Managing discourse in intercultural business email interactions: a case study of a British and Italian business transaction (original) (raw)
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The Effect of CMC in Business Emails in Lingua Franca: Discourse Features and Misunderstandings
The paper argues that everyday exchange of business emails produces a development in the work-group relationship, which, in turn, makes new communication styles possible and acceptable by the users' habit to computer-mediated forms, even in unbalanced professional exchanges. The focus is on the (spoken) discourse features of email messages in a self-compiled corpus of selected computer-mediated business emails, produced by five participants over three months (October 2015 – February 2016). The exchange, involving the use of English by non-native speaker interactants (in particular, Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF)), as well as language adjustments in a computer-mediated exchange, takes the form of a 'written dialogue', and closely resembles the features of the spoken discourse. Results confirmed that, despite being the oldest computer-mediated communication technology, emails constitute a 'not yet conventionalized' communication mode that is influenced by the push email system, and provide a new (dynamic) communicative frame. Semi-spoken interaction 48 The Effect of CMC in Business Emails in Lingua Franca: Discourse Features and Misunderstandings
Business Communication Quarterly, 2006
Recent turbulence in the corporate world resulting from cross-border mergers and acquisitions and advances in communication technology has meant major changes for internal communication in multinational companies. For example, in Finnish-Swedish mergers the common corporate language is increasingly English in spite of the fact that Swedish 2 has traditionally been the lingua franca of the region (e.g. Björkman et al. 2003: 219; see also Vollstedt 2002: 103). What this means is that English is not a native tongue for either party but is used as a lingua franca, a common language. Before the recent wave of mergers and acquisitions, Finnish business practitioners used English in company-external communication to carry on international trade, traditional export and import. In such situations, the documents exchanged were format-bound inquiries, quotations, orders, and the like delivered by fax or mail, and export assistants and secretaries took care of that paper work. In those times, the model for learners of (business) English in Finland was a native British English speaker with impeccable language skills.
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.
Email correspondence has become one of the most useful ways for global communication, and more precisely for international business communication. Diverse studies of global communication in English have been carried out concerning ELF (English as lingua franca) and BELF (Business English as lingua franca). The purpose of this research is to bring to the forth the latest variation patterns in business email communication in English. The study aims to analyze an authentic corpus of 90 emails written in English by business managers of different chemical companies set up in 14 different countries around the world, including native and non-native speakers of English who use this language as a lingua franca for commercial and distribution purposes. The central research targets are to observe: (i) The main communicative strategies used by business practitioners to achieve the required communicative competence in BELF (e.g. politeness strategies or a shared core vocabulary); (ii) the generic move structure variation from the standard organization of, for instance, business letters to a more relaxed pattern. Several linguistic, generic and pragmatic aspects reveal an inclination towards a more informal, co-operative and goal-oriented international business email communication.
Today the most international written mode of communication within the business world is electronic correspondence. As the introductory section explains, diverse analyses of emails written in different cultures have been carried out revealing interesting differences and similarities in their discourse features and rhetorical strategies. However, a comparative examination of business emails from representative European cultures such as British (Northern Europe), Spanish (Southern Europe) and Polish (Eastern Europe) has not been undertaken so far. With this aim, a corpus of over 100 emails of response to business requests written in English by companies set up in these three cultures has been compiled and analysed. The main research targets are to observe the main parameters of variation across these cultures, the existent variation regarding the prototypical move structure and how register variation fluctuates depending on each culture. The results will indicate that across these cultures the move structure of this genre is more complex than current templates and existing published materials show. The study also demonstrates that, while there is a tendency to standardize email correspondence at a European level, there are certain parameters of variation that may help language learners and users to conform their messages depending on the recipient's culture.
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.
Interethnic Workplace E-mail Communication: An Investigation into Politeness Strategies
Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on e-Education, e-Business and Information Management, 2014
The use of email in business communication might be troublesome in the sense that the language of emails is generally theorized as a mixture of spoken and written varieties. This possibility might even increase further among communicators who belong to different ethnic backgrounds as they have different perspectives to communication and expectations of how messages should be structured. Research shows that politeness strategies used by native speakers might be viewed in an unpleasant way by nonnative speakers and vice versa; however, very little research has been done pertaining politeness strategies used by different types of nonnative speakers. Drawing upon Brawn and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory, this study investigates politeness strategies used in Malaysian workplace emails.
Communicative Strategies in Cross-Cultural Business Environment
Mìžnarodnij fìlologìčnij časopis, 2019
The present paper looks at a set of communicative strategies employed in the international business by English-speaking business people in general, and auditors and accountants, in particular. The work aims at the relevance of cross-cultural communication and the generally accepted classification of communicative strategies in English. Thus, to meet the objectives, a concept of intercultural communication comes to description to be followed by the stages of the message delivery. These relate to (i) encoding of the message, (ii) choice of a medium / media to transmit a relevant message, and (iii) decoding of the message. As respects intercultural communication, the article speaks of relevance in understanding the particular backgrounds, which the communicants in the international business environment may not ignore. English-speaking business people may make great experts in their professional domain of activities, however, that may not guarantee they would never face a wide range of challenges, which would arise in the course of communication between the business peoplecolleagues, peers, business partners or just business contacts from different countries. One of the reasons for some difficulty in interaction can link to their belonging to different cultural backgrounds, for example, religious, social, ethnic, educational, etc. It is important to note that the contemporary progress with digitization and globalization influences ways of thinking, beliefs and values. The ethnic identity borders dissolve in the global processes of integration. Open borders and more opportunities to travel and discover the world may not, but impact the personality, their perception and interpretation of the world within and between cultural environments. Therefore, the topicality of the work highlights the need in the unified approach to simplified interaction despite the borders and time zones and moves the needle with the classification of seven communicative strategies business people may employ for work when travelling and speaking English. To help better understand each strategy, the explanations are furnished with the English examples for a certain communicative context.
The study seeks to add to the current debate on English as a lingua franca by analysing the role of the native speaker in English in intercultural Business negotiations and attempting to answer two questions: what are the differences in the production of communication strategies in business negotiations between native speakers of English and lingua franca speakers of English? And do native speakers of English effectively accommodate lingua franca speakers in intercultural negotiations? The data, gathered from a sample of 14 native English speakers and 13 non-native English speakers, consist of interaction data collected through a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and the participants’ a self report on their language use in the format of a short questionnaire. The results showed that the native speakers in this sample used a wider range of linguistic devices than the non-native speakers. The majority of the native speakers attempted to accommodate non-native speakers, but there was significant variation in the way that individual participants chose their strategies and approached accommodation. The most striking finding was the imbalance between the native speaker's understanding of the issues of intercultural communication, and their inability to effectively accommodate non-native speakers. The implications are discussed.