An Investigation into Linguistic Problems in writing English business complaint letters. A case Study at Universal Petroleum Viet Nam Joint Stock Company

In the global economy, business correspondence is crucial to the communication of multinational corporations. The information flow inside a corporate or business environment is facilitated by well-written business letters. English business letter plays an essential written text used for international business communication and it has its own features of a text. However, well-written skills in English business complaint letters are also the skills that Vietnamese office workers face the most obstacles. The current research aims to investigate the linguistic problems of Import-Export employees in writing English business complaint letters at Universal Petroleum Viet Nam Joint Stock Company. The study employed a mixed-method design, combining qualitative and textual analysis. The sample was 16 Import-Export employees and 90 Draft English business complaint letters. The research findings indicated that morphological errors (38.0%) were the most prevalent, followed by mechanical (25.5%), syntactic (18.3%), and lexical errors (18.2%). These results lead to several implications for targeted training programs to enhance employees’ proficiency in writing professional and accurate English business complaint letters.