Abstract
The aim of this paper is to figure out the difficulties the students of Bachelor of Business English in Ho Chi Minh City University of Food Industry (HUFI) face in commercial correspondence. During the 4th semester of Bachelor of Business English, students in HUFI study the course of commercial correspondence. The major barrier for these students is their inability to use terminology and syntax correctly. For this purpose, data were collected from 100 students from two Business-English-majored classes in HUFI using timed Grammaticality Judgment Tests proposed by Ellis, R. (2005). The results showed that most students were not familiar with terminology commonly used in commerce; they failed to use formal English language syntax in their correspondence writing. In the post-test interviews, students shared that they were not equipped with enough terminology used in commerce, and it was so complicated to use grammar correctly in commercial correspondence. The findings in this paper may serve as a foundation to figure out factors that need to be considered when designing materials and teaching business English.
Highlights
1 Commercial correspondence, a written communication, plays an important role in helping business-English-majored students pursue future careers in foreign-invested enterprises in Vietnam
This paper aims to figure out difficulties in written communication faced by Bachelor of Business English students in HUFI; suggestions to solve the problems are given
Different from the original test suggested by Ellis, R. (2005), the author of this paper kept the nature of 17 grammatical structures; the language used in these 17 sentences was taken from the coursebook of Oxford Handbook of Commercial Correspondence written by Ashley, A. (2007)
Summary
1 Commercial correspondence, a written communication, plays an important role in helping business-English-majored students pursue future careers in foreign-invested enterprises in Vietnam. Learning how to write and use commercial correspondence effectively must be essential for working in foreign-invested enterprises. Business-English-majored students in Ho Chi Minh City University of Food Industry (HUFI) do not seem confident in getting knowledge in this course. They are not good at written communication. They are unaware of common grammatical structures of English that they have been learning at different levels of education, especially those used in commercial correspondence
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