| English business letters are of various kinds with different communicative purposes, but the variety of move structures in business letters has never been explored before. Most researchers believe that business letters as a typical genre have fixed and stable move structures. In view of this, the present research attempts to conduct a genre analysis of the variety of move structures and the linguistic realization of business letters from the three sub-genres—everyday business letters, bad-news business letters and persuasive business letters.Based on the theoretical fundamentals of genre model pioneered by Swales(1990) and developed by Bhatia(1993), the thesis has carried out a careful analysis of the move structure as well as language strategy of the three sub-genres based on a corpus of 25 business letters in the situational context, which refers to the different phases of a transaction. The analysis reveals that 1) three different types of move structures exist in business letters for everyday business letters, bad-news business letters and persuasive business letters; 2) the variety of move structures in business letters is determined by the communicative purposes; in other words, the move structure varies according to the communicative purpose;3) the most striking language strategy in terms of lexical and syntactic choice are used to achieve the primary communicative purpose of the three sub-genres. Besides, the explanation of the question "Why is a particular text written the way it is" is offered by combining socio-cultural and psycholinguistic aspects of textconstruction. The analysis of some optional moves in business letters further reveals the writer's private intention of promoting some items. In view of the typical problems of Chinese students' writing of business letters, namely, the misuse of move structures and adopting improper form to perform some function, the research may prove its practical value in teaching and writing business letters.
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