business Email Correspondence

Abstract

Correspondence, may it be in written or electronic format, has dominated the business realm for ages. Malakul and Bowering (2006) examined the moves and steps in research writing at Pibulsongkram Rajabhat University. They analyzed students’ works and writing features through their understanding in genre as well as their grammar and vocabulary and found that genre-bases approaches enhanced the students’ ability to produce better work in academic writing. In this paper, all students in a business writing class are assigned to independently write two emails in class addressed to the teacher: (1) an email to arrange an appointment, and (2) an email in replying an arrange for a meeting using whatever knowledge they already have about letter writing. The former is used to guide each student to write a formal email to make an appointment with a potential business partner and the latter is used to guide each to write either a formal letter of acceptance or refusal. Then students were explicitly taught about the generic structure these business letters. After the intervention, the students were instructed to write again two business letters of making an arrangement and replying to an arrangement for a meeting using the generic structure (moves and steps) they enhanced students’ business correspondence writing skills as the data collected from students’ post-test. They study discusses that a combination of genre and familiar task can create a crucial pedagogical tool which is expected to serve as a springboard to improve the email writing skills that can be used in formal business settings.