Teaching Business Correspondence: Lessons from the Globalised Workplace

Abstract

This article discusses the findings and pedagogical implications of a multifaceted investigation into the role of business correspondence (i.e., email, letters, memos, faxes) in Hong Kong’s principal service industries. The findings were derived from four sources: a questionnaire survey of 1,010 service-sector professionals, semi-structured interviews with 31 Cantonese-speaking professionals, analyses of 50 email chains comprising 406 separate messages, and a “week-in-the-life” case study. These findings provide pedagogically relevant information and insights about the role of email vis-à-vis letters, memos and faxes in the globalised workplace, the purposes and characteristics of these text types, and the challenges that Hong Kong professionals experience when writing business correspondence in a second language. The article argues that the traditional foci of business English courses (letters, memos, faxes) are largely irrelevant to the needs of modern-day professionals and that email chains rather than discrete, functionally distinct messages should be the basis for instruction.