خلاصة:
Electronic mail (e-mail) as a means of fast and effective communicationwhich has removed the barriers of distance and time has become verycommonplace and important in institutional environments. Speakers ofEnglish as a foreign language across different disciplines need toenhance their awareness of the generic and formal features of the e-mailgenre in order to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of theircorrespondence. Following genre analysis studies such as Swales(1990), Bhatia (1993), Santos (2002), Vergaro (2004), and Samraj andMonk (2008), and in line with studies on electronic messages such asGains (1999), Gimenez (2000, 2006), and Jensen (2009), the presentgenre-based research was conducted to analyse e-mails exchangedbetween EFL teachers and biology professionals for the purposes ofrequesting and providing information at two criteria of the macro-textualand micro-levels of the two corpora to present a tentative model. Theresults revealed clear discrepancies between the parallel constitutivemoves, strategies and formal features due to cross-disciplinary variationsand the prevalence of intertextuality. The findings of this study havepedagogical implications for devising courses, preparing teachingmaterials and raising ESP instructors' awareness of learners' problems.
ملخص الجهاز:
"The present study is a genre study in the tradition of Swales’ (1990) and Bhatia's (1993) work that sets up categories (moves) and then analyses the lexico-grammatical realizations of these moves in electronic messages which were exchanged for the purposes of 'requesting and providing information' among EFL teachers and biology professionals to see where the differentiating factors across the two corpora lie.
Since most studies on e-mail communication so far have concentrated on linguistic and stylistic conventions of this new genre (Gains, 1999; Gimenez, 2000), its role in the business communication process (Gimenez, 2000, 2006; Jensen, 2009), and its comparison with conventional letters (Amirian & Tahririan, 2003) and due to the scarcity of a cross-disciplinary research on the discoursal and formal features of electronic messages, the present study was carried out.
For instance, in the 'providing information' and 'evaluating' moves and 'advising about the messages' and 'giving personal opinion' strategies in which the correspondents' own arguments and opinions rather than the procedural description of the work of others seemed to predominate, higher use of 14 The Discoursal and Formal Analysis of E-mails… present verbs and active voice were observed.
16 The Discoursal and Formal Analysis of E-mails… Table 7 Frequency of occurrence of conversational features across EP and BP e- mail messages frequency conversational features EP BP discourse markers 0 6 Standard 8 1 abbreviation non- 2 9 standard contracted forms 21 29 decapitalization 6 28 Discussion and Conclusion The results revealed that the overall schematic organizational pattern in the two corpora was the same due to the shared communicative purposes."