A Comparative Genre Analysis Of English Corporate Mission Statements Of Chinese And American Commercial Banks

The study investigated English corporate mission statements of American and Chinese commercial banks based on genre analysis model in ESP school and Mission Statement Evaluation Matrix(in terms of 9 component) in management field. 30 American commercial banks’ mission statements constitute Corpus A and 30 Chinese commercial banks’ mission statements constitute Corpus B. The data were analyzed and contrasted both qualitatively and quantitatively aiming to explore similarities and differences in move structure and linguistic features between two corpora and seek possible explanations to differences from socio-cultural perspectives. At the same time, according to Mission Statement Evaluation Matrix, qualities of mission statements of American and Chinese commercial banks were measured and compared quantitatively in terms of number of components that fits an ideal one. The following main results were obtained:Compared to American commercial banks, Chinese commercial banks contain an exclusive private intention in their mission statements, namely to set behavioral standards for employees to abide by. What’s more, mission statements of American and Chinese commercial banks share all five moves among most of which have three to five steps to realize individual purposes. However, they differ in flexibilities and the actual realization of these moves and steps. Thirdly, American and Chinese commercial banks prefer different lexical features to realize moves and steps, such as different addresses, peculiar choice of words. Differences above are mainly caused by social and cultural differences in such as power distance, individualism/collectivism etc. At the same time, after measuring and contrasting qualities of CMS of American and Chinese commercial banks in light of Mission Statement Evaluation Matrix, it was found that CMS of both American and Chinese commercial banks were not satisfactory to some degree in quality while the quality of the former is superior to the latter.This research revealed characteristics of CMS as a genre, depicted similarities and differences in moves/steps and language choices between mission statements of American and Chinese commercial banks, provided guiding suggestions for makers and writers of CMS, and also proved to be pedagogically helpful.