Intercultural Communication in Letters of Recommendation
Abstract
The letter of recommendation (LR) as a means to communicate across different cultures for the purpose of applying for entering a university can be problematic. Using contrastive rhetoric analytic framework, this paper compares LRs written by Chinese and English native speaker professionals. Discussion of culturally situated interpretations of the LRs is based on interviews with university professors who have been on the admission committee. The findings show similarities in macro discourse structure but differences in discourse content between the LRs, which suggest that successful intercultural communication in LRs requires meticulous dialogue with the ‘other’ according to Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. Unequal power relationship between writer and reader is also discussed from critical discourse analysis perspective.
Full text article
References
Bardovi-Harlig, K. & Hartford, B. S. (1995). The construction of discourse by nonnative speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 17, 125-128.
Bouton, L. F. (1995). A cross-cultural analysis of the structure and content of letters of reference. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 17, 211-244.
Cotton, H. (1981). Documentary Letters of Recommendation in Latin from the Roman Empire. Kigstein/Ts.: A. Hain.
Moore, S. & Smith, J. M. (1986). Writing recommendation letters for students. Clearing House, 59.
Morrisett, L. N. (1935). Letters of Recommendation. Concord, NH: The Rumford Press.
Palmer, S. E. (1983). What to say in a letter of recommendation? Sometimes what you don’t say matters most. ED236953.
Precht, Kristen. (1998). A cross-cultural comparison of letters of recommendation. English for Specific Purposes, 17, 241-265.
Prior, P. (2001). Voices in text, mind, and society sociohistoric accounts of discourse acquisition and use. Journal of Second Language Writing, 10, 55-81.
Schiffrin, D. (1994). Approaches to discourse. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: B. Blackwell.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Authors
Copyright (c) 2007 Jing LIU
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This journal provides immediate and free open access to all its content and is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). This means readers are permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author, as long as proper attribution is given. This policy is consistent with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access.