Svitlana Ostapenko

Kryvyi Rih Institute of Kremenchuk University of economics,

advanced technologies and management, Ukraine

Insights at Business Writing in Teaching Business English

We believe that knowledge of genre is a key element in all communication and especially significant in writing academic or professional texts. Knowledge of genre involves an understanding of the expectations of the discourse community that reads the text and of the conventions that have developed over time about the structure, the language and the rhetoric of the genre. Genre awareness will help with all the five macro-skills, but here we focus on writing.

Developing writing skills also involves other skills, notably the skills of planning, drafting and revising so that the end product is appropriate both to the purpose of the writing and the intended readership. Writing starts with the individual writer(s), these days often using a word processor. S/he may begin by planning the piece of writing and then doing the actual writing. This writing will then be revised before the final draft is written. Alternatively, the writer may begin by writing as much as possible and then revising, polishing and adding further points. In planning, writing and revising writers will have in mind a reader and will (or should) think about the needs of that reader and the purpose of the document. They will have a map to guide them - their message, audience and purpose. Writers need to ask themselves questions such as whether to expand a point, provide an example or define a term in order to help the reader understand the text or to persuade him of the validity of the argument presented. The reader may be a real person that is definitely going to read the text, for example a senior or junior colleague in a company, a client from another company, a supervisor in a university, an editor of a journal and so on.

The term of product approach has generally been used to refer to concentration on the features of the actual text - the end-product - that writers have to produce. The product approach to writing usually involves the presentation of a model text, which is analyzed and then forms the basis or task that leads to the writing of an exactly similar or a parallel text. Robinson (1991) summarizes the method in the following way:

Model Text → Comprehension/Analysis/Manipulation → New Input → Parallel Text

In early days the use of a product approach often led to a rather simplistic copying of the model text by merely changing certain words, from the original text to produce a new text. This was a purely mechanical task which involved no real thought about the purpose the writing, the readership or the expectations of the discourse.

The use of models for text analysis and as a basis for thinking about the purposes and readership of a text can, however, have an important role play in teaching writing. The situation where the writer looks at a model, or previous example, of a text he wishes to write and then adapts it for the specific purpose does, reflect what frequently happens in business or academic writing.

The process approach began as a reaction to the simplistic model-based approach which focused only on the end-product. The process approach as emphasized the idea of writing as problem-solving, with a focus on thinking and process. It is most closely associated with the work of Flower (1985) whose textbooks show students how to identify the rhetorical problem, plan a solution or series of solutions to the problem and finally reach an appropriate conclusion. This is the thinking stage; the process stage involves translating the plan into paragraphs and sentences, reviewing the first draft and then revising the text to produce a number of subsequent drafts. In the actual teaching, the skills of editing and review are taught through peer review and group work, and the whole emphasis is on moving students on from over-concern with sentence-level accuracy. The first stage in the process approach is the thinking stage, which follows the sequence below:

Generate Ideas →Select Ideas →Order the Ideas →Group the Ideas

The social constructionist approach based on the principles is generally referred to as social constructionist approach to the teaching of writing and is closely associated with the development of genre analysis as a key approach to text in ESP and work on the sociology of science (see Bazerman, 1988, Myers, 1989). Work on various genres such as the academic articles (Swales, 1990), the dissertation (Dudley-Evans, 1994) and business letters (Bhatia, 1993) have shown how the establishment of a number of moves can capture the regularities of writers' communicative purpose in certain genres. The social constructionist approach, however, does much more than teach these moves; it encourages writers to consider their role as members of a discourse community and what this implies in terms of the style and stance that they should adopt.

The process and the social constructionist approaches have generally been seen as two conflicting approaches to the teaching of writing. Certainly in ESP work the process approach, although extremely valuable in helping students organize and plan their writing, has failed to tackle the actual texts that students have to produce as part of their academic or professional work. Indeed, most advocating a process approach to the teaching of writing (at least in the USA) seem to regard the teaching of generalized strategies of planning, writing and revising as sufficient and the detailed analysis of the target texts as beyond the scope of the writing teacher (Raimes, 1993; Spack, 1988; Zamel, 1983). The social constructionist approach has reintroduced the idea of examining the end-product in a way that is much more acceptable than the old model-and-imitation approach used in early teaching of writing. It has also, as we have noted, extended the focus on the reader to take on board the discourse community. We therefore believe that it could bines the strengths of both the product and the process approaches to the teaching of writing. The approach that we advocate follows the stages below:

• develop rhetorical awareness by looking at model texts;

• practise specific genre features, especially moves and writer stance;

• carry out writing tasks showing awareness of the needs of individual readers and the discourse community;

• evaluate the writing through peer review or reformulatioп.

When we come to translate the approaches outlined in the sections above into teaching materials and actual exercises, we find that there are six main exercise types. These are exercises that develop:

• rhetorical awareness;

• particular skills or language features step-by-step;

more extensive writing skills through tasks (the deep-end approach);

• editing skills through peer review;

• editing skills through reformulation exercises;

• more specific rhetorical and linguistic awareness through integrated teaching with subject specialists.

In conclusion, we have summarized the key elements involved in the five skills of reading, listening to monologue, listening and speaking, and writing, and discussed various approaches to the teaching of these skills. The fact that we tackled each skill separately does not imply that we favour the teaching of each skill in isolation. In fact, there are strong reasons for integrating the teaching of these five skills, or at least two or three related skills. Using one skill generally involves at least one more of the other skills; writing generally involves some reading, listening to monologue may be preceded or followed up by a discussion or a reading activity, a discussion may lead to a follow-up fax or letter. Another reason is that skills are generally learnt more effectively when taught with other skills in an integrated manner. For example, research shows that following a written text when it is read aloud increases understanding and retention when it is subsequently read silently. Similarly, hearing the correct pronunciation of a vocabulary item helps storage of that item in the memory and retrieval when it is needed for speaking or writing.

References:

1. Brown H. Douglas. Teaching by Principals: Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. - Addison Wesley Longman : Pearson Education Company, New York, 2001. – 480 p.

2. Harmer J. How to teach English. - Longman, 1998. – 208 p.

3. Wajnryb R. Grammar Dictation. [Ed. By Alan Maley]. - Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1990. – 144 p.