Abstract
Traditionally, commercial correspondence has been the core of Business English, and the teaching, materials of Business English have been directed mostly at offering ready-made sample letters according to the stages of business transactions. In recent years, however, manuals and textbooks of the so-called "Building Block Style" have come into wide use and have been warmly received because of their handiness and serviceableness; they collect a large number of "set phrases" and arc designed to make up a complete letter by combining various phrases accordingly. The conventional "Letter Style" and the newly-developed "Building Block Style" contrast markedly with each other; the former is deductive, macroscopic and monistic, while the latter is inductive, microscopic and pluralistic. Consequently, their propriety and impropriety as teaching materials of Business English will be reversed, especially, on the axis of the factors of learners' side. In this report, as a compromise between the two types above mentioned, the present writer showed an effective teaching method of business letter writing, that is, teaching of sentence patterns by generalizing "Skeleton Plans". So far as commercial correspondence is concerned, Structure, Sequence and Organization -"SSO"- of business letters arc almost fixed at each stage of business transactions, and their skeleton plans can be generalized to some extent. Therefore, I'm sure that the students can be trained effectively to write letters covering all the business transactions, if instructors take the following steps of pattern practice: (1) Using a textbook of "Letter Style" (2) Generalizing the skeleton plans of each sample letter, and showing them to the students in advance (3) Extracting sentence patterns which correspond to each skeleton item (4) Drilling the students in the sentence patterns
