A Comparative Genre Analysis of English Business E-mails Written by Iranians and Native English Speakers

Abstract

The present study aimed at conducting a comparative genre analysis of English business e-mails at generic and lexico-grammatical levels. To this end, a corpus of 60 English business e-mails written by Iranians was compared with a counterpart corpus comprising the same number of emails written by the native English speakers. All of these e-mails served the same communicative purpose (i.e. providing and/or requesting information and actions). They were investigated following Swales (1990), Bhatia (1993) and Santos's (2002) notion of genre analysis. The results revealed that Iranian and native English business correspondents followed closely similar generic structures to exchange information. Moreover, Iranian correspondents favored the lexico-grammatical expressions that helped them respect their interlocutors’ negative face whereas the native English speakers tried to encourage a friendly and intimate atmosphere. Investigating structures and characteristics of English language realized in business settings and for commercial purposes, this study offered a number of implications for business English teaching staff, material developers, and last but not least, business negotiators.