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Building Knowledge Structures in Teaching Cross-cultural Sales Genres

School of Communication, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNITEC, Institute of Technology, Carrington Road, Private Bag 92025, Auckland, New Zealand

Approaching genres as knowledge structures provides a useful theoretical basis for teaching students to communicate across cultures. The approach is based on the concept of schemata (Rumelhart, 1980; Cook, 1994) and on Swales's (1990) techniques for genre analysis. It is divided into four interrelated teaching stages: background information, communicative purposes, text structure, and the implica tions of genre comparisons. Among the four stages, teaching the communicative purposes is the most important. This approach has been used effectively to teach students how to write sales letters in English and Chinese.

Key Words: Genre analysis • sales letters • knowledge structures • contrastive rhetoric—Chinese and English

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