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TRANSCRIPT
A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF THE LEXIS OF BUSINESS ENGLISH AND BUSINESS ENGLISH TEACHING MATERIALS
A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of PhD in the Faculty of Education.
2000
Michael Nelson
Centre for English Language Studies in Education
1
Table of Contents
Page
Acknowledgements 22
Chapter 1 Summary of the Research 25
Chapter 2 Statement of the Problem and Overview 292.1 Introduction 292.1 The hypotheses and research questions 302.3 Method 302.4 Methodological overview 332.5 Aims of the research 332.6 Overview of the thesis 342.7 Concrete problems - concrete answers 35
Chapter 3 A Review of the Literature of Business English 373.1 Introduction and overview 373.2 The development of ESP 38
3.2.1 The origins of ESP until 1945 383.2.2 Post-war ESP 393.2.3 Stage 1: Register Analysis 413.2.4 Later developments in Register Analysis 433.2.5 Stage 2: Discourse or Rhetorical Analysis 433.2.6 Later developments in Discourse Analysis:
Genre Analysis44
3.2.7 Stage 3: Needs Analysis 453.2.8 Later developments in Needs Analysis 473.2.9 Stage 4: Skills and strategies 483.2.10 Stage 5: The Learning-Centred approach 493.2.11 Stage 6: ESP today 503.2.12 Summary: definitions of ESP 51
3.3 Business English in an ESP context 54
A: Studies into What Business Language is 5858
3.4 Pickett and beyond 583.4.1 Introduction: initial comments on the
nature of Business English58
2
3.4.2 Pickett and the ÔpoeticsÕ of the business ÔergolectÕ
61
3.4.3 Pickett: a summary 673.5 PickettÕs Concept 1: Poetics and the nature of
ÔtechnicalÕ language69
3.5.1 The notions of sub-technical language and layering outside the field of Business English
70
3.5.2 The notion of layering in the field of Business English
73
3.5.3 Discussion 763.6 PickettÕs Concept 2: The ÔGamutÕ - the
ergolect of business80
3.6.1 Discourse 813.6.1.1 Cohesion 823.6.1.2 Strategies 83
3.6.2 Culture 863.6.3 Corporate culture, power and language 91
3.6.3.1 Corporate culture 923.6.4 Power 943.6.5 Genre: a brief overview 97
3.6.5.1 Business English genres 993.6.5.2 Moves, steps and cycles 1003.6.5.3 Extra-linguistic aspects of genre study 102
3.6.6 Discussion: approaches to researching the Ôgamut’ - discourse and genre
103
3.6.6.1 Discourse 1043.6.6.2 Genre 1083.6.6.3 Discussion 113
3.7 PickettÕs Concept 3: Business communication - needs analysis and Business English
114
3.7.1 Needs analysis and Business English: who communicates with who?
116
3.7.2 Problems with needs analysis approaches 1173.7.3 Language and needs analysis 1183.7.4 Perceptions and intuition 1193.7.5 An attempt to overcome the question of
language in needs analysis121
3.7.6 An attempt to overcome the question of intuition in needs analysis
121
3.7.7. Language and needs surveys 1223.7.8 Discussion 123
B: What Business English is thought to be 125
3
3.8. Business English materials 1253.8.1 General or special English? 125
3.8.1.1 Discussion 1293.8.2 Categorising Business English materials 1303.8.3 Analysis of the validity of Business
English materials in relation to intuition134
3.8.4 Studies of intuition outside Business English
136
3.8.5 Studies of intuition in Business English 1393.8.6 Discussion 142
3.9 The review of the literature: summary and conclusions
143
3.9.1 Macro- vs micro-level knowledge 1443.9.2 Single vs multi-disciplinary knowledge 1453.9.3 Intuitive vs empirical knowledge 1463.9.4 Research knowledge vs classroom practice 146
3.10 Afterword: towards a methodology 147
Chapter 4 Lexis: From Collocation to Colligation 1494.1 Introduction 1494.2 Vocabulary and pedagogy: a brief history 150
4.2.1 The 1950s to the present day 1544.3 Collocation 155
4.3.1 A preliminary definition of collocation 1554.3.1.1 Syntagmatic/paradigmatic relations 1574.3.1.2 Reciprocal/non-reciprocal collocation 157
4.3.2 Development of the concept of collocation 1584.3.3 Key elements of collocation 163
4.3.3.1 The notion of upward and downward collocation
164
4.3.3.2 The strength of collocations 1654.3.3.3 The notion of collocational span -
what makes a collocation?167
4.3.3.4 Collocation as an embodiment of the Ôidiom principleÕ
169
4.3.3.5 Collocation, the idiom principle and Business English
170
4.3.3.6 Collocation and beyond 1744.4 Semantic prosody 1744.5 Colligation 179
4.5.1 Technical aspects of colligation 1794.5.2 Pedagogy and colligation 180
4.6 A final view of collocation, colligation and semantic prosody
181
4
4.7 Multi-word items, prefabrication and the lexical approach
183
4.7.1 Introduction 1834.7.2 What are multi-word items? 1844.7.3 Gambits 1854.7.4 Other definitions of MWIs 1864.7.5 Discussion 1954.7.6 Characteristics of MWIs: making sense of
the definitions197
4.7.6.1 Fixed and non-fixed: points on a continuum
198
4.7.6.2 The relationship of form and function 2004.7.6.3 Competence, performance, the idiom
principle and multi-word items202
4.8 The lexical approach 2044.9 Multi-word items in this thesis 2094.10 The next chapter 211
Chapter 5 The Methodological Background:British Traditions of Text Analysis, Correlative Register Analysis and Corpus Linguistics
212
5.1 Introduction 2125.2 British traditions in text analysis: Firth, Halliday
and Sinclair213
5.2.1 Principle 1: Linguistics is essentially a social science and an applied science
213
5.2.2 Principle 2: Language should be studied in actual, attested, authentic instances of use, not as intuitive, invented, isolated sentences
214
5.2.3 Principle 3: The unit of study must be whole texts
215
5.2.4 Principle 4: Texts and text types must be studied comparatively across text corpora
217
5.2.5 Principle 5: Linguistics is concerned with the study of meaning: form and meaning are inseparable
218
5.2.6 Principle 6: There is no boundary between lexis and grammar: lexis and grammar are independent
219
5.2.7 Principle 7: Much language use is routine 2205.2.8 Principle 8: Language in use transmits the
culture220
5.2.9 Principle 9: Saussurian dualisms are misconceived
221
5.3 Corpus linguistics 222
5
5.3.1 Corpora: a brief history 2225.3.2 Why use corpora? 2255.3.3 Corpora: for and against 2255.3.4 Reasons for the use of corpora in linguistic
analysis226
5.3.5 Some problems with the use of corpora for linguistic analysis
229
5.3.6 Corpora use in this study 2335.4 The next chapter 234
Chapter 6 Creating the Corpora 2356.1 Introduction 2356.2 Corpus size 235
6.2.1 The size of the Business English Corpus 2386.2.2 The size of the Published Materials Corpus 239
6.3 Sampling, representativeness and balance in the BEC
240
6.3.1 Introduction 2406.3.2 Sampling 241
6.3.2.1 The population 2426.3.2.2 Extra linguistic factors in relation to the
population243
6.3.2.3 Specification of macro-genres for the samples
245
6.3.2.4 Sample size and make-up 2476.3.3 Balance and representativenes in the BEC 249
6.4 Sampling, balance and representativeness in the PMC
254
6.5 Data collection and entry 2596.5.1 Data collection for the BEC 259
6.5.1.1 Publicly available data 2606.5.1.2 Private data 260
6.5.2 Data collection for the PMC 2626.5.3 Methods of data entry in the BEC 262
6.5.3.1 Adaption of material already in electronic form
262
6.5.3.2 Conversion by optical scanning 2636.5.3.3 Conversion by keyboarding 263
6.5.4 Data entry in the PMC 2656.5.5 Transcription 265
6.5.5.1 Spoken language transcription 2666.6 Data storage and retrieval 2696.7 Confidentiality, copyright and ethics 2706.8 The reference corpus 2726.9 Discussion and rationale 272
6
Chapter 7 Hypotheses, Research Questions and Method 2747.1 Introduction 2747.2 Hypothesis One 2747.3 Hypothesis Two 2847.4 The next chapter 288
Chapter 8 Overview of results 2898.1 Introduction 2898.2 Analysis of the BEC 289
8.2.1 General statistics of the BEC 2898.2.2 BEC frequency list unlemmatised/unedited 2908.2.3 BEC frequency list (lemmatised) 2908.2.4 BEC Key words 2938.2.5 Grammatical categorisation of BEC
positive key words298
8.2.6 Semantic categorisation of BEC positive key words
298
8.2.7 Grammatical categorisation of BEC negative key words
298
8.2.8 Semantic categorisation of BEC negative key words
299
8.2.9 Analysis of 50 key words from the BEC 2998.2.10 BEC 3-6 word cluster frequency lists 3118.2.11 Key BEC 3-word clusters 3178.2.12 Analysis of five key 2-word clusters from
the BEC319
8.2.13 Analysis of five 3-word clusters from the BEC
322
8.2.14 BEC Key key-word database 3258.2.15 Analysis of five key words from the BNC
corpus327
8.2.16 Collocates of the 50 key words shown by MI statistic
330
8.3 Analysis of the PMC 3348.3.1 PMC general statistics 3348.3.2 PMC frequency list unlemmatised 3348.3.3 PMC frequency list lemmatised 3358.3.4 PMC positive key words (BNC reference
corpus)335
8.3.5 PMC positive key words (BEC reference corpus)
337
8.3.6 Grammatical categorisation of PMC positive key words (BNC reference)
340
8.3.7 Semantic categorisation of PMC positive key words (BNC reference)
340
8.3.8 Grammatical categorisation of PMC 340
7
positive key words (BEC reference)8.3.9 Semantic categorisation of PMC positive
key words (BEC reference)340
8.3.10 Analysis of five key words from the PMC 3418.3.11 PMC 3-word cluster frequency list 3468.3.12 PMC key 3-word clusters ( BEC reference) 3478.3.13 PMC Key key-word database 348
8.4 The next chapter 350
Chapter 9 Results and Discussion 3519.1 Introduction 3519.2 Hypotheses and questions 351
9.2.1 Research questions relating to Business English lexis
352
9.3 Linguistic features of Business English lexis 3549.3.1 Is there such as thing as Business English
lexis?354
9.3.1.1 Key words 3559.3.1.2 Positive key words in the BEC 357
9.3.2 If there is such a thing as Business English lexis what is it made up of?
360
9.3.2.1 Positive key word analysis 3619.3.2.2 Negative key word analysis 3759.3.2.3 Key words and the Ôworld of businessÕ 3849.3.2.4 The next section 387
9.3.3 Can the concept of semantic prosody be found in Business English?
387
9.3.3.1 Analysis of business lexis by semantic prosody
388
9.3.3.2 Semantic prosody: conclusions 4069.3.4 What colligational and grammar/meaning
patterns can be found in Business English?411
9.3.4.1 Colligation and grammatical form/meaning relations in Business English
415
9.3.4.2 Discussion: business-specific grammatical patterning?
434
9.3.4.3 Sub-technical language and Pickett - a footnote
437
9.3.5 How are words distributed across Business English macro-genres?
440
9.3.5.1 Overall range of Business English lexis across macro-genres
442
9.3.5.2 Doing vs about and spoken vs written Business English lexis
444
8
9.3.6 What kind of clusters can be found in Business English
447
9.3.6.1 Lexical clusters in the BEC at the macro-level
448
9.3.6.2 Lexical clusters in the BEC at the micro-level: analysis of individual 2-3 word clusters
452
9.3.7 How do words associate with each other in Business English?
460
9.3.8 Business English: a summary 4659.4 Business English published materials 471
9.4.1 How do the PMC key words define the lexical world of business and how does this definition compare to that shown in the BEC?
474
9.4.1.1 Analysis 1: Key word analysis of the PMC (BNC reference corpus)
474
9.4.1.2 Discussion: results of Analysis 1 4889.4.1.3 Analysis 2: Key word analysis of the
PMC (BEC reference corpus)490
9.4.1.4 Discussion: results of Analysis 1 and Analysis 2
502
9.4.2 Further analysis - PMC negative key words 5049.4.3 Semantic prosody in the PMC 505
9.4.3.1 Discussion 5119.4.4 Colligation and grammar/meaning
combinations in the PMC512
9.4.5 Word clusters in the PMC 5179.4.5.1 Clusters at a macro-level in the PMC 5189.4.5.2 Clusters at a micro-level in the PMC 521
9.4.6 The PMC: conclusions 5229.4.6.1 The next section 525
9.5 Pedagogical Issues 5269.5.1 Materials creation should be corpus-
based527
9.5.2 Business English materials should contain Business English
529
9.5.3 Sub-business language needs to be stressed
533
9.5.4 Semantic prosody needs to be made widely known and explicitly taught
535
9.5.5 Lexis should be seen in its typical grammatical setting
540
9.5.6 Students should know that words are not evenly distributed
543
9.5.7 There should be a greater focus on 545
9
word clusters9.5.8 Associate words should be more
recognised548
9.5.9 Pedagogical issues: a conclusion 5509.6 Incidental findings 5529.7 Critique and future applications of the corpora 561
9.7.1 Critique 5619.7.2 Further applications 565
Chapter 10 Summary of Conclusions 56710.1 The lexis of Business English 56710.2 The lexis of published Business English
materials 570
10.3 A final word 572
PMC Bibliography 573
Bibliography 575
10
Appendices
The appendices to this thesis are situated in two places. Firstly, in Volume II that
accompanies this volume, and secondly on the CD ROM that is to be found inside the
back cover of this volume.
