An Analysis of the Physical Elements and Rhetorical Moves in Application Letters of Filipinos and Thais

Abstract

An application letter is an initial document required of an applicant for a possible hiring by an employer. Among different linguistic and cultural contexts, there are 7 physical elements of an application letter considered by the Washington University of St. Louis (2020) as the most common ones. The nine rhetorical moves presented by Upton and Connor (2011) were used as the basis of the study. Fifteen applications letters written by Filipino graduating students and another 15 application letters written by Thai graduating students were used as a set of corpus. To determine the physical elements used by the respondents, a simple frequency count was used, and to analyze the moves employed by the writers, the coding analysis of Upton and Connor (2011) was employed. A move was classified as obligatory if its total occurrences is above 60% and if it is below 60%, a move is considered optional. Two language teachers as inter coders were also requested. The results revealed that both groups included only 6 elements in their application letters. They excluded the last element which is enclosure. This finding may be attributed to the level of familiarity or awareness of the writers are regards to the inclusion of the enclosure in an application letter. With regard to the rhetorical moves, the Filipino graduating students considered 6 out of 9 moves as obligatory while the Thai graduating students considered 7 moves as obligatory and only 2 moves as optional.