A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of Job Application Letters In English And Chinese

In the past twenty years, genre and genre analyses have become the noticeable topics of the field of linguistic research and teaching, especially the second language teaching. Many genre analyses of spoken and written discourse have been carried out in academic and professional settings. However, there are limited genre analyses on the professional discourse---job application letter despite the fact that it is obligatory in seeking a job. What's more, there have been even fewer contrastive studies of job application letters in English and Chinese from the perspective of genre analysis. Therefore, this thesis is intended to conduct the contrastive study of the letters in two languages via genre analysis to fill in the gap, hoping to gain some insights into the field that has been little touched; aiming at exploring the similarities and differences of the generic structures of the same purpose-oriented genre in Western and Chinese cultures; aiming at helping college graduates and other job applicants understand the social function and communicative purpose of genre and improve their awareness of the generic structure of English cover letter and its writing.In this thesis, Swales's Move-Step analysis model is adopted to analyze the generic structures of the sixty job application letters, which is randomly taken. They constitute two corpora in this research. One corpus is composed of thirty job application letters in English written by the writers of native speaker and the other one consists of thirty job application letters in Chinese. On the basis of the analysis of the communicative purposes, the moves (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993) of the discourse structures of these letters in English and Chinese are identified and compared. In addition, Hasan's Generic Structure Potential (GSP) analysis model is also adopted to describe the obligatory and optional components of the structures of English and Chinese job application letters in a linear sequence.The results of this contrastive study show that some degree of variation exists despite a certain degree of homogeneity between the job application letters in Chinese and those in English. The generic structure of the letters in Chinese is more complex than that in English letters, with eight moves in Chinese letters and six moves in English counterparts respectively. A brief discussion of these differences suggests that native writers more closely reflect Swales and Bhatia's model in their letters, while Chinese writers are less aware of the prototypical generic structure of English cover letters. The divergences may be the result of the influence of a number of the factors of social-cultural contexts.On the basis of this research, some important pedagogical implications arise from the findings of this paper. Firstly, the structure and the content should be modified in writing according to the results of the genre-based analysis of the discourse to exert the greatest communicative purpose. Secondly, the prototypical generic structure of English cover letter in this study can be useful in the process of teaching English job application letters to college graduates. Thirdly, this genre-based teaching approach which is characterized by detailed generic analysis and imitation is quite important in the teaching of writing, especially that of ESP (English for Specific Purpose) or EAP (English for Academic Purpose).