Appendices in Vol.II
BEC
Appendix Content Page
Appendix 1 BEC lemmatised frequency list - top 1,000 words 604Appendix 2 Grammatical categorisation of BEC positive key
words623
Appendix 3 Semantic categorisation of BEC positive key words
637
Appendix 4 Grammatical categorisation of BEC negative key words
649
Appendix 5 Semantic categorisation of BEC negative key words
656
Appendix 6 Analysis of 50 BEC key words: 664Key words 1 customer 665
manager 668supplier 671distributor 674shareholder 677employee 679staff 681partner 684boss 687management 690
Key words 2 business 694investment 707delivery 711payment 714development 717production 721communication 724competition 727takeover 730
11
distribution 732Key words 3 sell 734
manage 738receive 741confirm 743provide 746send 749develop 753discuss 756achieve 759improve 761
Key words 4 high 764big 769low 773global 777international 780local 784competitive 787corporate 790strategic 793financial 795
Key words 5 sale 802merger 805trade 808package 812export 815service 818market 823earnings 832performance 834product 837
Appendix 7 Five 2-word clusters 841Key words 6 interest rates 842
cash flow 845market share 847stock market 849Wall Street 851
Appendix 8 Five 3-word clusters 853Key words 7 a lot of 854
one of the 859the end of 863in order to 867we need to 870
12
Appendix 9 Five words from the BNC 873Key words 8 send 874
manage 877big 880global 884package 886
Appendix 10 Collocates of the 50 words by MI statistic 888Appendix 11 Example teaching materials 891Appendix 12 Ideal vs Actual Content of the BEC 905
PMC
Appendix 13 Grammatical categorisation of PMC positive key words (BNC reference)
908
Appendix 14 Semantic categorisation of PMC positive key words (BNC reference)
918
Appendix 15 Grammatical categorisation of PMC positive key words (BEC reference)
926
Appendix 16 Semantic categorisation of PMC positive key words (BEC reference)
931
Appendix 17 Analysis of 5 PMC key words 936Key words 9 manager 937
customer 943product 946market 951business 958
Appendix 18 PMC negative key words (BEC reference) 966
Appendix 19 Key to BEC file names 971Appendix 20 Key to PMC file names 972
ON THE CD ROM File names match their contents
Readme.docBEC
BEC Corpus: working versionBEC Corpus: macro-genre versionBEC Corpus: split version (by 1,102 texts)BEC Corpus: tagged versionBEC Database of Contents
13
Unlemmatised BEC frequency listLemmatised BEC frequency listPositive BEC key wordsNegative BEC key words3-6 BEC frequency clustersKey 3-word clustersBEC key key-word database
PMCPMC corpusUnlemmatised PMC frequency list Lemmatised PMC frequency listPMC (BNC) positive key word listPMC (BEC) positive key word listPMC 3-word cluster frequency list PMC key 3-word cluster list (BNC reference)PMC key 3-word cluster list (BEC reference)PMC Key key-word databasePMC Negative key word list (BEC reference)
14
List of Tables
Table Number
Table Page
I A definition of ESP: absolute and variable factors 53II The layering of business lexis 66III Examples of discourse/genre studies in relation to the size of
the data gathered and the transfer of results to the classroom106
IV Types of lexical phrases defined by Nattinger & DeCarrico 190V Summary of categories of multi-word items 195VI Different terminology used for same MWI phenomena 197VII Formulaic language as defined by Howarth (1998) 199VIII Reasons for using corpora for linguistic analysis 229IX Business English Corpus ideal content specification 246X The Business English Corpus 252XI Business English books included in the PMC 256XII Data gained via personal contacts 261XIII Data gained via the Chamber of Commerce 262XIV Mode of text entry in the BEC 264XV General statistics of the BEC 289XVI BEC lemmatised frequency list (top 100 lemmas) 291XVII BEC positive key words (top 100) 293XVIII BEC negative key words (top 100) 296XIX 6-word frequency clusters 312XX 5-word frequency clusters 313XXI 4-word frequency clusters 315XXII 3-word frequency clusters 316XXIII Key BEC 3-word clusters 317XXIV BEC key key-words (top 100) 325XXV Collocates of the key words and MI score 331XXVI General statistics of the PMC 334XXVII PMC positive key words (top 100) - BNC reference 335XXVIII PMC positive key words (top 100) - BEC reference 338XXIX PMC 3-word cluster frequency list 346XXX PMC key 3-word clusters - BEC reference 347XXXI PMC key key-words (top 50) - BEC reference 349XXXII Business-related words found in the top 100 most frequent
words in the lemmatised BEC355
XXXIII Top 100 BEC Positive Key Word List - business-related words only
357
XXXIV Differences in the top 100 frequency/key word lists of the BEC
359
XXXV Positive key words grammatical categorisation 362XXXVI Semantic categorisation of positive key verbs in the BEC 367
15
XXXVII Negative key words grammatical categorisation 376XXXVIII Semantic categorisation of negative key verbs in the BEC 380XXXIX Semantic categorisation of negative key adjectives in the
BEC382
XXXX Business lexis vs non-business lexis: positive and negative key words
386
XXXXI Left of node word semantic prosodic analysis of the word customer
390
XXXXII People in business: table of semantic prosodic relations 394XXXXIII Business activities: table of semantic prosodic relations 395XXXXIV Business actions: table of semantic prosodic relations 397XXXXV Business descriptions: table of semantic prosodic relations 400XXXXVI Comparative prosodies of global and international 402XXXXVII Business events and entities: table of semantic prosodic
relations404
XXXXVIII Percentage of coverage by semantic prosody 408XXXXIX Comparative occurrence of semantic prosody BEC/BNC 409L Examples of noun/verb phrases and compound adjectives
related to people in business415
LI Business-specific usage of words related to people in business
418
LII Business-specific usage of words related to business activities
421
LIII Business-specific usage of words related to business actions 425LIV Business-specific usage of words related to business
descriptions428
LV Business-specific usage of words related to business events and entities
431
LVI Key words computed from Meeting 2 in the BEC 437LVII Division of key words into three categories of lexis 439LVIII Macro-generic distribution of Business English lexis 443LIX Placement of the 50 words along the spoken/written and
doing/about continua 445
LX Colligational differences between a lot of and the end of 458LXI Placement of the 2- and 3 word clusters along the
spoken/written and doing/about continua459
LXII Associates of the top ten key key-words in the BEC 462LXIII Associative patterning between the top ten key key-words in
the BEC 463
LXIV The 100 most ‘key’ key words of the PMC (BNC reference corpus)
475
LXV Semantic categorisation of PMC key word verbs 483LXVI Noun/verb PMC-BEC differences 488
LXVII The 100 most ‘key’ key words of the PMC (BEC reference corpus)
491
16
LXVIII PMC positive key verbs (BEC reference) 498LXIX BEC negative key verbs 499LXX PMC positive key adjectives (BEC reference) 500
LXXI PMC positive key noun/verbs (BEC reference) 501LXXII Differences between key words found in the PMC and BEC 503LXXIII Semantic prosodies of manager in the BEC and PMC 506LXXIV Semantic prosodies of customer in the BEC and PMC 507LXXV Semantic prosodies of product in the BEC and PMC 508LXXVI Semantic prosodies of market in the BEC and PMC 509LXXVII Semantic prosodies of business in the BEC and PMC 510LXXVIII Differences between semantic prosody in the PMC and BEC 511LXXIX Comparison of five words PMC/BEC 514LXXX The most frequent 3-word clusters BEC and PMC 522LXXXI Summary of the lexical world of business 530LXXXII Examples of the relative frequency of male-female lexis in
the BEC552
LXXXIII The sliding scale of use of swearing: PMC ->BEC ->BNC 553
17
List of Figures
Figure Number
Figure Page
Fig. 1 The development of ESP as found in the literature 42Fig. 2 A time-line of approaches to ESP 51Fig. 3 Conflict of ESP conceptions 53Fig. 4 The division in SP-LT - Strevens (1977) 55Fig. 5 The division of ESP - Jordan (1989) 55Fig. 6 The division of EAP - Jordan (1989) 55Fig. 7 EBP divided into EGBP and ESBP 56Fig. 8 Business English in ESP and Business English learners 57Fig. 9 Business English as seen by Brieger (1997) 59Fig. 10 The specialised language of particular businesses 63Fig. 11 A summary of Pickett’s main ideas 68Fig. 12 Similarities and differences in BPAs and BNPs 74Fig. 13 Problems related to NNS discourse patterns 85Fig. 14 A model of cross- and inter-cultural discourse 91Fig. 15 Spoken genres in Business English as identified by Tompos
(1999)99
Fig. 16 Generic structure of corporate meetings 102Fig. 17 Factors involved in the discussion of Business English 124Fig. 18 Business English categories of materials 132Fig. 19 Syntagmatic/paradigmatic relationships 157Fig. 20 Kjellmer’s (1990) ideas on collocational fixedness 165Fig. 21 A sliding scale of collocability 166Fig. 22 Gender division in the BEC by percentage of words 253Fig. 23 UK/US language in the BEC shown by percentage of words 254Fig. 24 The Spoken/Written and Doing/About divisions in the BEC
shown by percentage254
Fig. 25 The PMC divided into 70% resource books (23 books) and 30% course books (10 books)
258
Fig. 26 Resource books in the PMC 258Fig. 27 Gender distribution of authors of books in the PMC 258Fig. 28 Books devoted to speaking, writing or general skills in the
PMC259
Fig. 29 An example from the BEC database 270Fig. 30 Key words analysed in the thesis shown by semantic
category280
Fig. 31 The process by which Business English key words were arrived at
357
Fig. 32 The relationship of Business English key words and general English
360
Fig. 33 Semantic noun categories of BEC key words 362
18
Fig. 34 Relationship of business to delexicalised verbs in the 100 most frequent words of the BEC
369
Fig. 35 Semantic noun/verb categories of BEC key words 371Fig. 36 The sliding scale of business-related key noun/verbs in the
BEC372
Fig. 37 The main semantic groups that go to form key Business English lexis
374
Fig. 38 Semantic noun categories of BEC negative key words 376Fig. 39 People featured in positive and negative key words 377Fig. 40 Places featured in positive and negative key words 379Fig. 41 The sliding scale of key word adjectives 383Fig. 42 Semantic noun/verb categories of BEC negative key words 383Fig. 43 The axes that delineate Business English lexis 387Fig. 44 Semantic prosody for distribution 396Fig. 45 The most frequent semantic sets collocating with business
lexis407
Fig. 46 Dispersion plot for customer 441Fig. 47 Macro-generic distribution of the 50 words taken for
analysis443
Fig. 48 Semantic prosodic sets for 2-word clusters 453Fig. 49 Semantic prosodic sets for 3-word clusters 456Fig. 50 Levels of lexical connection in the Business English
environment460
Fig. 51 Associates of company and sales 464Fig. 52 Semantic groups commonly associating with business lexis 467Fig. 53 Business English lexis: ever-expanding segments that form
part of the whole471
Fig. 54 The two-way process of key word analysis of PMC lexis 473Fig. 55 Distribution of key words by word class in the PMC (BNC
reference)477
Fig. 56 Semantic categorisation of positive key nouns PMC -> BNC 478Fig. 57 The lexical world of Business English as found in the PMC
(BNC reference corpus)488
Fig. 58 Distribution of key words by word class in the PMC (BEC reference)
493
Fig. 59 Semantic categorisation of PMC key word nouns (BEC reference)
494
Fig. 60 The business world found in the key nouns of Business English teaching materials
498
Fig. 61 Most frequent 3-word clusters - PMC and BEC 518Fig. 62 PMC key 3-word clusters - BNC and BEC reference 518Fig. 63 A lexical map of Business English for students 531Fig. 64 Example 6- and 7-word clusters from the BEC 546
19
Abstract
This thesis addresses two fundamental issues regarding lexis in the Business English environment. It firstly asks whether the lexis of Business English is significantly different from that of ‘everyday’ general English, and secondly, if the lexis found in Business English published materials is significantly different from that found in real-life business. In order to test these hypotheses two corpora were created to form the basis of the analysis: the Published Materials Corpus (PMC) consisting of 33 published Business English course and resource books at 590,000 running words and the Business English Corpus (BEC) at, 1,023,000 running words divided between spoken (44%) and written (56%) texts. The BNC Sampler corpus was used as reference corpus. These three corpora were then able to be lexically compared by using WordSmith 3 (Scott 1999) using statistically-based key words. The results of these analyses showed that it was possible to define the world of business lexis, and also how it was lexically separated from general English by placing the words into a limited group of semantic categories. These categories were found to recur across word class boundaries and showed a lexical world of business bounded by its people, institutions, activities, events and entities, The boundary limits of business lexis were placed by the non-business lexis of the negative key words and the semantic groups they formed. Representative words from each of the main semantic groups were chosen for further study to see how they behaved both semantically and grammatically. Louw’s (1993) concept of semantic prosody was used to determine how Business English words associated with certain semantic groups, and Firth’s (1957) and Hoey’s (1997) idea of colligation was used to show which grammatical patterns the words typically formed themselves into. Results of these secondary analyses of the BEC showed that whilst some business lexis associates with semantic groups unique to itself, most lexis is formed into patterns of interrelated semantic groups which regularly co-occur with each other. Additionally, there was evidence to suggest that words form associations to some semantic groups when in the business environment, and others when out of it. In the business setting, the meaning potential of words was found to be reduced and this had consequences both semantically and grammatically. Fewer meanings were used than in general English - and, as grammatical patterning and meaning were found to be co-dependent, restricted meaning led to area-specific and restricted grammatical patterning. The same analytical methods were used in the analysis of the PMC and it was compared both to the BNC, to see how published materials differ from general English, and to the BEC, to see how two corpora, both purporting to be Business English, differed from each other. Where the BEC could be seen to show a limited and specialist lexis, the PMC was even more limited. The lexical world of business presented by the materials showed a stress on personal and interpersonal contact, and a focus on a limited number of business activities, notably entertaining, travel, meetings and presentations. There was less reference to states and qualities, and the lexis in the PMC concentrated even more than the BEC on tangible, concrete items.
No portion of the work referred to in this thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university.
20
Copyright
1) Copyright in text of this thesis rests with the Author. Copies (by any process) either in full, or of extracts, may be made only in accordance with instructions by the Author and lodged in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. Details may be obtained from the Librarian. This page must form part of any copies made. Further copies (by any process) of copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the permission (in writing) of the Author.
2) The ownership of any intellectual property rights which may be described in this thesis is vested in the University of Manchester, subject to any prior agreement to the contrary, and may not be made available for use by any third parties without the written permission of the University, which will prescribe the terms and conditions of any such agreement.
Further information on the conditions under which disclosures and exploitation may take place is available from the Head of the Department of CELSE.
The Author
Mike Nelson, BA (Hons) Communication Studies, M.Ed TESOL, has lived and worked in Turku, Finland since 1983. Originally teaching young learners, Mike moved on to teach in the medical faculty of the local university hospital and subsequently to the private sector, where he has been teaching Business English since 1990. He has been Director of Studies at Kielikanava Language Centre since 1991. MikeÕs research interests have been needs analysis, materials development and Business English. These factors were combined in 1994 when he published the Business English Course Generator - a computerised system for Business English needs analysis. In 1997, together with Richard West of Manchester University, Mike produced a computerised needs analysis and placement testing system for Oxford University Press to operate in a World Wide Web environment. Most recently, he has written a distance learning module - Teaching Business English - for M.Ed students at Manchester University. Mike is married with two - soon to be three - children.
Acknowledgements
21
When I was just beginning this project four years ago a friend of mine, who had just
finished his own PhD, asked me if I knew what I was getting myself in to. I replied that
I was fully aware and that I knew it would be hard. I had no idea. Working more or less
full-time at the same time as doing a doctorate only adds to the stress and makes the
thanks I express here even more heartfelt. Writing a doctorate is an intensely lonely
experience, but at the same time it can only be done with the help and co-operation of a
large number of people. All these people now deserve a special mention.
First mention must go to my supervisor, Richard West, whose belief in me from our first
meetings and subsequent MEd work, through to this PhD has given me the lift I needed
to get it done. Acknowledgements sections are often full of phrases such as ‘without
whom’ but in this case it is true. Without Richard this work would not have been done.
Similar thanks must also go to my present boss, Riitta Tuominen of Kielikanava
Language Centre, Turku, Finland, whose understanding of this work and my desire to do
it has enabled me to use both school time and resources in order to get it finished.
This work has gone through several phases and three incidents have been central to its
development. It was started off by comments made to me by Michael Lewis. I had
submitted teaching materials to him for possible publication, but whilst seeing good
points in them, he asked me: ‘What about the language? You have to have a clear overall
view of the language you teach Business English students’. The fact that I did not have a
satisfactory reply to these points forced me into a thinking process that resulted in this
thesis. Next came a talk given by Michael Hoey at IATEFL 1998 in Manchester on
semantic prosody. I had never heard of semantic prosody before, but it struck me that it
needed to be a central part of any study into the lexis of Business English, and so it did.
The third event was a meeting with Mike Scott in Liverpool in the same year. I had been
concentrating on published materials and their weaknesses. Mike pointed out that a
Business English corpus could be put to much better use and that it would be more
profitable to look at real business lexis rather than only that found in materials. My
thanks to all three for their insights and advice. Also, further thanks to Michael Lewis
22
and all at LTP for continued help and advice throughout the whole process and to
Michael Hoey and Mike Scott for sending copies of their articles.
Thanks for help in getting articles also to Tony Berber Sardinha and Chris Tribble. Chris
also offered advice on how the key words in the BEC could be analysed and helped
broaden the analytical base I had planned.
Thanks to Anne Williams who read my chapter on multi-word items and offered very
sound critical comments. Also, thanks to Teresa O’Brien who helped me with genre and
provided data for the corpus. Thanks, too, to John Morley, whose advice and reading of
early drafts on corpora helped a great deal.
I would very much like to name all the business people and the people at an unnamed
Chamber of Commerce who helped me create the BEC, but due to reasons of secrecy I
am unable to do so. I can mention Hanna, Hasse and Marja from a firm in Finland who
went out of their way to help me get data. Special thanks to Ian, Kevin, Pat, Terry,
Alisdair, Joanne, David, Ted, Colin and Debra in the UK. Also an extra special mention
to Tom, who fought my battles for me for over a year and gave me access to invaluable
data. Without the often very considerable help of these people, the corpus would not have
been possible. I can also mention Louis Garnade and Andy Cowle of the English Book
Centre, Oxford, who helped in gathering data for the PMC. Also, thanks to all the
publishers who gave permission to include their books in the study.
I would like to thank all those who allowed themselves to be interviewed for the
interview section of the BEC. My brother, Tony, a product development manager, my
Uncle Frank, who for over forty years was a work’s manager and engineer in Manchester
and Liverpool, and my old friends John Stevenson, John Grundy and John Hampson. To
them, and all the other interviewees, thank you.
Thanks to Pekka Lehtiö of Lingonet for advice on statistics and tricky computer
problems and other comments on the work as it progressed. Thanks to Nick Moon for
proof-reading the final drafts and Anitta Tuovinen and Jarna Rantanen for advice on
23
grammatical issues. Thanks to Jane Honka for reading rough drafts of the work and
making helpful suggestions, and for her on-going encouragement. Thanks must also go to
my old friend Dr. Tony Lyons for his constant support, positive attitude and good advice
- it has helped a great deal.
I would also like to thank Oliver Mason for help with collocations and a special thanks to
Alex Chengyu Fang for tagging the BEC for me with his own tagger. Thanks also to
Jeremy Clear with advice on word clusters. These people I have only corresponded with
by email, but their willingness to help someone they did not know has greatly helped my
work.
Getting hold of the right articles when living outside the UK has not always been easy.
Fortunately, university libraries in Finland are freely open to all and I have had help from
both Turku University library and bo Akademi English department library. Also special
thanks must go to Pat Hurst at the CELSE library for years of kindness and flexibility in
book loan times.
Finally, thanks must go to my family who, as often seems to be the case, have borne the
brunt of the hard times. My daughter Sofia (now 7), has often asked if I am going now to
my study to write more of my ‘story’. Thanks therefore, to my wife, Marja, for giving
me the time to write my ‘story’, and to my son Joel, and Sofia for their love and support.
I would like to dedicate this thesis to the memories of my sister, Ruth, and my mother
and father. They would have been proud.
Mike Nelson
September 2000, Turku, Finland.
24
Chapter 1 A Summary of the Research
This thesis addresses two fundamental issues regarding lexis in the Business English
environment. It firstly asks whether the lexis of Business English is significantly
different from that of ‘everyday’ general English, and secondly, if the lexis found in
Business English published materials is significantly different from that found in real-life
business. It also fulfils a further important descriptive role - so little is known about
business lexis that this work has also focused on describing the lexical world it found. In
order to gain answers to these questions and to enter the world of business lexis, it was
necessary to have representative samples of all three lexical environments: Business
English, general English and the Business English found in published teaching materials.
This presented both methodological and logistical problems of how best to approach the
study, and how to actually get the data necessary to carry it out. This short chapter
presents the solutions arrived at and gives a summary of the conclusions reached.
It was decided from the outset that in order to answer the questions satisfactorily the
study had to be both computerised and corpus-based. Intuition, whilst being a valuable
resource, was in no way sufficient to cope with a task of this nature. Further, as the study
needed to address linguistic issues both at the micro- and macro-level, large bodies of
data were needed, and this placed analysis beyond the level that any purely manual
approach could attempt. This thesis, therefore, falls methodologically into the area of
computer-based corpus linguistics, correlative register analysis, and is firmly based in the
Firthian tradition of British text linguistics (Stubbs 1993, 1996).
Over a period of three years, two corpora were created to form the basis of the analysis.
The first corpus created, the Published Materials Corpus (PMC) consists of 33 published
Business English course and resource books, and comes to just over 590,000 running
words in size. The criteria for inclusion of the books in the corpus were based on sales
data gained from EFL bookshops in 1997. The books chosen for inclusion were scanned
into the computer with only the language purporting to be Business English included - all
25
rubrics and gapped exercises were excluded. Thus the PMC presents the writers’ views of
what Business English is. The second corpus created was the Business English Corpus
(BEC). The final size of the corpus was just over 1,023,000 running words and it is
divided between spoken (44%) and written (56%) texts. The corpus consists of 28
macro-genres and is further categorised by the knowing-acting axis of Pickett (1988).
Thus macro-genres are categorised into the language used to do business (59%) and the
language used to talk about business (41%). The 2 million word British National Corpus
(BNC) Sampler corpus of general English was chosen as the ‘reference’ corpus.
These three corpora were then able to be lexically compared by using WordSmith 3
(Scott 1999). WordSmith operates by using a large reference corpus as a standard by
which the other corpora can be compared. Using the notion of key words, the program
statistically determines which words in a smaller corpus occur significantly more or
significantly less than in the bigger, reference corpus. In this case the reference corpus,
the BNC, represented general English and the smaller corpus, the BEC, represented
Business English. In this way it was possible to determine which words occur unusually
frequently in Business English as compared to general English. The same procedure was
carried out to compare the smaller published materials (PMC) to the larger Business
English corpus (BEC), and also the PMC to the BNC.
The results of these analyses produced sets of key words that were then subjected to
further, more detailed analysis. These key words not only showed which words were
used unusually frequently, they also showed words that were found to be used unusually
infrequently in Business English. Using the key words gained from the BEC it was
possible to define the world of business lexis, and show how it was lexically separated
from general English by placing the words into a limited group of semantic categories.
These categories were found to recur across word class boundaries and showed a lexical
world of business bounded by its people, institutions, activities, events and entities. The
boundary limits of business lexis were placed by the non-business lexis of the negative
key words and the semantic groups they formed. Key words had previously been used to
26
study schema patterns (Scott 1997), and written genre (Tribble 1998, forthcoming). This
study was able to use them to lexically define a whole ‘specialist’ area of language.
Representative words from each of the main semantic groups were chosen for further
study to see how they behaved both semantically and grammatically. Louw’s (1993)
concept of semantic prosody was used to determine how Business English words
associated with certain semantic groups, and Firth’s (1957) and Hoey’s (1997) idea of
colligation was used to show which grammatical patterns the words typically formed
themselves into. The COBUILD (1995) dictionary was used to help determine what
grammar/meaning relationships the words formed, and typical 3-word clusters and word
associates (Scott 1997, 1999) were also computed.
Results of these secondary analyses of the BEC showed that whilst some business lexis
associates with semantic groups unique to itself, most lexis is formed into patterns of
interrelated semantic groups which regularly co-occur with each other. Additionally,
there was evidence to suggest that words form associations to some semantic groups
when in the business environment, and others when out of it. In the business setting, the
meaning potential of words was found to be reduced and this had consequences both
semantically and grammatically. Fewer meanings were used than in general English -
and, as grammatical patterning and meaning were found to be co-dependent, restricted
meaning led to area-specific and restricted grammatical patterning.
Pickett’s (1988) idea of knowing and acting language was extended. Where Pickett
concentrated mainly on language routines, here, individual words showed a tendency to
be used more for doing business than for talking about business and vice versa. This also
showed at the level of word clusters, meaning that high frequency shorter clusters,
previously thought to be largely genre-independent, were found to fall clearly either side
of the doing business/talking about business divide.
Business English thus differs significantly from general English at several levels. So, too,
do published materials from the lexis of real-life Business English. The same analytical
27
methods were used in the analysis of the PMC and it was compared both to the BNC, to
see how published materials differ from general English, and to the BEC, to see how two
corpora, both purporting to be Business English, differed from each other. Where the
BEC could be seen to show a limited and specialist lexis, the PMC was even more
limited. The lexical world of business presented by the materials showed a stress on
personal and interpersonal contact, and a focus on a limited number of business activities,
notably entertaining, travel, meetings and presentations. There was less reference to
states and qualities, and the lexis in the PMC concentrated even more than the BEC on
tangible, concrete items. There were lacks in the PMC in both pure business and sub-
business lexis. A similar semantic environment was found, but it was lexically less rich
and varied. Colligationally, the PMC tended to focus on a limited number of grammatical
patterns and missed out on several key patternings that were found for words in the BEC.
Word clusters found in the PMC indicated an over-emphasis on politeness and contrasted
with the shorter clusters in the BEC by being much more genre/situation-specific.
In short, Business English displayed significant differences from general English in terms
of its lexis, semantic prosody, clusters and the semantic ‘meaning world’ it is made up
of. Likewise, published materials differed significantly from real Business English in
many of the same ways. The rest of this thesis looks at these issues in more detail,
beginning with Chapter 2, where the basic issues and problems related to the study are
laid out.
28
Chapter 2 Statement of the Problem and Overview
2.1 Introduction
The importance of the command of business lexis for business people has been known
about for centuries. Daniel Defoe1 when writing The Complete English Tradesman in
1726, was quite explicit on the importance of understanding and being able to use the
language of business. He wrote:
I therefore recommend it to every young tradesman to take all occasions to converse with mechanics of every kind, and to learn the particular language of their business; not the names of their tools only .... but the very cant of their trade, for every trade has its nostrums, and its little made words, which they very often pride themselves in, and which yet are useful to them on some occasion or other. (Defoe 1726/1987:25-26)
His book, though written in a style unfamiliar to the modern reader, is filled with much
advice and insight on business that is just as relevant today as when he wrote it. The
implication of DefoeÕs advice is a clear implicit understanding that there is a language
of business that is separate and ÔspecificÕ from that of general English. This, he points
out, has a definite business advantage:
If you come to deal with a tradesman or handicraft man, and talk his own language to him, he presently supposes you understand his business; that you know what you have come about; that you have judgement in his goods, or his art, and cannot easily be imposed upon; accordingly, he treats you like a man that is not to be cheated ....
(Defoe 1726/1987:26)
Yet despite this clear business advantage, and the length of time this has been known, the
lexis of business has received little attention, academic or otherwise. The review of the
literature that follows this chapter will show that academic work has been done related to
1 My thanks to Richard West for first bringing this book to my attention.
29
several aspects of Business English, but what is missing is an overview of the lexis - a
knowledge of what business lexis is and how it typically behaves. Business English
teaching is one of the most rapidly growing areas of English for Specific Purposes (ESP)
today, yet both teachers and materials writers are operating in the dark: they are teaching
Business English when it is not quite known what Business English actually is. This has
meant that Business English materials have largely been the result of the intuition and
experience of the teachers and materials writers. This work, therefore, stems from a
practical desire as a teacher to be more certain that the lexis presented to students as
Business English, is, in fact, Business English.
2.2 The hypotheses and research questions
In order to find out just what Business English lexis is made up of, and to see how
Business English has been represented in materials up to now, two main hypotheses were
formulated with several research questions attached to them.
Hypothesis One: The lexis of Business English is significantly different from that of
general English. The main research questions posed were these:
Is there a lexis specific to Business English?
If there is, then what is it made up of?
Hypothesis Two: The lexis used in Business English teaching materials is significantly
different from the lexis used in real-life business. The main research question asked was:
Can significant lexical differences be found between the language used in published
Business English teaching materials and the lexis of business used in real life?
2.3 Method
It was clear that a clean break from the methods used by materials writers was necessary
in order to test these hypotheses. Materials writers have used their assumptions and
beliefs regarding business lexis in order to create texts and exercises: the flow has thus
30
been from person to text. In order to get an accurate picture of business lexis, the flow
should be in exactly the opposite direction: one should, therefore, create a large body of
texts of Business English and then make observations on what is found there. The
resulting methodology is unavoidably quantitative and the use of corpus linguistic
methodology becomes central to the research. This theme of intuition versus empirical
data is the first major theme that recurs throughout the thesis.
The first stage of the analysis was the creation, therefore, of two corpora that would be
able to adequately test the two hypotheses. For the creation of the PMC, 33 books were
scanned into the computer to form a corpus of texts of just under 600,000 running words.
The BEC was formed from both written and spoken texts gathered from across the UK
and its final size came to just over 1 million running words. Additionally, a corpus of
general English was chosen in order to act as a linguistic reference point. The corpus
chosen was the British National Corpus (BNC) Sampler corpus of approximately 2
million words. This corpus is split 50-50 between spoken and written texts and is
representative of general English. Once the corpora were in place, a system of analysis
was needed. It is very difficult to analyse a million-word corpus, so criteria were needed
by which the language analysed would be both representative of the corpora and at the
same time manageable.
The focus of much corpus-based work, has in the past, centred around the concept of
frequency, i.e. the most frequent words used are in essence the most important (Murison-
Bowie 1996). Previous studies that have tried to relate corpus findings to the classroom
have used frequency as the basis of lexical choice for materials, notably in the COBUILD
project reported in Willis (1990). Early work in the field of register analysis, however,
found that very little specialist language was frequent, and that a frequency analysis of
scientific text, for example, looked much the same as that of general English (Coffey
1984). Whilst frequency data is regarded in this thesis as valid, rather than pure
frequency, the concept of unusual and significant frequency has been used. The
WordSmith Tools 3 computer program of Scott (1999) was used in order to compute the
key words from both the BEC and the PMC. WordSmith statistically compares a smaller
31
corpus to a larger, reference corpus and computes key words - that is words which appear
in the smaller corpus more often, or less, than could be expected based on the evidence of
the larger, reference corpus. The resulting key word lists present lexis, therefore, that is
special to a given corpus. In this thesis, the BEC and the PMC were each in turn
compared both to the BNC corpus of general English, and additionally, to each other. By
analysing the key word lists computed - just under 2,000 words for each corpus - a
lexical picture of the world of Business English, both real and in materials, could be
gained.
