A narrow-angled corpus analysis of moves and strategies of the genre: 'Letter of application'

Nowadays, the term 'genre' is thought of as sociolinguistic activity through which members of a discourse community achieve their communicative goals. A genre approach to language teaching attempts to teach learners the main parts, 'moves', of a genre and the most common Linguistic features associated with the moves. To date, many genre analyses have been carried out in academic and ESP settings. Some of these studies have shown that writers or speakers can realise moves through different rhetorical options a which following Bhatia [(1993). Analysing genre: language use in professional settings. London: Longman], we call 'strategies', None of these ee studies, however, has made full use of computer analysis to obtain exact linguistic information on the moves and strategies of a genre. This paper reports on a genre analysis, complemented by the Wordsmith suite of computer programs for corpus analysis (Scott, M, (1996). Wordsmith tools tools [computer program]. Oxford University Press, Oxford. (Internet: http:// www.oup.co.uk/elt/software/wsmith)), of the moves and strategies of the Letter of Application. The results show striking differences between the different levels of analyses and from 'general' English. The paper concludes that this type of analysis provides language teachers with essential information that can make teaching and learning more effective. (C) 2001 The American University. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.