Business Letters Research Articles

Analysing Industry Needs in Orientation to Developing Vocational Students’ Workplace English Communicative Competence for Globalization

This study aimed at examining how English was used at work and what industries actually needed in terms of their staff’s English communicative competence for the current globalization. For these purposes, the research methodology was constructed with the main use of questionnaires survey and interviews with 126 employees and managers from 11 corporates in central Vietnam. The triangulation of data collection instruments, sources of information and various investigated locations helped to sort out important factors in order to enhance the vocational undergraduates’ English communicative competence at work. The findings reveal actual workplace communication needs of English as required by the employees majoring in business administration (BusiAdmin) and yield valid contents significant to developing the BusiAdmin students’ English communicative competence in orientation to the widespread globalization: (i) industries identified English as one of the prioritized recruitment standards; (ii) language skills for job purposes namely telephoning, reading and writing emails, business letters, contracts, memos and minutes, speaking and listening in social situations with business partners and job interviewing were recommended; and (iii) and the suggestions put forth by all the participants were catered for.

An Investigation into Undergraduate Students’ Readiness for Intercultural Written Communication in a Foreign Language

Employees’ ability to interact with international business partners in writing determines the success of their work, but difficulties conducting business correspondence in a foreign language complicate this process. The study aims to assess undergraduate students’ readiness for participation in intercultural written communication in a foreign language. The initial research data included the English language proficiency level for 169 undergraduate economics and management students and a list of difficulties performing written assignments. The study determined the degree of students’ awareness of how to write a business letter and readiness to conduct intercultural written communication. The level of the readiness was divided into high (8.88%), medium (66.27%), and low (24.85%). Such levels are enough for development of the students’ writing skills.

Alternative Forms of Current Business Communication: Text Structure and Composition Evolution

The article deals with the structure and composition of texts of current electronic business communication. The research materials included electronic business letters (initial requests in the sphere of travel and hotel service), initial requests on the pharmaceutical, engineering, and technological Internet forums, and Instagram business communication texts in the sphere of education, real estate, and food. The messages demonstrated evolution of both structure and text architectonics of business letters. The main research methods included monitoring and description combined with the method of comparative language analysis. The structure and composition of electronic business letters and requests on the Internet forums and social networks proved different from traditional business letters due to the text-generating online algorithms. Internet users seem unable to perceive business e-mails, web-forum requests, or social network messages as a segmentable text. Electronic business communication is currently undergoing deformalization and style hybridization as a result of electronic communication peculiarities and liberalization.

Scientific Publishing in Biomedicine: How to Write a Cover Letter?

A cover (covering) letter is a brief business letter introducing the scientific work alongside the submission process of a manuscript and is required by most scientific peer-review journals. A typical cover letter includes the name of the editor and the journal, date of submission, the characteristics of the manuscript, the importance of the work and its relevance to prospective audiences, declarations such as author agreements, conflicts of interest statement, funding source (s), and ethical statements. The letter also includes the contact information of the corresponding author (s) and may also include suggestions of potential reviewers. Spending enough time to draft an informative, comprehensive, and concise cover letter is quite worthwhile; a poorly drafted one would not persuade the editor that the submitted work is fit for publication and may lead to immediate rejection. Here, we provide a practical guide to draft a well-written, concise, and professional cover letter for a scientific medical paper.

Metadiscourse in Business English: Ideas for the EBC Class

Metadiscourse has been defined as the discourse used by writers to help their readers connect, interpret and evaluate their attitudes towards the referential material presented (Vande Kopple, 2002). In his study on CEO’s letters, Hyland (1998b) examined metadiscourse as the manifestation of a writer’s linguistic and rhetorical presence in the text and looked at the persuasive nature of business communication. An awareness of the rhetorical power of metadiscourse in this text genre is vital for professional development, particularly in the teaching of business English. This study was designed to examine the use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse in Business English writing through an analysis of the Enron Email Dataset and the Business Letter Corpus. The data analysis was conducted following Hyland (2005, 2019), in order to understand how content and discourse are set up to orient and persuade the reader. Although this study focuses specifically on interactional metadiscourse, the results are expected to be relevant for the ESP classroom, particularly in English for Business Communication (EBC) classes (Bhatia & Bremner, 2012). Acquiring conscious awareness of the rules and conventions to master formal writing can be of great help to business students in order for them to become successful writers in both academic and professional environments.

