A combined genre-register approach in texts of business English

Abstract

The present paper uses a combined genre-register approach to carry out an analysis of some of the most representative written and oral professional texts from the field of Business English: the business letter, the job interview, the business meeting and the company presentation. We believe that the combination of these two approaches is an optimal way to help our students of Business English to learn and recall the linguistic peculiarities of some of the most relevant genres in this field of English for Specific Purposes. Genre analysis has become one of the research areas of greatest impact in the didactics of professional and academic English within communicative methodology. Its ultimate aim is communication by means of texts termed genres. Our analysis will be carried out using different parameters such as macrostructure, communicative politeness and discourse. Register analysis focuses on the structural elements (syntax and lexis) which form the backbone of these texts. To this end, the work follows the research lines of Dudley-Evans and St John (1998); Brown and Levinson (1987), Swales (1990, 2004), Bhatia (1993) and Alcaraz Varó (2000): lexicon-grammar or register analysis and text or genre analysis.