SWF Version xxxxxx PDF Version

Title
An Integrated Approach to Teaching English Trade Letters

Author
Wenhua Hsu

Bio
Wenhua Hsu is an associate professor of the Center for General Education in the I-Shou University, Kaohsiung, in southern Taiwan.  She obtained her MBA degree in Kansas State University, U.S.A. and a Ph.D. degree in the field of ESP in the University of Essex, U.K.  Over the past thirteen years, she has taught English courses for Business Purposes.  Her current research interest is students’ vocabulary size and the selection of English textbooks with specific reference to readability calculation.  

Abstract
The present study results from a reflection on the researcher’s teaching procedure in her Trade Letter Writing course for undergraduate English majors in an EFL context. The paper offers a conceptualized framework with content-based instruction, genre awareness, group work in continuous simulation and a courseware approach embedded, outlining the pedagogical procedures on which the framework is based. The researcher sought to reply to the genre theory set out in the literature to support a genre awareness, which aims to make learners recognize the communicative purpose, structure and linguistic features of a trade letter. Content knowledge and language components were phased into the course syllabus to progress in a systematic order. Group work was organized and assigned in a number of principled ways. In addition, a quasi-natural environment in the classroom was created, by modelling business correspondence through continuous simulation. From this premise, the researcher used a campus web-based learning platform to build up her teaching materials, which is called an e-course. Consequently another important goal of this study was to evaluate the proposed teaching framework and students’ attitude about the course. Open-ended questionnaires concerning the trade letter writing course were given at the end of the semester. The results provided some evidence of the effectiveness of genre structure knowledge in organizing and developing content. The courseware reduced students’ class tension and consolidated genre knowledge introduced in class. The questionnaire findings reflected the need of most students for business writing skills as well as knowledge of commercial documents and trade terms.

 Key words:- genre awareness, content-based instruction, continuous simulation,