| As the economy of China is growing so fast, the international trade is becoming more and more frequent. However, no matter how business firms try to be cooperative in the trade, mistakes may happen. The letters of claims (LOCs) are used very commonly in international business communication. In this research, in order to do a genre-based analysis of LOC, a corpus of 40 LOCs is created. The aim is to illustrate what the generic structure of LOC is, and how the findings can be applied in pedagogy.The research is mainly based on a quantitative approach. The analysis of LOCs is set out from a macro-textual perspective. We adopt the approach based on the genre study of Swales (1990), Bhatia (1993), Hasan (1989) and so on, to explore the moves and the structural levels of the text. Some detailed explanations are given on the arrangements of the generic structures, and move distributions are given according to the writer's communicative purposes. Besides, a GSP (General Structure Potential)model of LOC is proposed.Through the analysis, it has been found that: (1) the main communicative purposes of LOC are informing and persuading; (2) totally there are twelve moves identified in LOC, which serve the two main communicative purposes. Seven moves among them including letterhead, date, salutation, informing the situation, identifying the problem, lodging a claim and closing, are obligatory. The other five moves including subject line, enclosing documents, suggesting a solution, using pressure tactics and soliciting response, are optional. At last, the author suggests that the genre analysis should be applied in the ESP pedagogy. Based on the genre analysis carried out in the present research, the genre-based ESP teaching approach proposed in the thesis will be helpful to the development of teaching ESP reading and writing. |
