THE ROLE OF WRITING EFFECTIVE ENGLISH BUSINESS LETTERS IN DEVELOPING INTERNATIONAL TRADE

The advent of 21st century has accompanied the globalization in scientific, technical, and economic activities in an international scale, which has magnified the role of English language in international communications. Hence, in order to get better and more effective results in international trade, the relevant authorities in non-native companies, including Iran, should be proficient in using business English. To have a discourse analysis of business letters written by native English speaking and Iranian communicators, 25 authentic follow-up letters written by Iranians in four non-native big companies in Tabriz, Iran, and 25 authentic letters written by native English writers were sampled. Through Halliday’s (1985) notion of lexical density, the number of lexical and grammatical words was computed. Then, on the basis of model of schematic structure, the “moves” and “steps” of letters were specified and, finally, the politeness strategies used in the letters were analyzed. The analysis of corpus showed that the Iranian business letter- writers mostly focused on surface linguistic aspects of English language while pragmatic aspects of language, such as using politeness strategies, were ignored in their letter writing. Since the social and interpersonal aspects of language are of great significance for native speakers of English language, and any mismatch of linguistic forms such as interferences caused by Iranian writers, may lead to misunderstanding and annoyance, the ESP teachers should try to familiarize the learners of business English with social features and interactional aspects of the language and direct the learners to use the social sub-skills and pragmatic elements in their business letters.

Keywords:

English business letters , effective communication , pragmatic aspects of language