Jørgensen, Poul Erik Flyvholm

Trosborg, Anna

English

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9Hermes, Journal of Linguistics no. 31-2003Poul Erik Flyvholm Jørgensen & Anna Trosborg*Introduction:Exploring genres of professional communicationThis thematic section of Hermes contains contributions from sevenscholars participating in the 4th European Convention of the Associationfor Business Communication (ABC) held at the Aarhus School ofBusiness in May 2002. The convention was themed on the principles ofbusiness communication “across contexts, cultures and continents“, andthe contributors have in different ways attempted to chart and explainlanguage use and the underlying discursive choices of professionals andbusiness executives producing a variety of genres. The present selectionof articles clearly illustrates how genre analysts today exploit a mixtureof research methods and approaches in an unprejudiced fashion to accountfor the broad range of factors influencing professional messageproduction. Their expositions not only focus on relevant aspects ofresearch methodology but also highlight important teaching implicationsfor instructors in the field. Due to editorial pressures, Lise Mourier’sarticle about the requirements to financial reporting prepared in Englishby Danish companies, which belongs to the present collection, will appearin the next issue of Hermes (February 2004).Sonja Vandermeeren illustrates how a company’s requirement forcommunicative competence in a foreign language can be arranged intocategories covering objective, subjective or unconscious need. Ratherthan asking the management or staff of a company about their actual andperceived foreign language needs, she turns the table to conduct a seriesof interviews with their foreign business partners in order to capturehow they perceive the communicative skills of the other company’s sales* Poul Erik Flyvholm Jørgensen & Anna TrosborgEngelsk InstitutHandelshøjskolen i ÅrhusFuglesangs Allé 4DK-8210  Århus V10managers, marketing employees, etc. Interestingly, the study shows thatGerman companies are not particularly concerned about the German pro-ficiency of their Danish business partners but attach considerable impor-tance to their knowledge of German corporate culture and cross-culturaladaptability. Thus, she argues that company representatives are requiredto know the non-linguistic sales techniques of the foreign business culturejust as much as they are expected to be familiar with their partners’ corpo-rate tactics of communication. Vandermeeren not only makes the didacticobservation that teachers of business communication require remediesto develop their students’ intercultural sensitivity and skills but also sug-gests what these might consist of.In explaining the construction and use of a new institutional genre,Karsten Pedersen conducts a case study of the so-called ‘service infor-mation pamphlets’ distributed by Danish local and regional authorities.These pamphlets are produced locally by council authorities in accordancewith an Act of Parliament to provide for improved citizens’ informationabout public services and local government objectives and priorities.Pedersen supplements his text-based study with a top-down inquiry bothinto the actual production of the pamphlets by county officials and intothe reception of the pamphlets by local citizens. To do this, he performsextensive interviews with both message recipients and producers, studiesofficial guidelines for the production of the pamphlets, compares choicesand procedures across several different Danish councils, confronts infor-mants with real and made-up text exemplars, and is thus able to qualifyhis text-based findings concerning the construction of a new genre.Margrethe Mondahl and Lisbet Pals Svendsen discuss their ongoingresearch designed to clarify how competently Danish MA students ofEnglish employ information processing strategies to solve oral translationtasks and the degree to which the acquired competencies become moreor less permanently internalised. To do this, they rely on a range of re-search approaches, combining and reaping the benefits of qualitativeand quantitative methods. By videoing their students’ performances andself-reflective discussions over a period of fifteen months and by inter-mittently administering questionnaires to students, Mondahl and PalsSvendsen could quantitatively assess performances and collect a varietyof both introspective and retrospective data. This allowed them to beginto track developments across five communicative competence areas given11special focus within their teaching programme. Importantly, their earlyresults give indication that students of English as a foreign languagefocus on the choice of discursive and strategic resources at the expenseof grammatical input. Mondahl and Pals Svendsen take departure in threedifferent models which capture supplementary aspects of learners’competencies.Hilkka Yli-Jokipii focuses on the two genres of book information andplace description in order to explore alternative uses of adjectival modifi-cation in these text types which differ through the two fundamentallycompeting purposes of persuasion and description, respectively. Asopposed to the three previous contributions in this section, she takes abottom-up approach in seeking to pin down the different roles and signi-ficance of modifying adjectives in varieties of non-fictional discourse.This is done in the study by dividing modifying adjectives into fourdifferent classes which are, in turn, used to explain the various commu-nicative functions they serve. On the basis of the analysis of a sample ofeight texts in which she combines quantitative and qualitative methods,Yli-Jokipii concludes that adjectival modifiers are used with similarfrequency in the two genres investigated and that the established fre-quency is neither exclusively linked to writers’ use of nominal style norin a direct ratio to lexical density, contrary to what might be expected.Thus, the study strongly suggests that the use of adjectival modifiers isnot a characteristic which separates persuasive text types from descriptiveones.In order to meet the growing requirement for improved grammar skillsfrom both employers of graduates and technology programme faculty,Kathleen Vance has developed an intensive grammar course for engi-neering technology students designed to avoid a number of the traditionalpitfalls which commonly give poor results and frustrated courseparticipants. The contents of the eight mini grammar lessons in the coursewere determined by counting and categorising the errors found in a setof student exam papers. In order to improve student satisfaction andcompetence, the lessons were developed to specifically deal with thetopics, documents and tasks already familiar to the student of a particulartechnology area and were designed to be delivered by means of a commer-cially available software programme (WebCT). This programme offersvarious interactive features and resources useful for the specific purposes12of evaluation and feedback. Essential to the success of the programmewas the individual student’s self-reflective praxis as a learner, recognitionof his or her own communicative needs and requirements, and improve-ment of status and self-esteem with respect to linguistic skills. Vancerates the success of the web-facilitated mini grammar lessons by admi-nistering questionnaires to her students and by performing a qualitativeassessment of student responses. In spite of several clear advantagesover traditional sentence-based text-book teaching of grammar, Vancerecognises that there is still a considerable spillover effect from this me-dium which requires remedying action through increased contextualisa-tion of the mini grammar lessons, e.g. facilitated via group work andpeer editing.Finally, Paul Gillaerts has examined the persuasive text genre of jobapplications to establish possible links between negative/positive recruiterevaluations and the distinctive rhetorical and metadiscursive features ofapplications. Gillaerts made the early observation that the recruitmentofficers in his study were struggling to comment on how their assessmentsof individual applications were determined by aspects of form as opposedto context-related phenomena. Thus, the study was instead performed ina bottom-up fashion by examining a corpus of solicited and unsolicitedjob applications to determine which features were related to the degreeof persuasiveness already given to the applications by the informants.The adopted approach is qualitative, and Gillaerts argues that a straight-forward quantification of the rhetorical and metadiscursive elements ofa text is problematic insofar as each element may serve multiple persua-sive purposes. The study shows that a carefully balanced mixture of theseelements is crucial to the success of a job application.

Introduction: Exploring genres of professional communication

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Introduction: Exploring genres of professional communication

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