A Genre Analysis of Minutes of Academic Meetings
A Case Study of a Technical University in Ghana
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53696/27753719.41126Keywords:
English for Specific Purpose, genre analysis, meeting, minutes, move analysis modelAbstract
Genre analysis has received much attention in the recent few decades, in which different genres have been analyzed for their rhetorical features for academic and pedagogical purposes. One genre that has received very little attention in Ghanaian scholarship is meeting minutes. Meeting minutes are a cross-disciplinary genre and play crucial roles in organizations such as academic institutions, including serving as official records of all formal meeting proceedings and resolutions. From the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) tradition, this study explores the communicative events described in minutes of meetings. Using Swales' (1990) moves and steps genre analysis framework, a corpus of twenty-four minutes of meetings was collected from Sunyani Technical University and analyzed for their rhetorical structures as well as grammatical features that characterize these rhetorical events. The results show that the communicative events of the minutes are composed of a six-move structure: heading (Move 1), auxiliary information (Move 2), opening (Move 3), reference to previous minutes (Move 4), the content of the meeting (Move 5), and closing (Move 6). The prominent grammatical features that characterize these moves are tense (89.3% past and 10.7% present), voice (67.9% active and 32.1% passive), and sentence structure (48.8% simple, 29.8% complex, and 21.4% compound). These results have implications for the existing scholarship on meeting minutes, professional development (i.e. developing courses for secretarial students), and further research. It is expected that the knowledge of moves and grammatical features can help the students and novice secretaries practice writing minutes of meetings effectively.
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