Once a lexical base for analysis had been established through the key words, more
detailed analysis could be carried out. Here, the second major theme of the work - a need
for both macro- and micro-level knowledge - is stressed. The key words gave an overall
semantic picture of the lexis of Business English. However, a further, more detailed
analysis was needed in order to see how this key lexis behaves in the business
environment. For this, two main analytical approaches were chosen: semantic prosody
and colligation. Semantic prosody, first defined by Louw (1993), though originally an
idea of Sinclair’s (1991), refers to the phenomenon that words, as well as having typical
collocates, e.g. vested and interest, collocate regularly with semantic classes of words
comprised of groups of collocates. Earlier work on semantic prosody (Sinclair 1991,
Louw 1993) discussed the fact that some words relate to distinctly negative states, e.g.
commit and crime, a foul, an error, etc. whilst other words associate with very positive
semantic groups, e.g. provide often collocates with positive states. Later work (Stubbs
1995, Tribble 1998, Hoey 1997, 2000) has noted that words can associate with semantic
sets; for example the word package collocates with a group of words related to size.
Colligation - the way in which words typically behave grammatically - is also studied
here. Thus, just as words have typical collocates, they can also appear in typical
grammatical patternings (Firth 1957, Stubbs 1993, Hoey 2000, Hargreaves 2000).
The key word analysis gave a broad view over business-related lexis. By looking at
semantic prosody and colligation, a detailed picture of how words behave in Business
32
English was obtained. But looking at both lexical and grammatical aspects of lexis also
raised methodological issues.
2.4 Methodological overview
Inherent in the methods described above are certain methodological aspects that should
be stated clearly at this stage:
· The view of language taken in this research focuses on the idiom principle of Sinclair
(1987, 1991) which sees language as being made up of prefabricated blocks of
words for users to choose from. The importance of collocation is, therefore, at the
heart of this thesis.
· Lexis and grammar are seen as an interdependent whole that cannot, and should not,
be separated from each other.
· Chomskyan notions of rationalist linguistic analysis that rely on intuition for the
generation of data is rejected. Intuition is still needed, but it is needed in the
interpretation of quantitative data, not the creation of it.
· The methodology used stresses the need for using actual authentic data and takes
‘whole text’ as the starting point of lexical analysis. This approach falls into the area
of correlative register analysis, accepting the Firthian principle that language is varied
and heterogenous.
2.5 Aims of the research
This research, in short, does the following:
1. It specifies the differences found between Business English lexis and the lexis of
general English at a variety of levels.
2. It specifies how the lexis of published Business English teaching materials differs from
that found in real business life.
33
3. It explores and describes central aspects of Business English lexis providing a firm
base for future materials writers to work from.
This last point cannot be over-emphasised. Research of this kind must have immediate
application in the classroom. In creating an electronic corpus of Business English and by
investigating business lexis at several levels, this thesis aims to have all its findings
transferred, via new materials, to the Business English language classroom.
In order to facilitate the reading of this work, an overview of what is found in each
chapter is presented below.
2.6 Overview of the thesis
Following on from this introductory chapter, the literature of Business English is
reviewed in Chapter 3. It will be seen that, although some work has been done in the
field, it is still considerably less than in other ESP areas such as English for Academic
Purposes (EAP) and English for Science and Technology (EST). It will show that studies
of the lexis of business are very limited and that only one major writer in the field can be
found. The late Douglas Pickett, in a small but important output of articles in the late
1980s, provides almost the only original thought on the nature and formation of business
lexis. His ideas will, therefore, be considered in detail and will be incorporated into the
analysis discussed in Chapter 9. The review of the literature continues with work done in
register, discourse and genre analysis both in and outside the Business English area. It
also looks at studies carried out with regard to published materials and shows how other
authors have evaluated their efficacy.
Chapter 4 is formed from an overview of lexis, collocation, semantic prosody and
colligation. It follows thought on lexis from the 19th century to the present day and takes
in the work of Firth, Sinclair, Halliday and Stubbs. The idiom principle of Sinclair is
discussed along with the importance of collocation and multi-word items (MWIs) in
language formation and understanding.
34
Chapter 5 presents the methodological background to the thesis, taking advantage of
Stubbs’ (1993, 1996) work on the British traditions of text analysis. This is followed by a
brief history of the use and creation of corpora, leading to a justification of the use of
corpus linguistic techniques in the thesis.
Chapter 6 is used to present the two corpora created, the BEC and the PMC. Issues of
sampling, representativeness and balance are discussed, and the ways in which the data
was collected and entered into the computer are described.
Chapter 7 sets out the hypotheses, the research questions and the methods used for
analysis, and Chapter 8 gives an overview of the results, noting where the full results can
be found - either directly in appendices, or on the CD ROM accompanying the thesis.
Chapter 9 is perhaps the most important of the thesis. It discusses the results of the
analysis in detail and shows how the world of Business English lexis differs from general
English, how the lexis of published materials differs from real-life business lexis and also
describes the main lexico-semantic groups found in the business setting. It concludes by
discussing the pedagogical implications of the findings made.
Chapter 10 concludes the thesis by providing a summary of the findings.
2.7 Concrete problems - concrete answers
Business English teachers and writers of materials face several concrete problems in their
work. This thesis addresses, perhaps, the most important of all of them: the need to know
just what Business English is. It is only by identifying the lexis that is key to Business
English, and making use of it in the classroom, that teachers can give students access to
the language that is vital for their work, and often their careers.
35
36
Chapter 3 A Review of the Literature of Business English
3.1 Introduction and overview
The purpose of this chapter is to survey and evaluate relevant research in Business
English. It will firstly cover what is known about Business English from actual research
that has taken place and, secondly, what is thought to be known about it through the
intuition of its practitioners. In doing this, a chronological path will be followed, defining
the literature in terms of the broad movements or approaches of English for Specific
Purposes (ESP) that they belong to, as they have unfolded during the last thirty or forty
years. The relationship of Business English to ESP will thus be the first of two
organising factors of this chapter. The second organising factor will be the work of
Pickett (1986a, 1986b, 1988, 1989). The chapter is summarised below.
· The first part of this chapter will place Business English in its historical context by a
brief survey of the development of ESP, arriving at both a working definition of ESP
and a discussion of where it is today.
· The work of Pickett (1986a, 1986b, 1988, 1989) will be examined in detail, focusing
on his three key concepts of poetics, ergolect and communication patterns. These
three concepts will then facilitate a logical overview of the literature.
· Poetics - the layered process by which business terminology is formed - acts as a basis
for the study of register analysis work, both inside and outside the field of Business
English. This leads to a discussion of the notion of sub-technical language, the
layering of specialist lexis, and more recent attempts to define aspects of Business
English.
· Ergolect - or work language - will then be used as a heading by which discourse and
genre approaches to language research can be examined. Research covered will go
from early discourse analysis work, for example, Johns (1980), to later interactional
work done by, for example, Lenz (1987) and Micheau & Billmyer (1987).
Intercultural aspects of business language use will be examined and the relationship
37
between power, corporate culture and discourse will be looked at in detail. This leads
on to studies of genre as defined by Swales (1981, 1990). Again, these studies will be
from both inside and outside the field of Business English. Those from outside,
however, have a direct bearing on the key issues of this thesis.
· Communication patterns - Pickett’s ideas on who the participants in business
communication are - i.e. who talks to whom - is then utilised to look at needs analysis
approaches to Business English.
· The penultimate section evaluates Business English materials and questions their
accuracy in reflecting the real world of business.
· The final section summarises and synthesises the arguments put forward in this
chapter and notes both the positive aspects of the research covered and the lacks. It
will be noted how, although lexis plays a vital role in Business English, it has been
studied very little.
· The chapter concludes with suggestions towards a methodology for the study of
Business English lexis that will then be expanded upon in the following chapters.
3.2 The development of ESP
The chapter will now begin with a brief overview of the development of ESP. This
review is not meant to be exhaustive but simply to serve as a background for the rest of
the chapter.
3.2.1 The origins of ESP until 1945
An interest in special languages - indeed of business language - embodied in the
comments made by Defoe in Chapter 2, were shown to go back as far as the 1700s.
Accordingly, there has been much discussion in the literature as to the origins of ESP.
Dudley-Evans & St John (1998:1) note that the origins of Language for Specific
Purposes (LSP), in fact, can be traced as far back as the Greek and Roman Empires.
38
Pickett (1988:89) mentions a book authored by Winkyn de Worde2 who wrote in 1498 a
Little Treatise for to Learn English and French so that he could do [my] merchandise in
France and elsewhere in other lands. Pickett also mentions Meurier who published a
‘business English’ book in 1533 containing forms for making letters and other business
correspondence. Dudley-Evans & St John continue the history by noting Howatt’s (1984)
claim that a need to educate Huguenot and Protestant refugees in England in the 16th
century led to a focus on Business English in early ELT. Interestingly these forerunners
of present-day ESP were all concerned with doing business.
Strevens (1977), in an article in which he discusses ‘Special-Purpose Language
Teaching’ (SP-LT), says that the history of SP-LT goes back ‘at least half a century’
(1977:150). He goes on to say that SP-LT can be found in basically two forms: the
traveller’s language course - which he says goes back to the 16th century - and what he
calls the ‘German for science students’ type of course. Perhaps more interestingly, he
continues by saying that the Second World War engendered the need for specialist
language courses where students only needed a very limited competence in a language in
order to fulfil pre-set de-limited tasks. He gives the example of Royal Air Force
personnel being trained to listen to Japanese fighter aircraft radio dialogue. The
personnel were trained only in listening skills and with a very limited amount of lexical
input. Thus the stage was set for the boom in this area that was to follow the Second
World War.
3.2.2 Post-war ESP
Despite the long history hinted at above, it is probably safe to say that the ESP movement
is firmly placed in the second half of the 20th century and, as the millennium has now
turned, no doubt, beyond it. The rise of ESP can perhaps be seen as the result of two
separate but related developments: one economic, the other educational.
2 Pickett probably got this reference from Howatt (1984:7) though he does not actually mention his sources on this matter.
39
Economic: The first reason for the development of ESP was the rise in the ‘currencyÕ of
the English language. This was brought about by the economic dominance of the United
States after the Second World War. The vast influx of US dollars into many countries
around the world created with it as a by-product the need to communicate in English,
mainly in the world of science and technology. As a result, a large percentage of journals
and scientific data were to be found only in the English language. In addition to this was
both an influx of foreign aid workers into developing countries and a increased need of
English in former colonial countries.3 Colonialist systems were breaking down and the
Ôwinds of changeÕ - famously quoted by British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan -
were sweeping across Africa. A conference held at Makerere College, Uganda in 19624
noted the increased need for English. More significantly, it noted the need for the
teaching of ÔEnglish for Special PurposesÕ (Conference Report 1961:19-20). A third
factor accounting for the rise of ESP was the influx of western experts into the oil rich
countries of the Middle-East, creating an additional need for a lingua franca. This lingua
franca was English.
Educational: The second movement leading towards the rise of ESP was an educational
one, where the learner was starting to be considered as more central to the educational
process. Strevens (1977) notes
... the existence of a major ‘tide’ in educational thought, in all countries and affecting all subjects. The movement referred to is the global trend towards ‘learner-centred education’.
(Strevens 1977:152)
As both the world and concepts of education radically changed, English language
teaching changed with it. The way in which it changed has been seen in the literature as
series of distinct but overlapping stages. It is important to now look at these stages, as
later discussions on the nature of Business English are viewed in direct relation to the
evolution of how language and teaching have been viewed during this period. It is also 3 Corbluth (1975:277) noted that the ESP approach had come to the fore ‘under pressure of certain acute needs in the developing world’.4 The Commonwealth Conference on the Teaching of English as a Second Language, 1-13 January 1961.
40
important to realise that these ‘stages’ in the development of ESP were, and are, fluid
and overlapping in nature. Approaches to ESP have evolved and improved as time has
gone on. This too must be taken into account later when discussing how Business English
has been viewed during this period of development.
3.2.3 Stage 1: Register Analysis
A look at the literature shows that most writers agree that the first real starting point of
ESP was in the Register Analysis approach from the early 1960s onwards. Figure 1, on
the next page, shows a selected overview of the literature.5 The basic idea behind
Register Analysis (RA) was that the choice of language used in certain circumstances is
pre-determined. This pre-determination is governed either by the situation the speakers
are in or by the subject matter they are talking about. Thus it would be possible to find a
special language or register to match these subjects or situations or, as Pickett put it, you
could find ‘the right words in the right place’ (1986a:5). Analysis of these registers was
thus called Register Analysis. It was then thought that students of these special or
‘restricted’ areas of English (Strevens 1977) could be best served by providing them with
the key grammatical features and lexis to be found in their specialist area. In order to
provide this, teachers/researchers created corpora of texts taken from specific
disciplines, notably scientific,6 and subjected them to a detailed analysis. The aim was to
‘establish the statistical contours of different registers’ (West 1997:36) and try to
identify, for example, the frequency of certain grammatical forms or vocabulary. It
rested on the assumption that scientific text, for example, would be made up of certain
features unique to itself, that could then be identified and used as the basis for teaching
materials. The best known exponents of this were Barber (1962) and Ewer & Latorre
(1967). This ‘discrete-item’ (Swales 1990:3) approach, i.e. looking at features in
isolation, however, was soon found
ROBINSON 1980 COFFEY 1984 HUTCHINSON & JOHNS WEST 1997 DUDLEY-
5 This table is not intended to be exhaustive, but gives an overview of the trends as they have been viewed by major writers in the field over the last twenty years.6 Lee Kok Cheong (1975:3) explained how important EST research was at this time, saying that EST ‘ represents the current interest of linguists in the nature of language as communication’.
41
WATERS 1987 1991 EVANS & ST JOHN 1998
1. Register Analysis 1. Register Analysis
1. Register Analysis 1. Register Analysis
1. Authenticity: a) skills basedb) skills and strategies2. Research: a) Register Analysisb) Newspeak
1. Register Analysis
2. Discourse Analysis and the communicative approach
2. a) Discourse Analysisb) Notional/functional/communi-cative approach
2. Rhetorical/Discourse Analysis
2. Functional /Discourseapproach
3. Text:a) Discourse Analysisb) Genre Analysis
2.Rhetorical/Discourse Analysis
3. Student motivation and analysis of needs
3. Needs Analysis
3. Target Situational Analysis
3. Target Situational Analysis
4. Need:a) Target Situational Analysisb) Pedagogic Needs Analysis: deficiency, strategy and means analysis
3. Analysis of Study Skills
4. Skills and Strategies 4. Analysis of learning Needs
5. Learning-Centred Approach
4. Learning-Centred Approach
5. Learning:The Learning-Centred Approaches
5. No real dominating approach
Fig. 1 The development of ESP as found in the literature
to be disappointing for several reasons. Firstly, it operated only at sentence level and said
nothing about wider features of text that operate at intersentential level. More
significantly, the results of register analysis showed that there was very little actual
difference in ‘scientific’ language as compared to general English. As Coffey (1984)
concluded:
In short, register cannot be used...because there is no significant way in which the language of science differs from any other kind of language.7 (Coffey 1984:4-5)
Another problem was that this approach was only descriptive, it did not explain why the
words occurred where they did. Finally, the materials that were created from this
approach, for example Herbert (1965), whilst theoretically very sound for their period
7 Corbluth, in an article critical of ESP approaches, stated that whilst there were no discernible grammatical, phonetic or phonological differences, lexis in fact was different from general English (Corbluth 1975:280). This is significant for a thesis that is studying the special lexis of Business English.
