| The present thesis attempts to propose a systematic and comprehensive genre-based approach which can be applied to the teaching of English for Business Purposes (EBP). Within the analytical framework of genre-based theories, the proposed approach is adopted in a descriptive and explanatory study of letters to shareholders (LTS), in terms of their generic structural features, rhetorical features and linguistic features, drawing the insights from relevant aspects of genre analysis, register analysis and discourse/rhetorical analysis. In the quantitative analysis part involves the use of WordSmith 4.0 software package and a corpus of 100 letters to shareholders taken from 100 companies' websites. The 100 companies were randomly chosen from the Global 500 for the year 2000 nominated by the Fortune magazine. In the qualitative analysis part involves the use of a sub-corpus composed of 30 letters randomly taken from the original corpus. After approaching the collection of LTS from three planes of the text-i.e., genre, text type and language, the results generated in the analysis are incorporated into the tasks designed on the basis of the proposed approach to demonstrate how to apply it to the teaching of LTS writing.To situate the approach in a much wider context other than that of LTS, we could tentatively claim that the proposed approach is also of feasibility in teaching other business genres and can be very helpful in material development in EBP teaching. Though seemingly time- and energy-consuming to apply, the approach can overcome the prescriptiveness of the traditional way of teaching genres and assist students to develop their genre, register and rhetoric awareness and become competent in exploiting generic knowledge on their own, which would ultimately prove to be worthwhile. Additionally, the potentiality of the approach being applied to the teaching of listening comprehension, reading, even oral communication to EBP learners would make it more attractive to EBP practitioners. |
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