A Generic Structure Analysis Of Arabic And English Response Letters To Complaints

Abstract

Our study purports to examine the generic structure of responses letters to complaints in Arabic and English. A corpus of 80 letters was collected from Algerian Arabic users, EFL learners as well as American and British native speakers of English. The researcher provided the participants with three complaint situations and they were required to choose only one and write a response letter about it. Our analysis drew upon Swales (1990) and Bhatia’s (1993) approach to genre analysis to describe to move structure of such genre. The results revealed that response letters to complaint in Arabic and English adhere to the same generic structure composed of seven moves and twenty-one steps. It was found that several factors particularly culture and the correspondents’ social rank significantly influence the overall structure of complaint letters.