Written Communication Across Cultures: A Sociocognitive Perspective on Business Genres

Author(s): Yunxia Zhu

Series: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 141

Publisher: John Benjamins, Year: 2005

This book explores effective written communication across cultures both theoretically and practically. Specifically it conceptualizes cross-cultural genre study and compares English and Chinese business writing collected from Australia, New Zealand and China. It is also one of those inspired by contrastive rhetoric but has contributed innovatively and uniquely by incorporating research findings from genre analysis, in particular, the sociocognitive genre perspective into this cross-cultural study.

On the one hand, the endeavor represents an in-depth theoretical exploration by considering not only discourse community and cognitive structuring, but also the deep semantics of genre and intertextuality, while broadening genre study by integrating insights from cross-cultural communication as well as the Chinese perspectives. On the other hand, the book also addresses pragmatic issues. As a particular feature, it solicits professional members’ intercultural viewpoints; thus confirming the shared social "stock of knowledge" employed in the culturally defined writing conventions.

Last but not least, this book explores the implications for genre education and training, and develops an appropriate model for cross-cultural genre learning, which encourages learning through legitimate peripheral participation and intercultural learning in business organizations.