Teaching writing for professional contexts: the case of the cover letter

Abstract

The way people write tend to change through the course of a lifetime as a consequence of their own personal growth and life experiences. This assumption supports the formal teaching of text genres that have been either previously produced by individuals at some stage or that those consider to master – this is thus the case of the texts used within professional contexts. By showing that the teaching of a language can be used on behalf of active professional contexts, this paper aims at introducing the results coming from a didactic approach to the cover letter within the context of a higher education professional course. The work developed follows the socio-interactional fundamentals underlying the teaching of text genres along with the corresponding analysis and description of the genre itself arising from the former and final texts produced by the students. Following the students having being trained in a specific text plan, the work presented here aims then at showing a qualitative and comparative analysis of the student´s textual practices at their early and final stages, bearing in mind the internal architecture of texts (and also the corresponding infrastructural plan of texts, textual mechanisms and mechanisms for enunciative responsibility). Even though the students have previously been acquainted with the text genre at hand in other formal contexts (teaching or professional contexts), a direct observation of the work handled in the classroom leads to the conclusion that some of the setbacks for a successful writing are the need to use a formal register and also the absence of a proper representation of the applicants towards the employer, along with a clear resistance to writing (in this case, for professional purposes), leading us to conclude that writing itself is not seen as an object of training.