Openings and Closings in Workplace Emails

Languages vary when it comes to linguistic manifestations of formal politeness, but what particularly marks professional email communication is the flexibility of the genre compared to traditional, formal business letters. This poses the question of how individual email writers navigate without clear standards and clearly prescribed formulae. This study focuses on the individual email writer and, specifically, opening salutations and closing valedictions in 927Norwegian workplace emails, followed by metapragmatic interviews with their senders. In an egalitarian society with few explicit linguistic manifestations of formal politeness, individual choices of formulations provide a rich source of data. Linguistic content analysis reveals a significant degree of consistency in each person’s individual use, which indicates that when there are no commonly held norms, people make their own rules. The interviewees are aware ofwhich openings and closings they prefer, but often not why. Further analysis of the data reveals that hierarchical social distance is not a motivational factor, but the intentions to be either personally close or professionally distant are. Both are regarded as viable options in formal workplace emails by their users. However, the informants’ perception of which linguistic items represent these motivations depends on individual preferences rather than on any establishedor institutionalised practises. The latter is not a uniquely Norwegian problem, but concerns email correspondents in general because of the flexibility innate to the email genre.

TEACHING BUSINESS ENGLISH CORRESPONDENCE IN THE DIGITAL ERA IN POLITEKNIK KOMPUTER NIAGA LPKIA BANDUNG

Up to the present era of digital technology, printed-letters sent by post or electronic-mail have a very important role in businesses and government institutions. Meanwhile, the learning process of Business English Correspondence at the Polytechnic of LPKIA Bandung has not been much adjusted to the advancement of information and communication technology, so it might not suffice the needs of students who must work after they graduate. This study aims to describe the positive impact on the ability of students to produce and send business letters after studying the improved Business English Correspondence subject at the polytechnic mentioned above. The method used is descriptive analytics, and the data collection techniques are literature studies, questionnaires and interviews. The research comprises stages from analyzing pre-questionnaire evaluation result, revising and implementing the syllabus in the class, to analyzing post-questionnaire evaluation result. This study reveals that after completing the improved Business English Correspondence course, most students’ awareness and ability increases in producing and sending business English letters and e-mail more properly. The conclusion is that a number of improvements should be made to the Business English Correspondence learning contents and methods to be able to keep pace with the current advances in digital technology.

Innovations in Teaching Business Letter Writing at Nonlinguistic Universities: Individually Differentiated Approach

Innovations in Teaching Business Letter Writing at Nonlinguistic Universities: Individually Differentiated Approach

Pengembangan Website Desa Dalam Meningkatkan Kualitas Pelayanan Publik di Desa Bona, Gianyar

The poor quality of public services in Indonesia must be addressed by the government. One of the government's efforts to improve the quality of public services is to take advantage of advances in information technology in the process of governance. This is known as e-government or electronic or internet-based government administration. The process of implementing e-government goes through several stages, namely presence (web presence), interaction (interaction), transactions (transactions), and transformation (transformation). This study aims to determine how the implementation of e-government through the provision and operation of village websites can improve the quality of public services in Bona Village. This research is a qualitative-descriptive type of research that describes and explains the results of research based on relevant data collected through observation and literature study. The analysis of the research data used the Miles and Huberman model which included the initial data collection stage, the data reduction stage, the data presentation stage, and then the conclusion drawing stage. The results of this study are the application of e-government is carried out through the provision and operation of village websites as a means of public services that are easy, practical, and efficient. There are several services related to village administration including writing business letters, complaint reports, writing letters for other purposes, and essential telephone services. These services can be accessed by the village community easily and through a mechanism or procedure that is not complicated, so that the community feels satisfied with the public services they get. Based on the research results, it can be concluded that the application of e-government through the provision and operation of village websites that provide easy and practical public services can improve the quality of public services in Bona Village. Through the application of e-government, the implementation of village government can be carried out effectively, efficiently, transparently and accountably.