42
and based on painstaking research, were dull and uninspiring to both students and
teachers alike.
3.2.4 Later developments in Register Analysis
Register Analysis8 in ESP in its purest sense was abandoned to a large extent after this
period in the 1960s, but its influence has reached out through the 1980s and to the
present day. Dudley-Evans & St John (1998: 31) argue that with the advent of computer
technology and concordancing programs, register analysis has become a more valid
research approach. West (1997:35) shows that the projects concerned with transport
safety, SEASPEAK (Weeks et al. 1988), air traffic control, AIRSPEAK (Robertson
1987) and channel-tunnel communication, POLICESPEAK (Johnson 1993), developed
out of the original concepts of register analysis. These projects, however, have included a
broader concept of text to include features of discourse and function.
Thus it can be seen that the changes that followed register analysis saw the need to go
beyond the sentence level to longer pieces of discourse and see how texts joined together
to become both cohesive and coherent.
3.2.5 Stage 2: Discourse or Rhetorical Analysis
Returning to Figure 1, it can be seen that all the writers agree that the next stage of
development was that of Discourse or Rhetorical Analysis. This approach attempted to
look beyond the sentence to longer pieces of discourse. As West notes
The reaction against register analysis in the early 1970s concentrated on the communicative values of discourse rather than the lexical and grammatical properties of register. (West 1997:36)
8 It is important here to distinguish between this ‘original’ idea of register and that developed later by Halliday (1978) where register, defined through field, tenor and mode is classed as ‘a semantic meaning potential within which linguistic choices are made’ (Yunick 1997:327). See Yunick (1997) for a more detailed explanation.
43
Discourse Analysis looked at the way in which sentences were linked together in a text to
form a wider definition of meaning than the study of register had. This included studying
the concept of coherence, ‘the quality of being meaningful and unified’ (Cook 1989:4),
and cohesion ‘links between sentences and between clauses’ (Cook 1989:14) and how
meaning is tied together, e.g. through formal grammatical devices. Coffey (1984)
mentions Widdowson's idea of use, the idea of language used for a purpose, and usage,
the linguistic rules of the language, in relation to discourse analysis:
... it (discourse analysis) encouraged students to think in terms of use of language for a purpose, rather than in terms of practising correct usage. (Coffey 1984:5)
3.2.6 Later developments in Discourse Analysis : Genre Analysis
Discourse analysis has had a strong influence in ESP research and out of it has developed
the Genre Analysis approach with Swales (1981, 1990), being largely responsible for
bringing genre research to the fore of ESP. Genres,9 it will be seen, are difficult to
define, but at a general level10 ‘genre comprises a class of communicative events, the
members of which share some set of communicative purposes’ (Swales 1990:58).
West notes the difference between genre and discourse analysis by referring to a study
done on business telephone calls saying that ‘while discourse analysis identifies the
functional components of the calls, genre analysis enables the materials writer to
sequence these functions into a series to capture the overall structure of such texts’ (West
1997:36). The key feature of genre analysis is that it places the discourse into the
communicative context within which it occurs and takes account of aspects such as
culture and situation in a way that earlier discourse analysis was unable to do.
Accordingly, genre analysis has been considered a very important development in ESP
(Dudley-Evans & St John 1998:31).
9 In this thesis, although it is not purely focused on genre, the concept of genre is used give structure to later sections of the work. This will be discussed later in more detail. 10 A much more detailed discussion on this is found later in this review of the literature.
44
Returning to the chronological discussion of ESP, it can be seen that the natural outcome
of the discourse analysis approach was a pre-occupation with the purposes to which the
language would be put and with it came a slight change in focus. It was no longer enough
just to discover the specialist language of a given area: the concept of learnersÕ needs
now came to the forefront, i.e. in which situations do learners need the language and
exactly what is the language of these situations? The answers to these questions came in
the form of Target Situational Analysis (needs analysis) and in the functional/notional
approach.
3.2.7 Stage 3: Needs Analysis
The idea of the large scale of analysis of students’ needs was begun largely with
Richterich’s (1971) pioneering work for the Council of Europe, though the phrase
‘analysis of needs’ was used as early as the 1920s by Michael West when teaching Indian
civil servants. Approaches to needs analysis have changed as views on language and
communicative competence have changed. Thus, the first main movement, Target
Situation Analysis, grew up alongside the functional/notional work of Wilkins (1976).
Wilkins’ work, widely regarded as heralding in the age of ‘communicative’ language
teaching, argued that language was made up of functions - the purposes to which
language is put - and notions - concepts expressed by language. This resulted in a search
to find those situations where students would need language and subsequently an attempt
to define the language needed in those situations.
Stuart & Lee (1972) in ground-breaking work analysed the target situational needs of ten
different occupational groups. Their results gave insight into the most common
situational needs of Business English students. Indeed, their stratification of need
according to listening and speaking 49%, listening 8%, listening and writing 3%, writing
17%, reading 19% and speaking 4%, will be discussed later in this work when
determining representative corpus content.
45
Interest in research on occupational needs was followed by a focus on EAP and analysis
of studentsÕ needs in an academic setting (Jordan & Mackay 1973). As can be seen from
the dates, these movements were not chronologically separate, but were rather a
continuous overlapping and evolving of the same thought in different areas. The process
of TSA culminated in Munby’s (1978) Communicative Syllabus Design, in which it was
taken to extremes. Munby compiled a taxonomy of target situations that students would
potentially need to operate in - but the list, whilst of great theoretical value, was so long
and wieldy that it could not easily operate in practice.
There followed a backlash against TSA in the purest sense, as other more pragmatic
factors came to the fore of academic discussion. The problem had been that Munby’s
work could, in many ways, be seen as an ‘ivory tower’ approach with little practical
application in the real world. McDonough (1984:33) quite succinctly talks about the
post-Munby period as the ‘intrusion of reality’. Additionally, there were other, more
theoretical problems with Munby’s work. Although Munby listed constraints,11 no action
was taken to accommodate them in his model. Moreover, the students were seen in an
idealised vacuum in a totally objective manner away from the subjectivity of real-life.
They were not involved in the process of their own needs analysis; the first consultation
with them was also the last. Partly as a result of this, many later writers have stressed the
importance of on-going needs analysis (McDonough 1984, Riddell 1991). These matters
further seriously impaired the credibility of Munby’s model.
3.2.8 Later developments in Needs Analysis
TSA as an approach has never gone away, but has simply become one of many
approaches, rather than being the only one. Its basis, though of extreme practical use
11 See Munby (1978:217).
46
(most later models incorporate it in one form or another) is, unfortunately, only in the
intuition of its creators.
As views of language changed towards the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, so too did
approaches to needs analysis. Canale & Swain’s (1980) additional sociolinguistic
definition of communicative competence, allied with points of dissatisfaction with
Munby’s work, led to a flurry of activity. Needs were no longer defined simply in terms
of terminal situation language functions, but in turn in terms of means, lacks and
learning strategies.
Means analysis - analysis of the practical constraints on learning - grew out of the
backlash to Munby (mentioned above). McDonough (1984) looked at constraints on the
teaching situation and viewed them as being at the core of the course design process:
thus, options and not constraints. Mountford (1988), Räsänen (1987) and Swales (1989)
amongst several others, have also written in this area and its influence has continued up
until this day.
Deficiency analysis was started by Allwright & Allwright (1977), who based their
approach - that of looking at the difference between where a student is ability-wise and
where they want to be - on their experiences with medical students. It is interesting to
note with regard to this study that this approach was all based on their intuition. Nelson
(1994 a,b) includes a large scale computerised deficiency analysis to analyse business
language needs. This, too is based on intuition. Preferred ways of learning (strategy
analysis), also became widespread at this time. Work on learning strategies had been
done in other areas of education since the 1960s, notably in Canada and the United
States. By the 1980s it had also taken root in EFL with Allwright, for example, holding
sessions with his students on how to learn rather than what to learn.
The language audit (Pilbeam 1979) was also introduced about this time. This broadened
the spectrum of needs analysis by looking into company training needs and setting targets
for learning based on an analysis of staff needs. This approach has proved popular and
47
has developed over the years.12 However, whilst there has been a lot of work done in
practice in this area, most of it has not seen the light of day, largely due to companiesÕ
insistence on a degree of secrecy and the desire of language schools to keep secret what
competitive edge they may have over their competitors.
The 1990s saw a further broadening of the concept of need as the computer was utilised
to analyse students requirements. Jones (1991) and then Nelson (1992, 1994 a,b) used
computers to analyse the needs of students, the latter being Business English students.
The concept of need according to Nelson is extended to the finding of suitable teaching
materials. This is carried out by the use of a computer database of Business English
teaching materials contained in the program.
3.2.9 Stage 4: Skills and strategies
In the 1980s, another broad movement developed: that of concentrating on particular
language skills. Concentration on skills had actually been one of the first approaches to
teaching ESP in the register analysis period, but at that time had focused almost
exclusively on reading skills and written text (West 1997:33). By the 1980s this ‘skills’
approach had matured to cover a wider definition of text, i.e. to cover speaking and
listening skills. One writer associated with this movement, Morrow (1980), presented
skills he considered necessary in reading such as skimming, scanning and awareness of
cohesion and coherence. This movement has had a great deal of influence on Business
English materials and great number of books from the 1980s focused on skills work, such
as the Longman series of skills in, for example, Negotiating (O’Connor et al.1992) and
Telephoning (Bruce 1992).13
Analysis of needs then grew to cover not only individual skills, but also the strategies
students need to complete work. In the wake of the work of Allwright and Allwright
12 Lynch, Stevens & Sands (1993) provide a handbook which gives detailed instructions on how to carry out a language audit.13 For a list of these skills’ based Business English books see Brieger (1997:157).
48
(1977), where students were ‘learning how to learn’, both skills and strategy analysis had
arrived in ESP. Hutchinson & Waters explain that
The principal idea behind the skills-centred approach is that underlying all language use there are common reasoning and interpreting processes, which, regardless of the surface forms, enable us to extract meaning from discourse.
(Hutchinson & Waters 1987:13)
This movement will be returned to in more depth later when discussing Business English
materials.
3.2.10 Stage 5 The Learning-Centred approach
Concern with skills and strategies led to the next movement in ESP development - the
Learning-Centred Approach. This approach has been championed by Hutchinson &
Waters and many of their articles (Hutchinson & Waters 1980, 1981, 1983, 1987,
Hutchinson 1988) have this approach as their main theme. It is neatly defined below:
ESP is not a matter of teaching ‘specialised varieties’ of English. The fact that language is used for a specific purpose does not imply that it is a special form of the language, different in kind to other forms. Certainly, there are some features that can be identified as ‘typical’ of a particular context of use and which, therefore, the learner is more likely to meet in the target situation. But these differences should not be allowed to obscure the far larger area of common ground that underlies all English use, and indeed, all language use.
(Hutchinson & Waters 1987:18)
They argue that in terms of teaching, information gained from the target situation is of
secondary importance to the general development of competence in the learner. This
competence is not only the knowledge to perform but to isolate ‘how someone acquires
that competence’ (Hutchinson & Waters 1987:73). They believe that previous approaches
to ESP were intrinsically flawed, in that they were ‘based on descriptions of language
use’ (Hutchinson & Waters 1987:14) whereas they were interested in language learning.
This approach means in terms of course design that it is a negotiated process between
49
students and teacher and, therefore, a dynamic process where students are constantly
consulted on the content and structure of the course: ‘an approach with the avowed aim
of maximising the potential of the learning situation’ (Hutchinson & Waters 1987:77).
3.2.11 Stage 6: ESP today
The general opinion in the literature at present, (West 1997 and Dudley-Evans & St John
1998) is that little has happened in ESP since Hutchinson & WatersÕ work in 1987.
Dudley-Evans & St John, however, discuss the rise of genre analysis and its importance
in the analysis of ESP situations but they state that it cannot be seen as a major
movement such as register analysis, needs analysis and the learning-centred approach
were, for example. They also note the arrival of corpora and how this has validated new
register analysis work, as was noted earlier in this section. Interestingly in terms of this
thesis, another significant change is mentioned:
One major change has been the emergence of Business English as a major strand of ESP teaching. Early ESP work was dominated by English for Science and Technology .... However, in the 1990s … the largest area of growth is Business English.
(Dudley-Evans & St John 1998:31)
This will be returned to later. However, whilst perhaps there have not been major
changes as such, it can be noted that practitioners are taking advantage of all previous
facets of ESP in order to present students with a mix to fit their particular situation. This
present period may thus perhaps be called the eclectic period (see Fig. 2 for an overview
of the developments in ESP since 1960). The diagram shows all the main approaches on
a time-line, highlighting the fact that all the previous approaches are available to the
practitioner today.
APPROACH
Eclectic Period
50
Skills & Strategies
Needs Analysis
Genre AnalysisDiscourse Analysis
Register Analysis
Time1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
Fig. 2 A time-line of approaches to ESP
3.2.12 Summary: definitions of ESP
From the previous sections it has been possible to see the on-going development of ESP
to the present day. Underlying all these approaches has been a discussion on whether
specific situations where language is used can generate situational or subject-specific
language. The consensus has been that whilst the situations do not give rise to separate,
special languages as such, there is a restriction of language choice and a certain amount
of specialist lexis.14 The acquisition of this restricted, specialised language, first of all by
teachers in order to teach it, and its subsequent transferral to the learners, has created a
learning dynamic very different from that of mainstream ELT. Thus, most definitions in
the literature are concerned with either language or the teaching of that language.
Mackay & Mountford, in an early definition refer to the practical aspect of ESP in that it
is ‘generally used to refer to the teaching of English for a clearly utilitarian purpose’
(Mackay & Mountford 1978:2). Strevens (1977) gives four main criteria for SP-LT:
· Restriction: only basic skills needed for the learners’ purpose
14 The question of the specificity of language in relation to both this thesis and Business English materials is discussed in Section 3.8.1.1 later in this chapter.
