An empirical study of business request emails in the context of Business English as a Lingua Franca (original) (raw)
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English as a Business Lingua Franca: A Discursive Analysis of Business E-Mails
English as a Business Lingua Franca: A Discursive Analysis of Business Emails. International Journal of Business Communication, 1-21. , 2018
In the current world of business, English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF) is used in both spoken and written communication and underpinned by the paradigm of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). While a number of research studies have been conducted exploring the spoken discourse facets of BELF users, relatively little attention has been paid hitherto to explore BELF written discourse facets, particularly, in business e-mail communication. This article examines how the BELF community discursively practices written discourse in their business e-mails. Data have been drawn from a pool of 92 e-mail messages collected from the business personnel engaged in international communications from five ready-made garments business organizations located in Bangladesh. These e-mails were exchanged between nonnative English speakers working as business personnel in the ready-made garments sector in Bangladesh and their counterparts—including both native and nonnative English speakers employed in six different countries. Applying both qualitative and quantitative content analyses, findings reveal that stylistically the components of e-mail messages are usually personalized, flexible and informal, and similar to ELF spoken discourse rather than ELF academic discourse and/or standard business letter writing. A wide range of language features have been identified in e-mails that are unique in this specific technology-based genre of communication. The awareness of these different facets of e-mail discourse has multiple implications in education.
Research papers on teaching English as an additional language, 2016
Previous studies related to request strategies usually show that non-native speakers (NNSs) of English have inadequate pragmatic knowledge in making requests appropriately. For example, they use more direct strategies than native speakers (NSs). In this paper, the request strategies used by 47 associate degree in a tertiary institution in Hong Kong, as Chinese learners of English (CLEs), in their 28 e-mails and 24 memoranda written for the ‘Communication and Presentation Skills’ course assignment were analysed by using an integrated analytic framework combining the move structure analysis (MSA) (Swales, 1990) and the Cross-Cultural Speech-Act Realisation Project (CCSARP) coding manual (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989). Overall, similar to the previous studies (e.g. Chen, 2006; Lee, 2004; Zhu, 2012), this study shows that the involved CLEs seemed to make more direct than indirect requests. Although this tendency differs from the norm in the English-speaking world which generally favoured indirectness, at least to some extent the students, given their limited English proficiency, demonstrated some pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge by using some strategies to cater to the addressees’ face wants. The pedagogical implications drawn from the findings are that through explicit instruction and some ‘learners’ exploration’ tasks, followed by explicit teacher’s feedback, it is expected that learners’ consciousness to native speakers’ norm can be raised and their pragmatic competence in requesting can be gradually enhanced.
Business English – An Overview of Studies
Journal of Education and Humanities
The world has become a huge marketplace wherein trade between various cultures and nations is taking place, thus leading to an overwhelming need for one common language used worldwide among speakers of various native languages. Historically, this role has been occupied by different languages, even though the use of none of them can be compared to the current omnipresence of English. Thus, the aim of the present paper is to discuss the notion of English as a global language, global lingua franca with a major focus on the development of Business English as lingua franca (BELF), which has been embraced as a common language in multilingual and multicultural companies. Furthermore, this paper examines general characteristics of BELF and compares it to other similar concepts such as Business English (BE) and English as Lingua Franca (ELF). With the growing importance and presence of BELF worldwide, the teaching aspect has arisen as an important issue, so this paper touches upon it as well.
Business English: the Quintessence of the Corporate World
International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 2018
The status of English in the global arena has become an irreplaceable and unparalleled one. The language has become apparent and prominent in the key aspects of trade and commerce for the last two decades or more. Though the first spread of the language was due to colonial expansion, it has attained a level of being considered a standard and common one for all official communications by and large particularly in the countries where a vast number of regional and native languages are spoken. English, indeed, is not the most widely spoken language on the earth if it is taken in terms of number of native speakers. It has become a prominent language as it is spoken by people around the world – 350 million of 6 billion people. In case of International business, it is the only language that has occupied a great space revealing the importance of the language. This paper brings to light how English as a language is used for business communication in the corporate sectors. The business at glo...
Business is booming: Business English in the 1990s
English for Specific Purposes, 1996
English is the accepted medium for international business transactions and the market for Business English courses and textbooks is booming. There is relatively little published and practice is materials rather than research-led. This paper reviews developments in Business English using findings from articles, dissertations, reports and teaching material and considers the constructs that underlie much of the published teaching material. An interdisciplinary approach is called for to take account of language, interpersonal communication skills, business know-how and cultural issues.
