A Genre-based Study of English Recruitment Advertisements in Thai and British Daily Newspapers

This study analyzes the structural organization of English language recruitment advertisements in daily newspapers published in Thailand and the United Kingdom. This study has three main objectives: 1) to identify moves and steps of English recruitment advertisements in Thai and British daily newspapers, 2) to compare and contrast the move structures of these advertisements, and 3) to offer possible factors which determine the variation of the move structures of these advertisements. First, two corpora of Thai and British recruitment advertisements were systematically compiled to ensure that the samples from each country were comparable both in size and representativeness. Based upon a genre-analytic approach (Swales, 1990, 2004; Bhatia, 1993, 2004), moves and steps of these advertisements were identified. Then, an expert in the media and advertising business served as a coder to validate the move demarcation. The inter-coder reliability analysis, which was assessed by percentage and Cohen's Kappa, showed high agreement rates between the researcher and the expert. Finally, the move structures of Thai and British advertisements were compared. The analysis shows similarity in the set of moves across the two cultures. However, the discrepancies in the specificity/generality, frequencies, sequences and cyclicity of certain moves and steps reflect variations prevailing in this professional genre. Thai advertisements tend to underscore the importance of the company and invite interested readers to apply for the job. On the other hand, job specifications and remuneration for the successful candidates seem to be the most essential parts of British advertisements. It is speculated that major factors that play influential roles in determining the recruitment advertising writing style of Thailand and the United Kingdom are the degree of individualism/collectivism and power distance in the cultures of these two countries.

This study analyzes the structural organization of English language recruitment advertisements in daily newspapers published in Thailand and the United Kingdom.