Comparison of College Faculty and Business Professionals as Evaluators of Student Business Letters

This article reports on assessments of business letters assigned to students in a business communication course. Assessments were performed by faculty in other disciplines and local business professionals, with each sampled assignment evaluated by one faculty and one business professional. Overall, the assessments by the two groups were similar in terms of evaluation items related to quality of content and organization. However, faculty evaluators rated the letters lower on items related to mechanics, while business professional evaluators rated the letters lower on items related to professionalism. The paired assessments revealed only limited consistency between the two evaluator groups.

An Analysis of the English Language Needs of Customer Contact and Secretarial Operation Coordination Trainees: Some Selected Technical and Vocational Colleges in Ethiopia

This study is mainly conducted to find out the English language needs of Customer Contact and Secretarial Operation Coordination Level IV trainees. To achieve this objective, purposive sampling technique was used to select content area teachers while comprehensive sampling technique was used to include trainees and English language teachers. A survey research was the design of this study. To this end, questionnaire and interview were employed to collect data. Both quantitative and qualitative methods of data analysis were used in the study. The findings of the study showed that writing, speaking, reading and listening skills are prioritized by trainees according to their order. In the area of micro skills, listening to lectures to take notes and listening to class discussions were showed as highly needed micro-skills. With regard to speaking activities, asking and answering questions and participating in whole class discussion were highly needed speaking micro-skills. Reading reference books and reading lecture notes, writing different project works like term papers, assignments and sample personal and business letters were identified as the most important speaking and writing micro-skills. Vocabulary was found more important than grammar. Most trainees reported that they find asking and answering questions and writing different project works like term papers and assignments, sample personal and business letters difficult. The reason for this might be because the courses offered are inefficient to help them develop these skills. Disparity was also found between their language problems and the courses they take. Finally, based on these findings, recommendations were also forwarded.

Exploring the effects of corpus-based business English writing instruction on EFL learners’ writing proficiency and perception

This exploratory research presents the implementation and evaluation of the effects of integrating corpus consultation with business English writing instruction. The subjects consisted of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners enrolled in two undergraduate business English writing classes. Two groups of EFL students were randomly assigned, one group (n = 49) receiving corpus-based writing instruction constructed on a Moodle course management system (CMS), while the other group (n = 58) was given traditional lecture-based instruction. A mixed methods design combining qualitative and quantitative approaches has been chosen to investigate the overall effect of the corpus-based intervention on the improvement of business letter writing performance in aspects of lexical and syntactic complexity, as well as learners’ perceptions. The comparison of the pre- and post-tests of writing revealed a significant difference between the experimental and control groups after the instruction. Significant differences in students’ lexical and syntactic complexity were found between the pre- and post-test of the experimental group. Further, in response to a questionnaire survey and interview, the students stated they improved their writing skills regarding vocabulary, syntactic structure and content in general, and their writing confidence and linguistics awareness were also enhanced. The results suggest that the corpus provides useful resources to supplement existing materials.