51
· Selection: only the vocabulary and grammar needed by the learners
· Themes and topics: only those required by the learners
· Communicative needs: only those needed by students in their given situations
Coffey (1984:3), largely re-iterating Strevens, said that, ‘There is no special language;
only a principle of selection from the language to meet the purposes defined’ and that
Before a course can be designed, in any of its parameters, the process that Strevens calls ‘restriction’ must take place: the selection of items and features from the corpus of the language that are relevant to the designer’s intention and the student’s needs. (Coffey 1984: 4)
Learners’ needs are highlighted by many writers in ESP. Kennedy & Bolitho sum up
well by saying ‘In short, ESP has as its basis in an investigation of the purposes of the
learner and the set of communicative needs arising from those needs’ (Kennedy &
Bolitho 1984:3).
Arguably, most enlightenment can be gained from later writers who have the benefit of
hindsight. West (1997) argues that ESP rests on five conceptions. These are authenticity,
research-base, language, need and learning methodology. However, ‘These conceptions
all have dual and potentially conflicting origins in both the real world...and in ESP
pedagogy’ (1997:33). These potential conflicts he summarises in the following diagram
(1997:33):
real-world conceptions pedagogic conceptions
authenticity research-based language as need learning/ text methodology
Fig. 3 Conflict of ESP conceptions after West (1997:33)
52
Thus the real-world needs of the students, for example, may contrast with their
pedagogic needs, authenticity of materials may be constrained by pedagogic
considerations and so on. Dudley-Evans & St John (1998) claim to have found an
underlying methodology for ESP as a whole. As early as 1980, Robinson realised that
‘The student of ESP...is learning English en route to the acquisition of some quite
different body of knowledge or set of skills’ (1980:6). A natural consequence of this is
that the role of the ESP teacher is quite different from that of the general English teacher
in that ‘the teacher sometimes becomes more like a language consultant, enjoying equal
status with the learners who have their own expertise in the subject matter’ (Dudley-
Evans & St John 1998:4). They go on to define ESP in terms of absolute and variable
characteristics. These are summarised in the table below (Dudley-Evans & St John
1998:4-5):
TABLE I: A DEFINTION OF ESP: ABSOLUTE AND VARIABLE FACTORS
ABSOLUTE VARIABLEdesigned to meet specific needs may be related to or designed for specific
disciplinesmakes use of the underlying methodology and activities of the discipline it serves
may use in specific teaching situations a different methodology than general English
is centred on the language, skills discourse and genre appropriate to the activities
most likely to be for adult learners
most often designed for intermediate or advanced learners
The special methodology of ESP, therefore, lies in the nature of the relationship between
teacher and learner, which in turn is brought about by the focus on the specific language
of disciplines in which the students are experts and the teacher is, in a sense, an outsider.
This methodology of ESP is of key importance to this thesis. The underlying
methodology - that of the teacher as ‘coach’- obviates the need for teachers to very
quickly learn the appropriate language of the specific discipline. It will be seen in the
next section that present knowledge of the language studied in this thesis, i.e. the
language of business, is still, at least empirically, limited. The section will begin by
looking at how Business English fits into the general ESP picture and will continue by
53
looking at what has been discovered about Business English in each of the five or six
stages of ESP development previously covered.
3.3 Business English in an ESP context
It was noted in the last section that ESP has developed greatly over the last thirty or forty
years and that Business English has been part of that growth. The place of Business
English in that process can be seen in the following diagrams taken from different
moments in time. The first diagram (Fig. 4), is from Strevens (1977) and shows SP-LT
split into occupational and educational segments. In terms of occupational language it is
interesting to note that this is divided into three sections: pre-experience, simultaneous
and post-experience. These different aspects of need of language are particularly relevant
to Business English. Several writers (Pickett 1988, Johnson, 1993, Ellis & Johnson 1994
and Brieger 1997) have discussed the varying language needs of students who are
essentially learning both the language of the job, and also about the job or field of work
itself, i.e. pre-experience, and those learners who are already doing the job, i.e. post-
experience. Pickett (1988:90) refers to this as the difference between knowing about
something and acting - i.e. the difference between the language needed for knowing
about a topic and the language needed for actually being able to perform in a given area.
Brieger refers to the same distinction of learners calling them pre-service and in-service
learners (Brieger 1997:12).
PRE-EXPERIENCE
OCCUPATIONAL SIMULTANEOUS
POST-EXPERIENCESP-LT
PRE-STUDY
54
EDUCATIONAL IN-STUDY
POST-STUDY
Fig. 4 From Strevens (1977:155-156) - the division in SP-LT
Jordan (1989), in an article on English for Academic Purposes (EAP), reproduces the
now commonly-held views on the structure of ESP:
ESP
EAP EST EOP
Fig. 5 The division of ESP from Jordan (1989:150)
Thus Jordan saw EOP as an off-shoot of ESP in general, but separate from EST and
EAP. Jordan then divides his particular area of interest, EAP, into two distinct categories
- general academic English and specific academic English:
EAP
EGAP ESAP
Fig. 6 The division of EAP from Jordan (1989:150)By implication one may thus present a simplified picture of the division noted by the
writers above in terms of Business English - general Business English and more specific
Business English:
EBP
EGBP ESBP
55
Fig. 7 EBP (English for Business Purposes) divided into EGBP (English for General Business Purposes) and ESBP (English for Specific Business Purposes)
Yet it can, and is, argued in the literature that this presents a much too simplistic picture
of the broad scope of Business English today. Dudley-Evans & St John say that ‘We see
Business English as an umbrella term used similarly to the term English for Specific
Purposes to embrace both general courses in the appropriate lexis and grammar for
business communication’ (1996:1). Johnson (1993:201) agrees, saying that ‘Business
English does not fit neatly into the generally accepted categorisations of ESP’. She goes
on to quote Munby (1978), who presented a broad variety of different situations and
potential learners of Business English. She then concludes that ‘Business English is much
broader than other varieties of ESP because of the number of different purposes for
which it is taught’ (Johnson 1993:201).
Ellis & Johnson (1994) present, therefore, in relation to this broadness of Business
English, three basic categories of Business English learner:
1. Pre-experience learners: students at business schools - not yet in work.2. Low-experienced learners: junior company members and learners who are changing jobs.3. Job-experienced learners: those in work who need Business English for a broad variety of reasons.
Whilst it is certainly true to say that Business English is a broad area, and this will be
dealt with in the next section of this thesis, it can also be viewed as a part of the ESP
movement - simply a very complex and large part of it. The place of Business English in
ESP and the kinds of learners it has can be summarised in the diagram below:
EAP ESP
Business English
EGBP ESBP
56
Pre-experience Low-experience Job-experienced
Fig. 8 Business English in ESP and Business English learners
It can be noted in Fig. 8 that pre-experience learners are more likely to need general
Business English and those already in the workplace more specific Business English.15
Also, some students need ÔacademicÕ Business English in a college setting. Thus
Business English, though a separate part of ESP, is still part of it.
With Business English placed in its ESP context it is time to move forward to answer an
un-asked but inherent question that has been underlying the previous section. What is
Business English? The previous discussion has assumed that there is a fixed concept of
what Business English is that can be related to by all. In reality, this is not the case. The
purpose of the rest of this review of the literature, therefore, is two-fold. First, the aim is
to investigate attempts to define Business English through research carried out and
second, to look at what Business English is thought to be - through the intuition and
experience of its practitioners.
A: Studies into what business language is
3.4 Pickett and beyond
3.4.1 Introduction: initial comments on the nature of Business English
15 For more on this see Nelson (2000).
57
The immediately noticeable feature of Business English research is the relative lack of it.
The literature on Business English is largely concerned with the practical issues of
teaching, rather than with analysis of the features of its language. This state of affairs has
been brought about largely by the fact that most Business English teaching remains
outside the university environment. This has meant that whereas studies of EAP have
been more common, the private language schools that teach Business English often do
not have the resources or the time to support research. Moreover, any research done and
results gained are often held in-house, and the experience used as a competitive edge
over rivals. Business English teaching is a business, not an academic pursuit.
Additionally, gaining access to raw data, that is from the companies themselves, is often
hampered by the desire for secrecy on their part. Meetings and negotiations held can
commonly be of importance to their financial survival and it is, therefore, more difficult
to gain access to them than, say, a group of language students on a university EAP
course.
Thus, when looking at the three most recent state-of-the-art articles on Business English
(Johnson 1993, Dudley-Evans & St John 1996, St John 1996),16 and two major
handbooks on teaching Business English (Ellis & Johnson 1994 and Brieger 1997),
discussion for the most part is firmly based around aspects of teaching and materials and
discussion of learner issues.
· Johnson (1993) quickly covers some research done in the area of Business English and
then goes on to discuss needs analysis techniques and approaches and materials for
teaching.
· Dudley-Evans & St John are more thorough in terms of discussing what has been
discovered linguistically about Business English and go in much greater detail into
Business English research - the first fourteen pages of the forty page report are
devoted to work done in this area.
· St John (1996) similarly devotes space to research done in business, and one section
(1996:5) concentrates on ‘linguistic issues’. St John however, still notes the lack of
16 St John acknowledges that her (1996) state-of-the-art article is a re-worked version of the 1996 article with Dudley-Evans. The article written together with Dudley-Evans is able to go into more detail so both are presented here as separate but overlapping articles.
58
evidence on what Business English actually is, saying that ‘One of the difficulties of
Business English is the absence of an established ‘common-core’ of business
language’ (1996:5).
· Ellis & Johnson encouragingly entitle the first chapter of their book ‘What is Business
English?’ yet no attempt is given at any kind of linguistic definition. They complain
that there is a lack of research and therefore ‘little to support course developers
beyond their own first-hand experience gained in the field’ (1994:7).
· Brieger (1997) discusses the grammar and lexis of Business English but only in terms
of who is talking to whom and in what situation. His definition of Business English
(shown in the diagram below) is also very much concerned with its teaching rather
than any linguistic analysis.
Business English
LANGUAGE COMMUNICATIONKNOWLEDGE SKILLS
- grammar - presentations- vocabulary - meetings
- telephoning- pronunciation - report writing
Fig. 9 Business English as seen by Brieger (1997:35)
He continues by saying that ‘the legitimate scope of our pedagogic activities as Business
English trainers...is to design and deliver courses which aim to increase language
knowledge and communication skills’ (1997:35). In terms of language he does provide a
check-list of useful phrases at the back of the book, but again these are based on teaching
experience rather than on any in-depth study into the language of business.
Other writers have also both attempted definitions of Business English and noted the lack
of research into it. Yli-Jokipii (1994), for example, in a study of requests in business
59
correspondence, divided business language into interactive and non-interactive areas
shown in the example below (Yli-Jokipii 1994:38):
interactive spoken >> face to face, telephone >> service encounters, negotiations etc.written >> method of transmission >> memo, letter etc.
non-interactive >> forms, reports, proposals, adverts etc.
In terms of the language of business, however, she says significantly that ‘I am not aware
of any research that establishes the properties of business language as distinct from
general language’ (1994:43). Thus whilst there is definite interest in this question, hard
research is missing.
Yet despite the main focus of writing being on learner and classroom issues, major
research has been carried out into Business English and is, at time of writing, very much
on the increase.17 Analysis of Business English has benefited both from the direct
research done into it and also from studies of other specific languages - notably in EST -
the results of which have a definite cross-over effect in enhancing knowledge of Business
English. The next section of this thesis, therefore, looks at research done into Business
English which has given greater insight into its make-up. The discussion begins with the
writings of Pickett, who can be viewed as a major, if not the only major ‘thinker’ on the
nature and characteristics of Business English.
3.4.2 Pickett and the ÔpoeticsÕ of the business ‘ergolect’
The following is a short extract from an interview conducted whilst gathering data for the
Business English Corpus. In the extract, a sales manager recalls his previous work as a
top civil servant and how the civil servants had interfaced with people from the business
world. He felt that the campaign for plain English in the 1980s had had some effect in
stopping ÔofficialeseÕ as he put it, but that the civil service was still full of jargon. The
civil servants had managed to stop using jargon when business people were present but
resorted back to it when left alone.
17 For example, see articles in Hewings & Nickerson (eds) (1999).
60
SM18: ...but the danger was that we tended to do that when we were talking to the business people and when they left the room or we congregated in an area by ourselves we felt...
Int: Shift back....
SM: But at least then we spoke two languages, if you like, we were becoming a bi-lingual, or multi-lingual and the terminology changed a bit.
Int: So a language to the outside and a language for the inside?
SM: But there was cross-over, that language became broader in each case. People learned our expressions - we learned their expressions and some of the old expressions were dropped in each case, we adopted some of theirs and they adopted some of ours.
This observation on the cross-over of language from one group to another and the
grading of language into understandable and specialist terminology is at the heart of the
work of the late Douglas Pickett. His published output concerning Business English was
limited, with only three articles appearing between 1986 and 198919 along with talks at
IATEFL20 and BESIG21 conferences. However, despite this lack of volume, the ideas put
forward by Pickett represent almost the only real original examination of Business
English language at a macro-level in the literature. Pickett’s work was all based on his
own experience and intuition and lacked any empirical confirmation, yet it will be shown
that work going on around Pickett in other fields both before and at the same time all
lend credence to his ideas. Moreover, this thesis will attempt to show that Pickett’s ideas
were correct within the field of Business English. For this reason it is important to spend
some time looking at exactly what Pickett said, and then discover what empirical
evidence is available to substantiate his claims. Evaluation of Pickett’s work will include
the three articles mentioned above and the transcript of a talk given to the 1986 IATEFL
conference in Brighton.
18 SM = Sales Manager, Int = Interviewer.19 Business English: Falling Between Two Styles (1986a), English in Business: Knowing and Acting (1988) and The Sleeping Giant: Investigations in Business English (1989). For full references see the bibliography. 20 International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language.21 Business English Special Interest Group - one of the ‘SIGs’ of IATEFL.
61
Pickett (1986a) presented a retrospective look at a gathering of Business English teachers
and noted that all the teachers were teaching a wide variety of groups but
...despite all these disparities, they were united in the consciousness that what they were teaching was ‘business English’. Paradoxically, the question soon arose as to whether there was such a thing.
(Pickett 1986a:1)
Pickett himself felt that Business English is a part of ESP but
...as business and commerce are by definition an interface between the general public and the specialist producer...it must be a lot nearer the everyday language spoken by the general public than many other segments of ESP. (Pickett 1986a:1)
He then refined this statement by comparing Business English to ‘lay-language’:
Conversely, of course, the extent to which it departs from lay language depends more on the nature of the business than on any autonomous subject area it occupies all to itself. Thus if we take three different firms, one in insurance, one in pharmaceuticals and one in fashion, their language to the public will be much the same and no more specialised than can be avoided. Their internal specialist languages, however, will be respectively those of insurance, pharmaceuticals and fashion, not business in general. (Pickett 1986a:1)
Business transactions, he argued, and as a consequence, a large part of business language,
are governed by universal actions that take place in any business, no matter what kind,
e.g. the Bill of Lading, the VAT enquiry etc. (1986a:2). This is certainly true of written
communication and Pickett argued that it must also be true to a certain extent in spoken
exchanges of a ritual nature, for example, the committee meeting and the annual staff
interview. However, spoken language is less easy to define and
...what makes for real business communication is a whole gamut of subtly graded conversations sensitive to the subject matter, the occasion, the shared knowledge and social relationships holding between speakers. (Pickett 1986a:2)
62
Pickett believed that Business English, though a part of ESP, is much more complex than
other areas. In other areas of ESP, specialist language is for intra-group communication
and there is no need for a link to the general public. Pickett likened Business English to
the doctor-patient relationship in that doctors, as well as discussing with each other, also
need to be able to relate to their patients in understandable language. Pickett’s views on
the place of Business English can be summarised in the following diagram - adapted
from Pickett (1986a: 4).
