Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
Editor and Book Reviews Editor: John Edwards (St Francis Xavier University, Canada)
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Volume: 25 Number: 1 Page: 1–23
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How to Get Yourself on the Door of a Job: A Cross-cultural Contrastive Study of Arabic and English Job Application Letters
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Mohammed N. Al-Ali
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This cross-cultural study examined the generic structure of English and Arabic job application letters written by native Arabic speakers and English native speakers to find out the discourse genre text similarities and differences between them. A corpus of 60 job application letters
written by 60 job applicants was subjected to the form of move structure analysis proposed by Bhatia (1993). The results revealed that writers with different cultural backgrounds showed various types of rhetorical move preferences used in different sequences and frequencies to articulate the
same communicative purpose in two text groups. The letters of application written by native Arabic speakers were found to contain particular strategic moves, such as 'Glorifying the institution of the prospective employer'and 'Invoking compassion' that do not even exist in the covering letters
written by English writers. However, the letters written by native English applicants include lengthy supporting discussions to promote the candidate. This suggests that different strategies are effective in different cultures. We hope the results of this study will help language teachers
in increasing their students' consciousness of cross-cultural preferences, and the essential genrespecific meaning components peculiar to each language.
Keywords: GENRE ANALYSIS, CROSS-CULTURAL GENRE, CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS, JOB APPLICATION, LETTERS
© 2004 Multilingual Matters
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