A Business letter from Egyptian Museum

The current paper is an edition of unpublished Greek documentary papyrus from Cairo Museum under glass 86 of the S(pecial) R(egister) Nr. 3049 with inv. 161. This papyrus is from Tampemou (Oxyrhynchite nome) and dates back to third Century A.D. This papyrus text is a business letter. The letter preserved some details about transport of sheep made by the official who travelled south to Tampemou in the eastern toparchy of the Oxyrhynchite Nome. The verso contains two lists of the landowners, and the amounts of wheat recorded after their names. The purpose of amounts of wheat on the verso did not serve for taxation, because there is nothing to indicate the taxation. The names of the people appeared in two lists probably they were tenants, and the amounts of wheat recorded after their names may be the rentals which they paid for their leaseholds, but the rates of rent in private tenancy were usually higher. Thus it is possible that they were sharecroppers. The sharecropping is a type of farming in which sharecropper rents small plots of land from a landowner in return for a portion of his crop, to be given to the landowner at the harvest. The sharecropper agreed to hand over a proportion between one third and two thirds of the crop to the landowner, instead of paying a rent. The landowner provided the sharecropper with land, seeds, and tools, these supplies were deducted from the portion of the sharecropper. The papyrus has been presented as follows: general description of the contents of the papyrus, dimensions of the papyrus in centimeters, number of lines of text, arrows indicate the direction of writing relative to that of papyrus surface, a transcription of the Greek text, English translation and extensive commentary.تلخيص: الورقة البحثية الحالية هى عبارة عن نشر بردية وثائقية يونانية غير منشورة من متحف المصري بالقاهرة، رقم الزجاجة 86 للسجل الخاص 3049 تحت رقم الجرد 161. هذه البردية تأتي من طامبيمو (إقليم أوکسيرينخوس) وتعود إلى القرن الثالث الميلادي. نص هذه البردية هو خطاب عمل. احتفظ الخطاب ببعض التفاصيل حول نقل الأغنام، التي قام بها المسؤول الذي سافر جنوبا إلى طامبيمو في القسم العلوي الشرقي لإقليم أوکسيرينخوس. يحتوي ظهر البردية على قائمتين لملاک الأراضي وکميات من القمح مسجلة بعد أسمائهم. الغرض من کميات القمح على ظهر البردية لم تخدم الضرائب، لأنه لا يوجد ما يشير إلى الضرائب. ظهرت أسماء الأشخاص في قائمتين يحتمل أنهم کانوا مستأجرين، وقد تکون مقادير القمح المسجلة بعد أسمائهم هي الإيجارات التي دفعوها مقابل إيجاراتهم، لکن معدلات الإيجار في الإيجارات الخاصة کانت أعلى عادة. ومن ثم فمن الممکن أنهم کانوا مزارعين. المزارعة هي نوع من الزراعة حيث يقوم المزارع باستئجار قطع صغيرة من الأرض من مالک الأرض مقابل جزء من محصوله، يتم إعطاؤه لمالک الأرض عند الحصاد. وافق المزارع على تسليم نسبة تتراوح بين ثلث وثلثي المحصول إلى مالک الأرض، بدلا من دفع إيجار. قدم صاحب الأرض للمزارع الأرض والبذور والأدوات، وقد تم خصم هذه الإمدادات من جزء المزارعة. قدمت البردية على النحو التالي: وصف عام لمحتويات البردية، أبعاد البردى بالسنتيمتر، عدد أسطر النص، الأسهم تشير إلى اتجاه الکتابة بالنسبة إلى سطح البردية، ثم نسخ النص اليوناني، وترجمة النص اليوناني إلى الإنجليزية والتعليق علي أسطر البردية.

К ВОПРОСУ О СОДЕРЖАНИИ ПРАКТИЧЕСКИХ ЗАНЯТИЙ ПО РУССКОМУ ЯЗЫКУ И КУЛЬТУРЕ РЕЧИ БАКАЛАВРОВ-ЭКОНОМИСТОВ В НИУ МГСУ

Teaching Russian language and speech culture is presently focused on building professional skills of students of various specialties. The purpose of this article is, based on questioning of students of Economy of Enterprises and Organizations studying the discipline, Russian Language and Speech Culture, to find out their communicative needs and, on this basis, to offer such topics of practical lessons that will increase the motivation of studying this discipline and will contribute to building competences and skills necessary for future professional activity. Analysis of the questioning results has showed that, while studying the discipline, Russian Language and Speech Culture, students would like to acquire new knowledge and skills they need for their study and future work. Practical classes in Russian language and speech culture are aimed at developing communicative skills for work in a team. Effective business communication skills must be developed in students in practical classes. The content of practical classes must include tasks developing the ability of analyzing, interpreting and creating text information, such as reference papers, business letters and personal documents.