GENERAL ENGLISH
Communication with Public
BUSINESS ENGLISH
Communication Among Businesses
Insurance etc. Petroleum etc. Fashion etc.
Fig. 10 After Pickett (1986a:4) The specialised language of particular businessesWhen discussing the concept of register Pickett basically divided it into two areas:
register as defined by subject matter, i.e. special language being used because of the
subject area, such as football or cookery, and register as defined by situation, i.e. by the
special situation a speaker finds themselves in. ‘In other words, the individual can switch
his linguistic code to conform to his role, just as a bi-lingual can shift languages’
(1986a:8). The importance of this discussion on register is that Pickett says that although
Business English is a register, it cannot be confined by current definitions of it.
In both major senses of the word ‘register’ business English includes register but is not confined by it. In so far as register is defined by subject matter, business English embraces at least two subject matters. One is the specialist language of whatever sort of business one happens to be in - transport, petroleum, jewellery, hairdressing, banking, catering, etc. The other is the language of business in general that occupies a neutral place between particular businesses. Thus,
63
terms like ‘order’, ‘issue’, ‘bad debt’, ‘invest’, ‘boom’, ‘slump’, ‘invoice’, ‘depreciation’, ‘stock’, ‘discount’, ‘turnover’, would belong there, since they are part of a framework of concepts that would probably be used in any business. Insofar as a register is defined by situation, we might also speak of a ‘business register’, since there are certain situations peculiar to business which shape the language used in them. (Pickett 1986a:9)
Thus, ‘Business English is too rich and complex to be equated merely with register,
however defined, and like most chunks of real-life defies neat categorisation’ (1986a:12).
What is of key importance for the actual production of business language are
sociolinguistic factors, as Business English ‘depends much more on the setting and social
relations than upon the subject matter’ (1986a:2).
Pickett’s key points thus far were summarised in Pickett (1986b):
1. Business language looks out to the general public and inwards to a particular business.
It thus in one way resembles general English, but it also contains many words and
phrases unknown to the lay-person.
2. These distinctions are more to do with lexis and less to do with grammar, more written
than spoken.
3. Business language can best be found in the ‘forms and frameworks of
conventionalised transactions, governed by the courtesies and formalities of business life
which are to a large extent universal’ (1986b:2).
4. Thus, while there is a grammar and lexis of Business English, its main content is
sociolinguistic - the language showing ‘sensitivity to subject matter, the occasion, shared
knowledge and social relations holding between companies and communicators’
(1986b:2).
5. Business English fits none of the conventional definitions of register ‘but embraced all
and probably transcended them’ (1986b:3).
The talk is concluded by hopes for the future - he suggested the setting up of a spoken
Business English corpus to analyse spoken language, being especially interested in what
64
he called ‘oral collocations peculiar to business speech’ (1986b:4). These, he suggested,
should also be taught.
His arguments are taken up and further developed in Pickett (1988), where he both
introduced new ideas and also elaborated on old ones. The new idea concerned the
learners of Business English and he made the distinction discussed earlier of knowing
about business and acting in it. Both, he proposed, should essentially generate different
language.
In his final article on Business English (Pickett 1989), he discussed his perhaps most
important points: ergolect - the concept of a work language - and what he called the
poetics22 of Business English - that of business language being drawn from general
English to create fresh meaning in a business context which can then flow back into
general usage. In the article he concentrated on the language of Business English and
offered a framework for discovering exactly what it might be. He began the article by
saying that Business English
... is clearly a dialect of English but not exclusively of England. Indeed, it is not a dialect defined by place at all but by activity, occupation, subject matter or situation. For this we might coin the term ergolect - work language, though for many years linguists have been using the term register. (Pickett 1989:5 - Pickett’s own italics)
This ergolect, at least partially, is created by the poetics of business language. Poetics is
of key importance to later discussion on technical and sub-technical language as it shows
a feature of specialist language noted by most writers in the field - that of the layering of
specialist lexis. Pickett suggested that general language flows into the Business English
environment and takes on new combinations and meanings. These meanings are graded
in terms of how understandable they are. It is perhaps easier to see this gradation of
business lexis by viewing the examples below in Table II:
TABLE II: THE LAYERING OF BUSINESS LEXIS AS SEEN BY PICKETT
22 Pickett uses the term ‘poetics’ to describe this phenomenon as he sees it as a similar process to creating poetry.
65
Opaque Obscure Misleading Guessable Transparent Generalf.o.b. free on board < < < free/on/boardPBR public
borrowing requirement
< < < public/borrowing/requirement
CBI < < < Confederation of British Industry
confederation/British/industry
Thus, for example, the terms public, borrowing and requirement which all have a general
English use are, when used together, an obscure term. When the acronym PBR is used
the same words become opaque. One key distinguishing feature of Business English,
Pickett believed, is that although all ÔspecialÕ languages may be based on this process,
in Business English it is much more apparent. The languages of science, medicine and
technology, by way of comparison, are concerned with ‘the natural order’. A gall bladder
is the same the world over, and this uniformity is a unifying factor. Business, however,
is based on regional variations and thus totally different all over the world (Pickett
1989:9).
3.4.3 Pickett: A summary
From PickettÕs work it is possible to discern three key areas in which he put forward
ideas - all of which affect the nature and make-up of business language used in different
ways. These are summarised in the diagram23 on the next page (Fig.11), but are also laid
out here:
· The language of business itself: There is a lexis of business created by the process of
poetics - flowing from the general to the opaque (and back again). This results in a
layering of language and indicates that words in a business environment take on new
meanings.
23 The middle section of this diagram, headed ÔergolectÕ, is adapted from an original OHT used by Pickett himself and sent to the author.
66
· Language choice: The ergolect of business determined by subject matter, situation,
social roles and channels used (speaking or writing): all these factors influence the
final choice of language output.
· Communication partner on a macro-level: Business to public, business to business,
and business to business area, i.e. discussion within a companyÕs own field
These three main points will now be used to order the remainder of this review of the
literature.
It was mentioned at the beginning of this section that PickettÕs ideas do rest on some
empirical evidence, even if he himself used only intuition. Much of the evidence to
confirm his ideas, however, lies outside the field of Business English. This evidence will
now be examined and related back to his work. Additionally, it is clear that Pickett can
be criticised on certain counts and, therefore, a full analysis of his work is also necessary
before continuing further.
67
Fig. 11 A summary of PickettÕs main ideas
MACRO-LEVEL LANGUAGE CHOICE ERGOLECT POETICS OF LANGUAGE
LEXIS OF WHOLE LANGUAGE GENERAL
TO GENERAL PUBLIC SUBJECT MATTER
SITUATION
SOCIAL ROLEBUSINESS TO OTHERENGLISH BUSINESSES
CHANNEL
TO OWN BUSINESS SPEECH WRITING AREA
OPAQUE
SPECIAL FILTEREDLANGUAGE OF BUSINESSENGLISH
3.5 Pickett’s Concept 1: Poetics and the nature of ÔtechnicalÕ language
It has been seen that the first movement in ESP was that of register analysis and that the
early pre-occupation of register analysis was to try and establish the ‘special’ vocabulary
of different disciplines. In its earliest stages this was almost exclusively in the field of
EST. Of these early examples, Barber (1962), who looked at the grammatical and lexical
make-up of scientific text, Herbert (1965) and Ewer & Latorre (1967, 1969) are, perhaps,
some of the most well-known. Other interesting work, however, was being done at this
time on the question of vocabulary in specific disciplines and deserves a mention here.
Kirkham (1978) looked at what he called common core words in engineering and
mathematics textbooks. Friel (1978), in the same volume,24 carried out a small study in
an attempt to find useful verbs to teach students on legal English courses. Wingard
(1981) looked at verb forms and function in medical texts after a student had suggested
that when learning medical reading, the simple past passive was the most important form
to know, whereas Wingard believed in the importance of the simple present active tense.
His study of six medical texts bore out his belief in the importance of the simple present
active. Whilst all these studies were quite small in scale (with the exception, perhaps, of
Ewer & Latorre), they are all important as they represent the first real attempts to get to
grips with the language of specific disciplines on an empirical rather than on an intuitive
basis.
In addition to this focus on EST, examples of register work on Business English can also
be found both in this early period and later. Farmer (1967) established a vocabulary
frequency list for the vocabulary of business letters from a 10,956 word corpus, claiming
that they account for ‘nearly 97 per cent of the words in business correspondence’
(Farmer 1967:129). Lyne (1985), in later work, established the most common words of
French business correspondence using a corpus of 80,000 words (670 business letters in
all). He was able to establish what he called the ‘registral value’(1985:155-156) of
24 ESPMENA Newsletter 10 - see bibliography for full details.
words, ranking the 100 most frequent words of his corpus in order of their significance,
as compared to the Frequency Dictionary of French Words (Juilland et al.1970).25
Other work from the early period noted above was also starting to look at the layering of
the language of these specific disciplines - most of it outside the area of Business English
- but studies into Business English were to follow the trail blazed by these early writers.
3.5.1 The notions of sub-technical language and layering from outside the field of
Business English
As was noted above, Pickett has not been alone in considering ÔtechnicalÕ26 language
to be layered. A reading of the early related literature - loosely defined as belonging to
the field of register analysis - shows similar ideas. Close (1965:3) suggested that there are
three layers in scientific English: ‘a) a foundation that could serve any purpose; b) a
superstructure that could serve for any scientific purpose; and c) a later superstructure
serving some special scientific purpose’ (CloseÕs italics). Martin (1976), in an article on
academic vocabulary skills, divided them up into three areas for teaching purposes: the
research process - primarily verbs and nouns, the vocabulary of analysis - high
frequency verbs and two-word verbs e.g. consist of, derive and base on, and the
vocabulary of evaluation - academic adjectives and adverbs.
Cowan (1974), writing at around the same time, is widely attributed with the introduction
of the concept of what he termed sub-technical vocabulary.27 His ideas came out of a
25 Interestingly, Lyne’s notion of registral value is very similar to Scott’s (1997) notion of keyness. Registral value did not indicate only relative frequency of the words in the two corpora in question, but was also ‘a measure of the degree of certainty that the item in question really is more frequent (has a higher probability of occurrence) in one underlying population than in the other’ (Lyne 1985:166). 26 The word ÔtechnicalÕ here is used in the sense described by Martin (1976:91) as ‘ the specific vocabulary related to a particular discipline’ - in this case the discipline of business.27 It should also be mentioned, however, that despite the fact that the concept of sub-technical vocabulary is widely attributed to Cowan, for example, King (1989) and Trimble (1985) both cite him as the ÔcreatorÕ of the idea of sub-technical vocabulary, as early as 1965 Herbert, in his introduction to The Structure of Technical English talked about ‘semi-scientific or semi-technical words, which have a whole range of meanings and are frequently used idiomatically’ (Herbert 1965:v). Thus, perhaps, more credit should go to Herbert in this matter.
joint research program between the University of Illinois and Tehran University in Iran28
to train science students to read English at an advanced level. The students, he explained,
basically encountered problems in two areas: vocabulary and syntax, the former being of
interest here. Cowan distinguished four categories of vocabulary:
1. Highly technical words: these were words such as duodenum and aorta.
2. Sub-technical vocabulary: These he defined as ‘context independent words which
occur with high frequency across disciplines’ Cowan (1974:391). Examples of these
words he gave were function, inference, isolate, relation, basis. He also expressed the
need to determine these sub-technical words for each individual discipline.
3. Semi-technical and 4. Non-technical: these were words such as hospital, medicine,
patient, disease and he grouped them together making no explicit distinction between
them.
It can be noted here that this division of categories already sounds very similar to
PickettÕs notions of poetics. Cowan was also notable for his time in that he advocated
the use of electronic corpora and his data came from a 79,000 word corpus of medical
texts.
Inman (1978), cited in King (1989), having created a 110,000 word corpus of science and
technology texts, was able to divide the corpus into three categories: technical terms 21%
- with low distribution across disciplines; function words 9% and 70% sub-technical
words.
Godman & Payne (1981), in an article mostly concerned with the taxonomy of scientific
lexis and its division into clusters, suggested that the lexis of science is made up of two
elements - technical terms, which are terms where ‘there is a congruity of concept
between all scientists’ (1981:24) and common language terms used technically or non-
technical terms. Non-technical terms are further divided up, they suggested, into a) terms
28 How times change !
of the general language, e.g. co-ordinators, determiners and adjuncts, and b) terms that
can be described as ‘a basic list for usage in science’ (1981:28).
Trimble (1985) continued the discussion on sub-technical vocabulary by quoting
CowanÕs definition of it and then extending its meaning to words which ‘have one or
more ÔgeneralÕ English meanings and which in technical contexts take on extended
meanings (technical, or specialized in some fashion)’ (Trimble 1985:129). Thus, sub-
technical vocabulary for Trimble meant both context-independent words that occur with
a high frequency across the different disciplines of science, and also words that are found
in both general English and ÔscientificÕ English but with different meanings. He gave
actual examples of this latter category of terms, e.g. base, which has different meanings
in botany, chemistry, electronics and navigation - as well as in general English. Trimble
also looked at the special noun compounds to be found in scientific texts such as metal
shaft and liquid storage vessel and graded them on a four-stage scale depending on their
difficulty of learning: simple, complex, more complex and very complex (Trimble
1985:133), again substantiating PickettÕs theory of the layering of specialist language.
Yang (1986), put forward a technique to automatically retrieve scientific and technical
terms from machine-readable texts. He was also interested in a way of characterising the
text types once found. He worked on the hypothesis that as terms are context-specific
they should have a very high frequency where they occur but also ‘vary dramatically
from one subject matter to another’ (Yang 1986:97). Yang compiled a 270,000 word
corpus of science texts using a novel - Graham GreeneÕs ÔHuman FactorÕ - as a
reference corpus. His results were interesting and showed a ‘remarkable difference
between science texts and general texts in two-word combinations’ (1986:102). Overall,
he was able to divide the corpus into four categories of word:
1. Function words: Well distributed words - high frequency2. Sub-technical words: Broad distribution but with peaks in some texts3. Science/technical terms: Low distribution but high frequency in some texts4. Overlap category: Where a general sub-technical term can be a specialist term in one specific area
King (1989), working with MSc students who needed to write English assignments,
chose five assignments from different fields and was interested in seeing ‘what kind of
lexis was common to the five projects and how this commonality compared with other
cross-textual features in the corpora’ (1989:16). He decided to consider only nouns and
found that out of the 571 nouns extracted from the texts, only 43 of them occurred in
four or five of the texts. His analysis concluded with implications for teaching, where he
said that
What has here been identified as sub-technical vocabulary can be considered from the point of view of two functions:a) the referential function, in which the items have their meaning as part of a system which is the topic of writing ... andb) the discourse-oriented function, in which the clause-linking relationships or the superordinacy are typically the focus (most instances of way, procedure, case, for example). (King 1989:19)
It can thus be very clearly seen that in the specialist lexis studied above there is a distinct
layering of language along the lines that Pickett proposed. The next section will attempt
to discover whether the same can be said of business lexis.
