Genre-pragmatic Strategies in English Letter-of-application Writing of Jordanian Arabic–English Bilinguals

Abstract

This study reports an investigation of the genre components and pragmatic strategies of letters of applications written by Jordanian Arabic–English bilinguals. Specifically it is set up to trace how far novice non-native speakers of English are able to utilise the generic components and politeness strategies of the target language that strongly correlate with communicative success in social interactions. A corpus of 90 job application letters written by 90 job applicants was collected and analysed within the move structure analysis proposed by Bhatia (1993) and the framework of Brown and Levinson's (1987) model of politeness. The results indicate that politeness strategies are inappropriately utilised and the genre components are poorly managed in the letters of applications. The letters reflect particular strategic moves that are not usually utilised by English native speakers. The bilingual writers tend to avoid negative politeness but make frequent inappropriate use of positive politeness strategies due to their ignorance of the social-cultural constraints governing their selection. This suggests a difference based on areas of cultural transfer rather than on a language effect. We hope the results of this study will be of help to foreign language instructors in increasing their students' consciousness of cross-cultural preferences, the essential genre specific meaning components and appropriate pragmatic strategies in order to write in a manner that is acceptable to native speakers of the target language.

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