Applied genre analysis

: cases in business and law

Abstract

The dynamic complexity of present-day workplace practices has increased the number of universities changing the nature of their academic programs, to make them increasingly interdisciplinary (Bhatia, 1999:129). One of the major issues in the teaching of English in the academy is the complexity of discursive demands placed on Business and Law students within the increasingly interdisciplinary curriculum. Many of the traditional English courses appear to be inadequate to help students cope with the complexity of communication demands. Thus, there is a need to rethink, revise and redesign pedagogical procedures to make them more effective. In view of these needs, this thesis examines the ways in which Accounting, Economics, Law, Management and Marketing cases differ, and highlights some of the disciplinary tensions occurring between them by discussing textual evidence from cases associated with these academic and professional contexts. It is hypothesized that though cases identified as a genre give the impression that they may be similar, they are different in a number of ways. In this study, I propose to show that while perceiving the ‘academic core’ of similarities it is also essential to perceive significant conceptual dissimilarities leading to a better understanding of the subtleties of interdisciplinary variation. Generic move structures of cases, lexico-grammar, evidence of specification of task requirements and instructions, rhetorical mapping, etc. can all then be seen in the light of the dissimilarities surrounding disciplines while encouraging a need to make the requirements of the subject tasks more explicit for the students in order to help them cope with the complexity of the communication demands inherent in the multi-disciplinary academic tasks. Hopefully, it also provides a starting point, a theoretical and pedagogical imperative, which encourages the research of texts, their contexts and their ideologies—to see how disciplines view knowledge and how they define themselves, which in turn will help students have a better understanding not only of the communicative demands placed on them in designated disciplines, but also of the variation of demands across the disciplines.

Date of Award	3 Oct 2005
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Vijay Kumar BHATIA (Supervisor)