Schematic Structure of Letters of Recommendation Written by Lecturers of a Public University in Ghana

A Letter of Recommendation (LR) plays a significant role during the admission process in higher education. Almost all universities require LRs for the admission of prospective students into graduate programmes. Using Genre Theory (Bhatia, 1993; Swales, 1990), this study examined the schematic structure of 35 purposively sampled LRs written by lecturers from the Department of English of the University of Cape Coast (UCC), a leading public university in Ghana. We employed qualitative content analysis complemented by some descriptive statistics. One key finding is that, in general, UCC lecturers used a 6-move structure, namely: “purpose of writing,” “context of knowing the candidate,” “writer’s credentials,” “candidate’s credentials,” “candidate’s personal values,” and “closure”. It was found further that Move 6 (closure) had the highest percentage of frequency of occurrence (i.e., 100%), while Move 4, Candidate’s credentials, occupied the greatest space. A further finding was that the sequence of moves did not depict any one standard sequence; instead, there were different sequential patterns in the dataset. The study concludes that writing the LR involves deploying disciplinary and genre-specific conventions as well as personal stylistic preferences of the writers. These findings have implications for the existing scholarship on LRs, professional development, and further research.