Writing Skills for the Workplace: A Combined Corpus and Genre Analysis of Technical Catalogues in English.

This work seeks to explore technical writing at the workplace by combining two methodologies, Genre Analysis and Corpus Linguistics, within the field of teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP). It was inspired by the writer’s personal experience in teaching English as a foreign language to a group of Italian engineers employed in the Research and Development (R&D) department of an Italian based manufacturing company that operates internationally. The aim was to identify key genre features and lexico-grammatical patterns of “technical catalogues” both in Italian and in English. Moreover, I wanted to understand if there was any difference in the way writers with a different L1 organise their discourse and assess whether a word-by-word translation of the document from Italian (Italian L1) to English (English L2) was enough to fit within the specificity of the genre conventions in native English. The findings are expected to inform the teaching of writing skills at the workplace to make it more relevant to the specific setting and language needs of engineers. To this purpose, a combined genre and corpus methodology grounded in principles of ESP pedagogy have been chosen as the most appropriate approaches for improving the description of the genre structure and recurrent language patterns. The thesis is structured in 4 main chapters. Within the first chapter I review previous research on the topics of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), genre analysis, corpus studies of ESP and technical writing. In chapter 2, I describe the data used for the empirical analysis and introduce the combined genre and corpus methodologies. In chapter 3 I present the results of my analysis. Finally, I discuss the findings to evaluate how they could help me shape the teaching/learning writing process (chapter 4). The results of the above-mentioned analysis reflect systematic differences between technical writing in the comparable Italian and English genres and contribute to highlighting the importance of genre awareness in language teaching especially when it comes to technical writing skills. The importance of this awareness applies to the ESP language teachers who are faced with the task of offering meaningful training tailored to the needs of the English language engineer-learners who do not have much study time but still need to perform well and quickly in the global professional context. Finally, it also applies to entrepreneurs and organisations which must be ready to invest into relevant training for their own staff members.