Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / February 2005

Hello,

I'm from Holland, and although I do speak English quite well, I'm not fully
confident when it comes to writing a job application letter. I'm pretty much
content with what I have now, but there's some bits that I feel may not
quite 'sound natural',  or even be completely wrong. Would any native
English speaker please proofread the letter (email) below and give their
comments or suggestions for improvements?

Thank you very much!

Martin

P.S. for various reasons, I prefer to use US spelling conventions.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----

From:     xxxxxxxxxxx>

To:         xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Subject:  application for position of computational linguist (ref. nr. xxxx)

Dear Mrs. xxxxxxxxxx,

In reaction to the job opening posted on your website, I would like to apply
for the position of computational linguist (vacancy nr. xxxx, open until
21-2-2005). You will find my CV in the email attachment.

In 2003, I have completed my Master of Arts degree in Language, Speech &
Information sciences at the Radboud University Nijmegen. I have worked as a
research assistant (Ph.D. student) at the Université catholique de Louvain
(Belgium) for one year, in the field of second language acquisition
research. This has been a valuable experience, but I have now decided to
focus more on the computational side of linguistics.

The topic of my M.A. thesis was the possible use of a syntax parser,
developed at the Radboud University Nijmegen, in a text-to-speech system. In
this project I have gained experience with practical and theoretical aspects
of natural language processing. In my job as lab assistant at the Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics, I have had the opportunity to gain
experience conducting scientific experiments, and to learn from the theory
behind them. Also, I have worked with, and contributed to, specialized
software tools for analysis of the results. Finally, I have worked
temporarily for the lexicon management team of the Corpus of Spoken Dutch
project.

As language technology progresses, semantic annotation is added to
(automated) POS-tagging, presenting its own challenge. I would like to
contribute to this effort in the international context of the eContent and
LIRICS projects, and I'm confident my computational and corpus linguistics
experience would be of value to it.

I would welcome the opportunity to further explain to you my interests in
the LIRICS project.

If you are interested, or if you have any questions, you can always contact
me by email or by phone.

Sincerely yours,

Firstname Lastname

address

email

phonenr.