- Title
- An ethnographic study of business documentation writing practices of selected human resource practitioners in the Nelson Mandela Metropole
- Creator
- Blignaut, David Llewellyn
- Subject
- Business writing English language -- Written English -- South Africa
- Subject
- Written communication -- South Africa
- Date Issued
- 2014
- Date
- 2014
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MA
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10948/50077
- Identifier
- vital:42031
- Description
- The proposed study will focus on the dominant writing practices in the Human Resources (HR) workplace environment. Business writing is dominated by English and world Englishes as an international language, and users are increasingly second or foreign language speakers. As a result, business environments adopt English-only policies. As a result, the hegemony of English for business use has been entrenched. In addition, English has become a highly influential language in South Africa. As any document production is not simple and spontaneous where rules are visible and can be learned or known independently, this study specifically examines the business documentation writing practices of Human Resource (HR) practitioners in the workplace to evaluate the relevance of the BKH 1120 English in Communication A business writing curriculum. The integration of the workplace social context is essential as writing practices encompass not only the physical act of writing, but include abstract cognitive processes and the contexts of the reader, writer, text and social environment that pertain to text processing and production. Therefore, this study intends to inform current HE academic business writing requirements as well as documentation structures and layout practices for the curriculum development of the BKH1120 Communication in English A module. The study used a qualitative research tool based on an ethnographic design. Although an ethnographic study demands that the researcher spends extensive time in the field, an alternative strategy is to conduct the research based on interviews as a thick description of depth and detail that interviewers seek in interviews can be found in the interviewees’ first hand experiences”. Content analysis was also used to analyse the interview responses as well as the document samples collected from the participants. This research study concluded that HE often does not often adequately prepare students for the social, ideological and collaborative workplace writing expectations. Therefore, HE programmes should make careful decisions on which workplace discourse practices to include in their teaching practices and design meaningful and realistic ways to equip students in to prepare them well to deal with workplace writing challenges.
- Format
- 199 leaves
- Format
- Publisher
- Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Humanities
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University
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NMMU School of Language, Media and Culture
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | DAVID LLEWELLYN BLIGNAUT.pdf | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |