A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of English Job Application Letters By Chinese And Native Speakers Of English

Regarded as one way of discourse analysis, genre analysis is evolved from the surface-level description of language to the deep-level explanation and has concerned itself most with describing the higher-level organization and structures of written or spoken texts, aiming to study their macro-moves and the strategies and linguistic features that realize the moves based on the communicative purposes. A JAL (Job Application Letter/s) as the written discourse also belongs to study category of genre analysis. However, so far there have been no studies that probe into English Job Application Letters written by Chinese from generic point of view, especially the comparative study between Chinese and English native speakers'(NS) JAL. In view of the shortage and problems in the writing of the JAL by Chinese, within the theoretical framework of genre analysis, the present study investigates 40 English Job Application Letters written by Chinese as the sample. It aims at helping the English learners in China to improve their abilities of the language application.Both a quantitative and a qualitative approach are applied to the present research. This study investigates the generic structure, strategies and linguistic features of English letters written by Chinese and then compares the results with those of Henry and Roseberry'(2001), who studied 40 Job Application Letters written by native speakers of English.Findings suggest that there are some differences between the two groups of letters in three aspects. Firstly, the differences lie in the move structure of the letters. Four additional moves are added in the present corpus on the basis of Henry and Roseberry's 11moves (2001) and the related names and definitions of some of the moves are moderately different from theirs. Secondly, the differences are found in the strategies of the moves. For example, some Chinese writers use"Adversary-glorification"and"Self-glorification"to promote themselves and they are not found in Henry and Roseberry's study (2001). Thirdly, this study analyzes the linguistic features of 5 strategies of the most important move"promoting candidate"and the author shows the differences that the Chinese writers are inadequate in language competence, that is to say, they are not familiar with the flexible use for the native speakers'preferred way when they want to achieve a certain communicative purpose.It is hoped that the research findings can offer some guidance to the writing of this genre for Chinese learners. It also shows the enlightenment for ESP teaching and cross-cultural communication. It is suggested that the teachers and learners should pay special attention to these structural, strategic and linguistic differences, which are likely to bring about the biggest problems to learners who need to produce such discourse. Generally, this dissertation concludes that this type of analysis provides language teachers with essential information that can make teaching and learning more effective.