Entrepreneurs’ Attitude toward English Proficiency of Interns of Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi

This research was funded by Faculty of Liberal Arts, Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi (RMUTT). The purposes of this research were to 1) determine entrepreneurs’ attitude toward English proficiency of RMUTT interns in the second semester in academic year 2016, and 2) to study the entrepreneurs’ opinions for improving the content of English language courses. The 400 entrepreneurs participating RMUTT internship were selected by multi-stage sampling. The research instrument was a questionnaire (α = 0.94). The statistics used for data analysis were frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, and f-test. Findings of the research revealed that the organizations moderately used English language in workplace and using English in a workplace had no significant difference among types of the organizations. Most organizations did not require English language on recruitment process. According to the entrepreneurs’ opinions, all English skills of RMUTT interns were at a moderate level. The highest of each skill was listening to the supervisors’ instructions with technical terms, speaking English for everyday use, reading emails or business letters, and filling in forms. The entrepreneurs recommended writing email correspondence, filling in forms, and note-taking in English. Speaking with confidence was also suggested as well as more listening and reading practice.

Lingvocultural Specifics of the Communicative Behaviour in Arabic English-language Business Discourse

Introduction. The paper studies specifics of the communicative behavior of native speakers of English and Arab speakers of English as a second language in business situations. The novelty of the study is implied by the fact that it establishes ethnocultural features of comissive speech acts in value-marked situations in the English-language business discourse. The relevance of the study is conditioned by the interest in speech acts functioning in lingvocultural perspective, which studies patterns of communicative behavior in cross-cultural situations and issues of verbal representation of speech acts in the speech of native and non-native speakers of English as they are employed in various genres and types of discourse.Methodology and sources. The study employs methods of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis interpretive method. The study is drawn on a corpus compiled of business letters written by employees of United Arab Emirates companies who speak English as a second language (LBLC). The corpus LBLC comprises 160 letters, 33 907 words. To identify cultural differences, Business Letter Corpus of 1 million words that contains letters written by British and American writers was chosen.Results and discussion. The results of cross-cultural comparison of commissive speech acts representation in value marked situations in the Learner Business Letter Corpus (LBLC) and Business Letter Corpus are presented. It has been concluded that both corpora under study display similarity as for functions of comissive speech acts in value-marked communicative situations whereas differences are revealed in the variation of lexical and grammatical choices that represent these speech acts and their pragmatics. In the BLC the situations when commissive speech acts correlate with apology the addresser commits themselves to obligation not to perform actions that are undesirable for the addressee or prevent the circumstances that might have negative consequences for the addressee. In the LBLC, following the communicative act of apology the addresser emphasizes the causes that have resulted in his failure to complete his obligations and promises to eliminate these causes. The texts in BLC employ explicit speech acts of guarantee that represent an obligation on condition that the addressee completes a certain action and emphasize the sincerity of the addresser. The texts in LBLC do not contain any instances of explicit speech acts of guarantee and the utterance is interpreted as a guarantee on the basis of declarations expressed in the letter.Conclusion. It is concluded that in cross-cultural value-marked situations speech acts implementation follows algorithms that are relevant in a given culture and display cultural specificity that can be studies by linguistic methods.

Politeness constructions in written business communication: A plea for African politeness strategies

In this article, we conduct a comparative study which investigates challenges faced by isiZulu-speaking (L1) students with regard to appropriate politeness strategies in English (L2) business letters. We draw on the well-established distinction between interactional and transactional intentions in business writing. Data consists of a comparative bilingual business writing task as well as of a questionnaire that sought to identify specific challenges experienced by students in business communication. Findings indicate that students mostly implement politeness strategies successfully in their L1. In the L2, however, they manage to communicate transactional intentions but struggle with interactional intentions because they often do not address their audience appropriately and adopt unsuccessful politeness strategies. The article argues that isiZulu politeness constructions could empower students to communicate more efficiently when writing in their second language, English. The study may have practical implications for the teaching of business communication and may lead to critical reflections on the relationships between English and isiZulu politeness constructions and strategies in business communication.

ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ НАВЫКОВ ВЕЖЛИВОГО ОБЩЕНИЯ В ПРОЦЕССЕ ОБУЧЕНИЯ ДЕЛОВОМУ ПИСЬМУ В ВУЗЕ

The necessity to improve business interaction and to develop new approaches to study politeness, as an essential category of communication, has determined the need to develop a methodology to teach business writing for future professionals. Thus, the paper aims to study the linguistic politeness means and further develop a system of exercises for university students to write business letters effectively based on the study of politeness. The study uses the descriptive method to determine the choice of linguistic means to express politeness as well as the method of pedagogical construction to produce an effective methodic system to write business letters in English. The results show that business letters use two types of politeness strategies: the intimacy strategy (aiming at establishing and developing business contacts) and the distance strategy (aiming at preventing conflicts). These strategies use a particular set of speech acts that are represented by specific speech cliché or formulas. Finally, the paper suggests the methodic system including five stages: introducing the concept of politeness and its linguistic means; analyzing the means of politeness in sample business letters; developing lexical skills of politeness; writing business letters based on the samples and schemes; practicing reading and writing business letters imitating the real communicative situations.

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The article analyzes the main types of oral and written communication on the material of different functional styles of the Ukrainian language. The research methodology consists of both the main methods of functional stylistics and its partial and concrete-practical methods, namely: functional, complex, semantic, comparative methods, multifaceted analysis and the method of direct observation. The purpose of the study is to determine the features of linguistic communication by means of the Ukrainian language on the example of official-business, epistolary and conversational-domestic styles in a comparative aspect. Achieving this goal involves a number of tasks: 1) to outline the features of construction, placement of details, language tools of business letters; 2) to study the structure and linguistic richness of Lesya Ukrainka�s letters; 3) identify typical and different linguistic and stylistic means of business and private letters; 4) analyze the features of messages transmitted using instant messaging programs Viber and Telegram; 5) to investigate the influence of gender on the features of language means of various forms of written communication. The role of Lesya Ukrainka is determined in expanding the communicative boundaries of the Ukrainian language, in particular on the metaphorization of speech, the introduction of vocabulary, which belongs to the spoken, dialectal or obsolete, in the texts of letters, which can serve as a model for restoring halfforgotten but extremely important for establishing trusting, friendly and warm interpersonal relationships, communication practices in the modern world. The author�s attitude to the use of feminism to denote positions, professions, titles is formed. Such innovations are not always motivated, because according to the new version of the �Ukrainian spelling� they are somewhat complicated in the way of creation. It has been proven that the main tool of communication is language, so it is extremely important for each communicant to master its culture in general and business communication in particular. Language is a kind of mirror of culture, which reflects not only the real world, but also the social identity of the people, its national characteristics, traditions, morals, value system and more. Language as a means of communication preserves cultural heritage in vocabulary, grammar, phraseology, in various forms of oral and written communication. In addition, it is a means of communication between generations, that forms a personality through a kind of vision of reality, embedded in the linguistic picture of the world, as well as transforms individuals into an ethnic group, creates a nation. Over the centuries of its existence, the Ukrainian language has created various forms of language units that serve to adequately convey information, preserving the national traditions of Ukrainian culture. Each functional style of the Ukrainian language has specific language tools for covering events and concepts depending on the circumstances of communication, its purpose, taking into account the characteristics of communicators. In general, the problem of generalization of Ukrainian language experience in both business and informal relations is solved, which is especially important in modern conditions of narrowing personal and expanding written forms of establishing and maintaining contacts at all levels of human relations, including official business and private correspondence.

Needs Analysis of Reading and Writing Skills for Tour guide Students in Kenya

A course designed on the premise of needs analysis contributes, to some extent, to the threshold for curriculum development and syllabus design. This article presents an argument that needs analysis is an integral part of course design by focusing on the skills of reading and writing both as learning and target needs for tour guide diploma students in Kenya. The study adopted a descriptive research design and the data is extracted from Orang’i (2013) MA study. It emerged that reading tasks of scanning, skimming, reading for note taking, and summarizing revealed needs as learnings for both learners and teachers. In addition, the writing skills tasks that revealed learning needs for both learners and teachers were developing ideas, grouping ideas, and spelling correctly. Further, reading tasks that revealed target needs are business letters, e-mail messages, fax messages, instruction booklets, minutes of a meeting, tickets, and invoices. On the other hand, writing tasks that revealed target needs were writing: business letters, e-mail messages, reports, itineraries, tour commentaries, legal documents, and brochures. Based on the findings of this study, it can be summed up that learners’ needs are revealed whenever a needs analysis is conducted and should, therefore, be a must-do in any course design.