Genre Analysis of Business Emails Written by Pakistani Employees: A Case Study in Pakistani Organizational Context

Abstract

In the wake of rapid advancement of technology, the medium, most widely used for business communication practices by Pakistani employees is electronic mails (emails). This quantitative study aims at analyzing generic features of business emails written by Pakistani employees working in an organization located in Pakistan. The sample text comprised one hundred English business emails exchanged between Pakistani employees and their business counterparts. Analysis was made on macro and micro level, Macro level analysis constituted the investigation of Move and step analysis of the selected corpus by applying   a genre-based approach established by Swales (1990) and Bhattia (1993).  Micro level analysis aimed to explore the lexico-grammatical choices opted by Pakistani writers to operationalize their communicative practices. Seven moves with their realization in one or more steps were identified in emails written by Pakistani employees. Following Louhaila-Salminen, et al (2005), three types of business Email genre were identified in accordance with different communicative purposes they expressed. The results revealed that three types of genre showed variation at the level of steps of Move 4, therefore, Bhattia’s (1993) model was modified to accommodate the genre specific and culture specific differences. The investigation of lexico-grammatical features in corpus led to many interesting findings. Pakistani writers tend to make a frequent use of “please” and “kindly” in Move3 Soliciting/providing information. It implies their concern about the addressee’s negative face and a sense of consciousness to promote an air of warmth and geniality at work places. An increasing tendency of writing concise and shorter emails replete with contractions and abbreviations is also observed inferring the closeness of email data with spoken text instead of the written text. The study emphasized the use of language in real business situations. It offers valuable implications for students of English for business purposes (EBP), teaching staff, material developers and business stakeholders.

Keywords: genre analysis, business correspondence, business emails, communicative purpose, move/steps, lexico-grammatical features.