Case Study: A Genre Analysis Of English Cover Letters Written By Chinese In Business Setting

In the past three decades, there is a growing interest in the study of business letters in applied linguistics, particularly in bilingual education. However, most of the attention has been on the generic structures of various cover letters with the emphasis on how to write a cover letter in the way in which a native English speaker does, few of them have taken the target reader, the job recruiter, into consideration. Furthermore, most corpuses in previous studies are from various sources and few case studies have probed into this specific genre in real business settings.This case study means to trace Chinese job seekers' ability in utilizing the generic moves to articulate the communicative purpose and Chinese job recruiters' preference for cover letters. It is divided into two phases:first, it examines the move structure of 56 cover letters written by Chinese job applicants for the same authentic position "CEO Assistant" advertised on the website of a professional headhunting firm; second, a questionnaire is used to elicit information about job recruiters'preference for moves and strategies.The results reveal that the cover letters in present corpus bearing such features:(a) Not being complete. There are no obligatory moves in present corpus. All the ten moves indentified in present study are optional.(b) Not being courteous.14% of the cover letters lack the move "Opening" or "Polite Ending", which indicates a lack of courtesy.(c) Not being concrete. The move "Promoting the Candidate "appears in 27 letters with an occurrence of 48%.Nearly half of the applicants write cover letters just as a note to enclose the resume.The survey reveals that 86%Chinese recruiters prefer the cover letters with the move "Promoting the Candidate". In addition, those cover letters without the move "Promoting the Candidate" are considered to fail to articulate the communicative purpose by 73% of the participants. Of the seven strategies, "Listing qualifications" and "Stating how skills, abilities were obtained" are considered to be the most essential.The research findings are hoped to offer some enlightenment to ESP learners and teachers as well as job seekers. It is suggested that people should be aware of the cultural difference and be alert for the preference of the target readers in real business settings by taking the target speech community into consideration.