The Importance Of English In The Workplace

English used in everyday situations can be distinguished from English used in the workplace, English spoken in the workplace has special characteristics of language and interaction patterns and People working together interact using structured and goal-oriented genres that have evolved over time.

English has a special status as a work language, as it is an international language, Language is conceived to be more key for jobs involving paper work and the word, such as education, administration and courts of law for example, and less so for manual job which are perceived to use language less centrally. But these jobs do use language and other symbolic systems for exchange of instructions and information in linguistic form, and they also use language

1. It is goal-oriented: participants usually focus on some core goal, task or identity . . . Associated with the institution or workplace 2. There are constraints on what participants will treat as allowable contributions, i.e. on what participants may say.

3. There are inferential frameworks and procedures that are particular to the specific institutional or workplace context. These inferential frameworks the participants in the meeting draw on include their assumptions about how such management meetings in their institutions are normally conducted, as well as background knowledge of the business and its procedures. Related to this is the fact that special professional or technical lexis is often used, such as the terms related to business or technology.

Institutional talk is goal-oriented, it has its constraints & allowable contributions, and each institutional context has its own inferential framework and procedures. In institutional talk, one common feature among all three categories is that the interactions are asymmetrical, that is, some speakers often have more power and/or special knowledge than

Like the blog (examined in Chapter 2 & compared to the journal entry), the business email has features of both written and spoken language, and has been influenced by a variety of other genres. So genres are not fixed or immutable; they change over time (e.g. through the influence of technology).

Some people have suggested that business emails have developed from the genre of written memos, which are company-internal messages, while others remark that email is also used for other kinds of messages, for example, very informal exchanges between individual colleagues, such as a two-line invitation and that may be the source .

• A genre, according to Swales, is a “class of communicative events . . . which share some set of communicative purposes . . .[The] rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains the choice of content and style’ (Swales, 1990,p.58). See definition of genre in Chapter