Variations in business English letters written by non-native writers
LFE, 2009
Writing in a second language does not follow a fixed pattern in the different parts of the sentence or text. We can find variations in discourse due to the conceptual implications of language production. Even if we are considering genres which follow stereotyped structures, a standard pattern is not always followed. Language is dynamic and changes depending on the socio-communicative, linguistic and cognitive characteristics of its users. The objectives of this paper are, first, to show that language variation exists in business English, specifically, in stereotyped business letters. Although the rules are established in books and the same structures are repeated, students do not follow this recommended structure. The second objective is to find out if there are variations between second language students in the organisation of the text, in the use of connectors and in the communicative objectives of application letters. The third objective is to know if these variations affect communication in business English. At the end, we discuss the didactic and pragmatic implications of these results in teaching how to write an English application letter. The results of this study could be useful to educators and teachers responsible for planning business writing courses as we question the effectiveness of giving clear guidelines to students instead of focusing on a pragmatic approach. Furthermore, we show in the results in which part of an application letter appears language change. Finally, we consider that it is due to cultural reasons and the influence of the mother tongue, as a consequence, it should not be considered negative, as we communicate in an international language.
Book review of Introducing Business English (Nickerson & Planken, 2015)
In Introducing Business English, Catherine Nickerson and Brigitte Planken, two leading researchers and practitioners in the field, seek to provide a comprehensive introduction to Business English by drawing on different research traditions. Overall, the book focuses on the spoken and written modes of business communication, while briefly addressing some genres which fall into the sphere of computer-mediated discourse. Apart from discussing the latest research on these areas, the volume dedicates a special section to Business English pedagogy. The authors stress the complex and context-driven nature of Business English, which must be considered by both researchers and practitioners when examining and teaching international business communication. Despite some weaknesses, the book is a welcome addition to the growing literature in this area as it provides an in-depth analysis of the many dimensions involved in the processes of understanding and producing business genres. This raises awareness of the complexity of Business English and warns practitioners against teaching decontextualized templates and linguistic features. The book’s extensive overview of both seminal works and recent literature on the topic from a variety of perspectives makes it a must-read for graduate students and researchers in the area. Moreover, the review of different pedagogical approaches and the listing of resources for teachers of Business English turn it into a useful toolkit for more seasoned practitioners in the field. The book also may be of interest to scholars in corporate discourse, ESP, genre analysis, discourse analysis, and translation studies.
Lexical variations in business e-mails written by non-native speakers of English
English is the lingua franca used in business communication. Therefore the number of non-native speakers of English already outnumbers native speakers provided that worldwide enterprises use English for international communication. The Internet has also increased the use of English as an international language, in this way; it is used by speakers with different linguistic backgrounds. This variety of authors produces differences or variations in language use. In this paper we contrast business e-mails written by Spanish agents who work in an exporting company in India and China. Our main aim is to analyze the possible variations due to the mother tongue and the socio-cultural context and to classify lexical variation in business English used as a global working language by non-native speakers. We intended to determine the causes of variation and their influence on discourse. We analyzed and contrasted sixty e-mails written by two groups of non-native English speakers. Group A was composed of native speakers from Pakistan and Group B was composed of native speakers from China. The corpus analysis was carried out manually. We classified the occurrences in categories depending on the cause of the variation. After the analysis, we observed that the lexical variations found were caused by sociolinguistic and cultural influences.
2016
Abstract. The article is an attempt to look at the reality of teaching English for business purposes / Business English from a practical point of view in the tertiary educational environment at three faculties in three different countries, namely Slovenia, Serbia, and Montenegro. The article emphasizes the similarities and negligible differences among the three systems in this respect, drawing on the long historical mutual heritage and also mutual tendencies for further development. Initially, the article introduces Business English as the most entrepreneurial arm within English language teaching/general English and lays down the key similarities and distinctions between the two. Next, the requirements of teaching/learning Business English in general are compared to the demands of teaching/learning English for business purposes/Business English at three different faculties. Eventually, conclusions are drawn from the comparison.
Despite its multiple benefits, writing has always been a problematic issue for business English trainers and their students, due to several aspects, among which the most significant ones are the fact that it is more time-consuming -therefore more difficult to integrate in the structure of face-to-face encounters -and less dynamic and interactive than other types of activities. This article focuses on analyzing the results of a questionnaire completed by students at the Faculty of Commerce from the Bucharest University of Economic Studies regarding their opinion on the usefulness of business writing skills, their views on tasks designed to develop these skills, as well as their suggestions of activities that might increase their interest in enhancing their business writing competences.