Frontiers in Educational Research, 2024, 7(12); doi: 10.25236/FER.2024.071218.
Ge Qu
School of Foreign Languages and Literature (School of Region and Country Studies), Heilongjiang University, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China
As economic growth serves as a key factor driving social development, the demand for talents in multinationals is currently high and the needs for professionalized graduates in Business English are increasing. Therefore, enhancing students’ ability to competently handle daily corporate communication is quite essential. This study initially focused on updating classroom teaching methods and exploring the way to improve students’ skills, and then investigated students’ corporate email writing tasks, mainly discovered the usage of shields (hedges) and politeness used in their emails. To fully develop students’ ability to better use hedges, this study also compared the politeness and hedges of their work with those from AI and native speakers. Meanwhile, a questionnaire was also analyzed to discover students’ attitudes towards using hedges. The results of this study revealed the great importance of learning how to properly use hedges and show politeness in emails, which is an essential skill for graduates to cope with daily corporate communication. And the suggested teaching practices could better support the findings of this study.
Business English Major, Hedges, Shield, Politeness, Production-Oriented Learning
Ge Qu. A Comparative Study of Politeness and Hedges Used in Corporate Emails Written by Business English Majors, AI and Native Speakers. Frontiers in Educational Research (2024) Vol. 7, Issue 12: 118-125. https://doi.org/10.25236/FER.2024.071218.
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