Bringing reality to the classroom: Exercises in intertextuality

Abstract

The ability to handle intertextual relations in email is an important component of workplace writing competence that is, for the most part, overlooked in business English classes because of a tendency to treat emails in classroom contexts as independent texts. This study reports on a series of email assignments that required students to read and process a collection of texts before composing emails themselves, with the aim of examining how students dealt with the demands made by the intertextual nature of workplace writing. The findings suggest that the management of multiple texts and their intertextual relations poses considerable challenges for student writers, specifically relating to the amount of information to include, the degree of explicitness needed in referring to other texts, and the management of the dialogue and writer-reader relationship. The study concludes that there is a need to demonstrate to students the centrality of intertextuality and the ways in which it contributes to the coherence of workplace communication. Students need to understand, too, that managing intertextuality is not simply a question of textual manipulation, but of understanding the communicative context and of considering how they want their relationship with the reader to develop.

Putting Research into Practice: Beyond Textbook Email Task Design for Pre-experience Business English Learners

“…While studies like those of Darics and Gatti (2019) and Gimenez (2014) have looked at the underlying skills that are needed in successfully engaging with digital communication in general, others have looked specifically at the nature of email messages. Over the course of the last two decades, for instance, several studies within the ESP discipline have focussed on the business email (Nickerson, 2000; Bremner and Costley, 2018; Cheng and Mok, 2008; Gains, 1999; Louhiala-Salminen, 2002; Warren, 2013). These have established, for instance, that writers routinely use specialized lexical items to collaborate with each other in intra-corporate email (Nickerson, 2000), that email is a hybrid genre that combines the characteristics of spoken and written discourse in multinational business, often in a network of multilingual transactions (Louhiala-Salminen, 2002), and that intertextual networks always exist between different emails as well as between emails and other business genres that are relied on by writers and receivers to interpret the meaning of the interaction (Cheng and Mok, 2008; Warren, 2013).…”

“…In a later review of the same coursebooks when he looked at activities focussing on collaboration Bremner (2010), found that ‘collaboration is discussed only in the most general terms’ and ‘few tasks provide students with activity-types that would help them understand and experience the kinds of collaborative interaction that they will encounter at work’ (2010: 121). Finally, most recently, Bremner and Costley (2018) show how difficult it can be for learners to understand the significance of intertextuality in email communication, and in particular the contribution that intertextuality can make to the writer-reader relationship. In other words, there is an apparent mismatch between the types of activities that textbooks suggest should be used in the classroom to practice writing, and the writing activities (and skills) that learners will actually need to accomplish once they enter the business arena.…”

“…First, our review of the relevant literature helped us to understand the various skills that scholars have identified as those that good business communicators need to achieve their goals and to get their work done. More specifically for email, the work by Gimenez (2014), by Evans (2012) and by Bremner and Costley (2018) was particularly illuminating in their view of email as contextual, intertextual and collaborative. Had we relied only on textbook models of business email, we would have been limiting our discussions to single instances of emails as well as to the surface features of the text.…”

“…In our future work, we aim to find more ways in which we can relate our students’ existing experience with digital media to the knowledge and skills that they will need to develop to communicate successfully in the business arena. For example, we will look in more detail at how to incorporate appropriate practise in intertextuality, as discussed most recently by Bremner and Costley (2018), or collaboration, as discussed by Bremner (2010), or the range of skills that underlie the effective use of CMC that Gimenez (2014) has identified. In doing so, we hope to move further beyond the boundaries of the textbook to provide our students with appropriate and relevant experience to draw on as novice business writers.…”

“…Bremner, 2008; Bremner, 2010; Evans, 2012). Furthermore, recent research into CMC in the workplace has identified other skills that are needed in communicating effectively through the medium of email that are generally not covered in textbook materials, such as the ability to create a shared sense of purpose and identity, the ability to understand different audiences and accommodate them in different messages, and the ability to recognize and create inter-linkages between email and spoken communication in the form of intertextuality or interdiscursivity (Nickerson, 2018; Nickerson and Planken, 2016; Bremner and Costley, 2018; Darics and Gatti, 2019; Gimenez, 2014; Zhang, 2013). In this study, we will be discussing a recent project carried out with high-proficiency learners of business English located in the UAE with little or no previous knowledge of business, which aimed to help them develop the CMC skills they will need to succeed in the contemporary UAE workplace, with specific reference to email.…”