Genre Analysis of Minutes of Meetings Conducted in English by Thai Engineers

Abstract

Meetings are one of the common activities that play an important role in the field of business. For the community of Thai engineers, meetings become the salient aspects of their work, and therefore the effective writing of minutes of meetings is required. As such a writing is essential in the field, analyzing the corpus of the minutes of meetings would shed a light the patterns of meaning instantiated through those minutes. A corpus of 115 minutes of meetings were collected and analyzed using the genre analysis framework (moves and steps) of Swales (1990), Bhatia (1993), and Thaweewong (2006). Further, the lexico-grammatical features e.g., tenses and voices instantiated through the meetings were examined. Results of the analysis showed that Thai engineers use e-mail as the medium in writing the minutes in two ways: using regular e-mail messages (e-mail form) and using the company form. In terms of moves, there were seven common moves observed in the writing of the minutes: (1) the heading; (2) an opening salutation; (3) establishing a correspondence chain; (4) the content of the meeting; (5) a closing correspondence chain; (6) a closing salutation; and (7) attaching a document. In terms of lexicogrammar, there are some prominent features such as the simple present tense, active voice, noun phrases, proper nouns, abbreviations, and key word lists. The results above can be further utilized by course designers when developing the materials for their course. It is expected that the knowledge of moves and lexico-gramamtical features can help engineering students and novice engineers practice writing the minutes of meetings effectively.

Genre Analysis of Minutes of Academic Meetings

“…The results show that the general details are similar to Move 1 (heading) of Changpueng and Patpong (2021) even though in the minutes of the Thai engineers the heading is a kind of email heading since their minutes are written as an email message to participants.…”

“…The second step also involved two-level analysis -macro-level and micro-level. At the macro-level, the researchers analyzed any rhetorical section of the minutes of meetings that performs a particular communicative event about the overarching communicative purposes as a move following Swales (1990) model of move/step analysis as used in Changpueng and Patpong's (2021). This model of move analysis uses cognitive-semantic criterion in the determination of a move, rather than the grammatical criterion.…”

“…It was found that the linguistic choices that an individual makes in minute writing are a key contributing factor to the development of the organization's culture. Also, Wolfe (2006), Kassim and Ali (2010), Spence and Liu (2013), and Changpueng and Patpong (2021) have studied the minutes of engineers in Thai and reported the relevance of meetings and meeting minute in the work of engineers. Accordingly, the skill of writing the minutes of meetings is highly required in that profession.…”

“…Wolfe's (2006) study was conducted on three experienced engineers working in international companies and concluded that since minutes serves as a guide to the fulfillment of the content of resolutions reached at meetings, minute writing is vital for such professionals. The analysis of Changpueng and Patpong (2021) using the genre analysis framework (moves and steps) of Swales (1990), Bhatia (1993), andThaweewong (2006) showed that Thai engineers use e-mail as the medium in writing the minutes in seven common moves, including the heading, an opening salutation, the content of the meeting, a closing correspondence chain, a closing salutation, and attaching a document. In terms of lexico-grammatical features, the prominent one among them are syntactic features (such as simple present tense, active ISSN 2775-3719 voice, noun phrases,) and lexical features (such as proper nouns, abbreviations, and keyword lists).…”

“…The methodological approaches used by Changpueng and Patpong (2021) provide an analytical framework, which provides a useful guideline to analyze the minutes of a meeting, in terms of moves and steps, and the lexico-grammatical features. Therefore, the present study aims to analyze the genre of minutes of meetings written by administrative secretaries of a tertiary educational institution (Sunyani Technical University) to inform lessons of Technical English for Secretarial students or anyone interested in practicing minutes writing.…”