A GENRE ANALYSIS OF BUSINESS EMAILS IN ENGLISH BETWEEN FAR EAST MARITIME COMPANY LIMITED AND FOREIGN BUSINESS PARTNERS

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the great technological advancement in the past decades, emails have become indispensible in business communication and email writing has been a part of many Business English courses. This qualitative research aims at identifying generic structures and lexico-grammatical features of business emails and measuring their effectiveness in business communication. A total of 32 business emails between Far East Maritime Company Limited and their foreign business partners involved in this research. Qualitative content analysis, in combination with simple statistics analysis, was employed to identify and synthesize generic structures and common lexico-grammatical features of emails. Then an interview was carried out to gain deep understanding of the use and effectiveness of those features.The findings disclosed the structure of seven moves commonly employed in business emails; five most popular moveswere subject line, opening greetings and salutations, providing information, ending politely and signature. Also, some common lexico-grammatical features were found, for example, abbreviations, omissions of punctuations, verbs to indicate wishes or plans, uses of plural personal pronouns and short sentences. In addition, by assessing business deals exchanged through emails and the interview, it can be seen that those structures and features contributed to delivering email messages successfully. The study emphasizes on the use of language in emails in real business communication; hence, it could benefit students and teachers of Business English or Business Communication courses, company employees and encourage further research on genre analysis of emails in Vietnam.