A Genre Analysis of 5-star Hotels’ Responses to Negative Reviews on TripAdvisor

Abstract

This paper aims to identify generic patterns, most frequently used expressions and lexical choices in the hotels’ responses to negative reviews on TripAdvisor, which can be of use to the teaching of business English writing. One hundred replies written by twenty Thai 5-star hotel managements were collected. Swales’s notion of move analysis was applied to explore the text patterns, and thematic analysis was used to identify word selection of hotels’ representative writers. Five generic moves with two to four steps were found throughout the corpus. Common expressions were also listed to provide choices for learners.