Metadiscourse in Business English: Ideas for the EBC Class

Abstract

Metadiscourse has been defined as the discourse used by writers to help their readers connect, interpret and evaluate their attitudes towards the referential material presented (Vande Kopple, 2002). In his study on CEO’s letters, Hyland (1998b) examined metadiscourse as the manifestation of a writer’s linguistic and rhetorical presence in the text and looked at the persuasive nature of business communication. An awareness of the rhetorical power of metadiscourse in this text genre is vital for professional development, particularly in the teaching of business English. This study was designed to examine the use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse in Business English writing through an analysis of the Enron Email Dataset and the Business Letter Corpus. The data analysis was conducted following Hyland (2005, 2019), in order to understand how content and discourse are set up to orient and persuade the reader. Although this study focuses specifically on interactional metadiscourse, the results are expected to be relevant for the ESP classroom, particularly in English for Business Communication (EBC) classes (Bhatia & Bremner, 2012). Acquiring conscious awareness of the rules and conventions to master formal writing can be of great help to business students in order for them to become successful writers in both academic and professional environments.