3.5.2 The notion of layering in the field of Business English
The previous section noted that ‘technical’ lexis from various disciplines can be seen to
contain a layering of elements. Research in the area of Business English on this matter
has been scarce, but there is enough to show that Pickett was probably on the right track.
Zak & Dudley-Evans (1986), Alejo & McGinity (1997), Posteguillo & Palmer (1997)
and comments by Mascull (1996), all point in the direction of a layering of business
language.
Zak & Dudley-Evans’ (1986) study of word omission and abbreviation in telexes found
three main types of abbreviation used: firstly, standard abbreviations that are used in
everyday life such as a.m. , p.m., approx; secondly, abbreviations that would only really
be used in the office such as asap, c/n (credit note); and thirdly, highly specialised
abbreviations that can be found only in telexes such as adv = advise, bal = balance.
They stated that:
...the extent of omission and abbreviation depends very much on the type of audience to which the text is addressed and on conventions established by a company, a department within a company or by an individual. (Zak & Dudley-Evans 1986:70)
The concept of audience thus seems to be critical in the choice of language used in a
business setting. The importance of audience was also found in work carried out by
Posteguillo & Palmer (1997), who discussed the use of language in business articles
found in newspapers. They distinguished between two kinds of article:
1. Business Press Articles (BPA) - aimed at the actual business community to both give
information and perhaps influence the economic development of the country.
2. Business News in the Press (BNP) - articles aimed at the general public, their main
purpose being simply to give information on business events of note.
The aim of their research was to find significant differences between these two kinds of
article. Their results showed that whilst there were some similarities, owing to the fact
that both can be seen to belong to the same genre of journalese, there were in fact
significant differences which they attributed to the different intended audiences of the
articles. Below is a summary of those factors shared by the two types of article and the
differences found between them.
Similarities:1. Both had similar average sentence length.2. Both had a similar number of finite verb forms per sentence.3. Both used similar amounts of the passive and active voice in sentences - the active voice being used more than the passive.Differences:1. BPAs had double the references to specific figures.2. BPAs had an average of 35 business terms per article whereas BNPs had only 25.63.3. BPAs used more technical acronyms than BNPs.4. Differences in syntax: the BPAs had much more complicated sentences than the BNPs.
5. Differences in the use of visual aids: BNPs often used a cartoon or clarifying map whilst BPAs used tables and graphs.
Fig.12 Similarities and differences in BPAs and BNPs
In their conclusion Posteguillo & Palmer state that
All these distinctions can be related to the existence of two different types of audiences: a specific readership of business people in the case of BPAs, and a wider less business aware audience in the case of BNPs. (Posteguillo & Palmer 1997:114)
It can be seen from this that there is a gradation of difficulty in the articles - simpler
language for the general public and moving to the more complex for the business people
themselves. This point is confirmed by Alejo & McGinity (1997), who, in an article
looking at the use of English loan words in Spanish economic texts, found that in the
case of one-word anglicisms used in the economic texts, there was a graded scale of
difficulty in identifying them. Patent - easily identifiable - terms were either unadapted
from English, e.g. antitrust, boycott, broker, or were adapted but still easily recognisable
such as barter >bartear and charter > chárter. A second category was also found - that
of non-patent or not easily identifiable terms (Alejo & McGinity 1997:220).
In addition to this research, it seems that the idea of the layering of specialist lexis has
now started to become accepted in the literature. Mascull (1996), for example, in the
introduction to his COBUILD-based book, Key Words in Business, says that ‘It
systematically covers words and expressions that frequently occur and recur in talking
about business. Some of these occur almost exclusively in business contexts; others are
used in general English but are used in a particular way when talking about business’
(Mascull 1996:v).
All the above examples lend further credence to the ideas of Pickett and thus suggest the
need for further study into the language of business. However, before continuing, it is
necessary to go back and make a critical review of both Pickett and the other research
mentioned above. There are limitations to all of them that need to be considered before
drawing any final conclusions.
3.5.3 Discussion
Pickett: In evaluating the literature centred around the ideas of Pickett it is useful to ask
the following questions. Firstly, how is Pickett actually adding to general knowledge of
Business English - what is he saying and conversely, what is he not saying? Secondly, is
what he is telling us plausible and can it be assumed to be correct based on any empirical
evidence? Thirdly, is the empirical evidence - presented in the last sections - valid?
It is possible to criticise the work of Pickett on two separate levels: in a general sense in
terms of his methodology (or lack of it) focusing on the overall import of his ideas, and
at a more detailed level, on individual points he made. The more general points will be
considered first.
The first major criticism has already been mentioned - his work is totally based on his
own intuitive ideas and not on hard evidence. Pickett does suggest that he believes that
his idea on poetics can be proved empirically (1988:93), thus indirectly inviting it to be
investigated, but so far this has not been done. This criticism affects all his writing in that
whilst he presumably had access to written texts, and so could draw some informed
conclusions, he also speculated on spoken language which he did not have access to, as
far as it is known. The greatest flaw in his work, however, is not what he said, but what
he did not say. What Pickett did was give a framework by which Business English can
be further examined - a structure that says three things:
1) Business language is layered and formed by a process of poetics.
2) People choose how to speak business language depending on the subject, situation
and a whole range of sociolinguistic factors.
3) The communication partners in business are business to business, business to public ,
and business to businesses in the same area.
All these in turn affect the kind of language being used. What Pickett does not say is
exactly what the language is that is being used in all these different situations, other than
suggesting a few words like order, issue, bad debt, and invest (1986a:9). The reader is
thus told to a certain extent why and where the language is being used, but the most
important factor - what that language actually is - has been left out. Thus, in many ways,
this thesis begins where Pickett left off, being primarily concerned with the what, as
opposed to the where and why of Business English.
Certain lesser details of Pickett’s work can also be called into question. His assumption
that business language faces two (1986a) and later three (1988) ways: to the general
public, to a particular business field and to other businesses, has been criticised by
Dudley-Evans & St John who said that ‘The distinction Pickett makes is useful but
probably not fine enough for today’s wide-ranging business activities’ (1998:55). Even a
cursory look at the literature of needs analysis in business shows that this is probably
true, as the number of people that business people need to deal with can be vast - each
one of whom may need a different level of language. However, other writers have tended
to follow PickettÕs line on this, for example, Barbara & Scott (1996), Brieger (1997) and
O’Brien & Jones (1998). This will be dealt with in detail later in this chapter.
Pickett’s definition of poetics is to a certain extent problematic - certainly in terms of
empirically proving it - in that the categories, though reasonably well defined, depend
almost entirely on the previous knowledge or intuition of the person who is categorising
the language. It must be assumed that Pickett meant a native speaker of English to do the
sorting, as he does not specify this in the article (1989). To use some of his own
examples of the grading of business language, demassification of the market and volume
car are put in the Transparent column. It can be argued that these terms would be opaque
or at least misleading to many native speakers of English, and it highlights just how
difficult it is to classify much of the language of business in the way he suggests.
One of Pickett’s central tenets was that Business English can be singled out on the
grounds that the process of poetics is much more pronounced than in any other specialist
field. His comparison with the field of medicine, mentioned earlier, suggests that the
subject matter of medicine is its ‘unifying factor’ - the more easily doctors can speak
together, the more the discipline will progress. Admittedly, there is not the same
altruistic spirit in business - quite the opposite in fact, as Pickett himself mentions - but
the effect on language this has may not necessarily be the same as Pickett suggests. He
seems to be suggesting that the language of business in different countries is formed on
the basis of institutional and legal grounds that are particular to each country and,
therefore, lexicalised differently. Thus, whilst there may be a certain amount of overlap
with regard to terminology, the terms are essentially institutionally and culturally bound.
This may well be true when comparing terms found in, for example, Spanish and French,
and then comparing them to English, but Pickett was talking essentially about English.
He thus ignores what Mole (1996) calls ‘International English’ - the language of airlines,
business and diplomacy. This can be seen as a parallel to the international ‘doctor-speak’
he mentions above - an attempt to do business on the same terms despite national
language variations. Thus a Finn doing business with a German may not operate using
the same system of purchasing as his or her German counterpart, but they can
communicate together using the ‘refined’ English that they have in common. Thus it
could be suggested that there is a universal Business English - International English - that
draws less on poetics for its formation than on a common ground of standardised
terminology understandable to all parties. This is definitely an area that would need more
research in the future.29
Other work on the layering of language: Despite these criticisms, Pickett’s work does
seem to be credible both on an intuitive level - it seems to make sense - and also on an
empirical level if the research discussed above can be regarded as valid. Most of the
pieces of research mentioned above, however, suffer from the same lacks associated with
register analysis that were noted in the previous section on ESP. The research covered
29 For interesting work on the concept of ‘international’ Business English, see Connor (1999).
concentrates solely on written language and is only descriptive of the language - not
saying why one kind of language is being used rather than another, Barber (1962) being a
good example of this. A further problem is the nature of the samples from which
conclusions are drawn. Wingard draws conclusions from six medical texts, Swales
(1985:2) in his notes on Barber’s work also notes a worry about the size of corpus being
used - less than 25,000 words. Similar criticism can be levelled at Kirkham (1978) and
Friel (1978). The work of Cowan (1974), Inman (1978) and Yang (1986) can be
complimented on the fact that larger corpora were used - 79,000, 114,000 and 270,000
words respectively, but again they concentrated solely on written texts. Additionally,
Yang’s choice of a Graham Greene novel for use as a reference corpus seems strange to
say the least.
Yet despite these criticisms, some points have become clear from this review. There are
in specialist disciplines, after Yang (1986):
1) function words, as in general English 2) sub-technical terms, i.e. terms that are found in general English but have different general technical meanings. These words are thus found to have a broad distribution across disciplines, but may peak in a specific discipline if they happen to constitute a specialist term in that area. 3) technical terms only found in a given area.
Despite some disagreement on the precise definition of sub-technical lexis, for example,
King (1989:14) criticised Inman’s division of lexis on the grounds that it is too broad,
there seems to be little doubt that it actually exists, and that specialist language is indeed
layered in the way that Pickett proposed. This notion is further backed up by the work
done in the field of Business English (Zak & Dudley-Evans 1986, Alejo & McGinity
1997 and Posteguillo & Palmer 1997) which is all based on actual authentic data of
greater or lesser volume.
Once again, however, the only language being considered is written language and the
topics researched are all small-scale; telexes or economic texts, for example. This means
that although it is possible make an educated guess and say that the results found here can
be generalised out to the whole of Business English, it is not possible yet to do that based
on the evidence presented. Interestingly, the hint for further discussion comes from the
work of King, who found that sub-technical terms fulfilled a dual function: a referential
function ‘in which the items have their meaning as parts of a system which is the topic
of the writing’ (King 1989:19) and a discourse-oriented one ‘in which the clause-linking
relationships or the superordinacy are typically the focus’ (King 1989:19). Thus, when
reviewing what is known about Business English from the literature, it is logical to move
on to the next stage. Here we will cover what Pickett termed the ergolect of business in
terms of subject matter and situation, and in terms of other factors that go beyond the
sentence level to discourse, genre and the concepts of power and culture.
3.6 Pickett’s Concept 2: The ‘Gamut’30 - the ergolect of business
By the time Pickett was writing (1986-89) it had long been clear to many researchers in
ESP that seeing language only in terms of frequency lists and grammatical form was not
giving a complete picture of what was going on. Something more was needed. The
answers to be found to this something more problem have, as was discussed in the first
section of this review, gone through various stages. This next section will look at the
ways that researchers have added to our knowledge of Business English using a variety
of methodologies.
The review begins with discourse analysis and research into the use of discourse
strategies used in business. Analysis of discourse has led to a very rich related field of
research in Business English, that of cross-cultural differences. This examines how the
discourse patterns of different cultures vary and the problems this can cause in a cross-
cultural business situations. Culture here will be examined in the traditional sense: as
30 ‘Gamut’ here refers to Pickett’s (1986a:2) quote that Business English is ‘a whole gamut of subtly graded conversations sensitive to the subject matter, the occasion, the shared knowledge and social relationships holding between speakers’.
referring to people from different countries, and also in terms of corporate culture and
what effect that can have on business language use.
Another key factor emanating from the literature that will be considered is power: how
the power relationships between the interactants in a business process affect the use of
language. Finally, genre studies into Business English will be examined. The aim is to
present a rounded view of Business English and what is really known about it before
moving on to look at more intuitive approaches to Business English in the form of
materials creation. Once again it will be seen that, although this section has been divided
up into smaller parts for the sake of convenience, many of the categories overlap, with
some studies encompassing aspects of discourse, genre, culture and power
simultaneously.
3.6.1 Discourse
Early research into discourse analysis arose from a discontent with the register analysis
approach of sentence level analysis. In a key article in 1974, Allen & Widdowson
criticised the register analysis approach, saying that courses taught in this way did ‘little
more than provide exercises in the manipulation of linguistic forms’ (1974/1985:74).
They went on to say that
We take the view that the difficulties which the students encounterarise not so much from a defective knowledge of the system of English, but from an unfamiliarity of English use.
(Allen & Widdowson 1974/1985:74)
They then summarised their views as follows:
One might usefully distinguish two kinds of ability which an English course at this level should aim at developing. The first is the ability to recognise how sentences are used in the performance of acts of communication, the ability to understand the rhetorical functioning of language in use. The second is the ability to recognise and manipulate the formal devices which are used to combine sentences to create continuous passages of prose. We might say that the first has to do
with the rhetorical coherence of discourse, and the second with the grammatical cohesion of text.
(Allen & Widdowson 1974/1988:74 -their italics)
This was a useful distinction to make and the first pieces of research covered here in
Business English were concerned with the second of these two factors - cohesion.
3.6.1.1 Cohesion
Cohesion was studied by Johns (1980), who conducted a small study into the use of
cohesion in business letters, reports and academic textbooks of business and economics.
She began by dividing Business English or English of Business and Economics (EBE)
into two main classes: the English of applied business and the academic English of
business and economics. Her aim was to see if she could find constellations - or groups -
of cohesive elements that would occur repeatedly in the discourse types selected
(1980:36). She used a corpus of twenty letters, twenty reports and ten textbooks. Her
results showed that lexical cohesion is the most common type of cohesion in letters and
reports - similar findings were also made for the textbooks. She was, however, unable to
find the constellations she was looking for in the major classes of literature (applied or
academic business literature) but she did find that there were constellations of features
within the genres of letters, reports and textbooks respectively. Dudley-Evans & St John
(1996:6) point out that this might suggest it would be more worthwhile ‘establishing the
distinctive linguistic features of key genre of business communication than in trying to
develop a detailed linguistic description of the variety of Business English’.31
Work on cohesion also included analysis of conjuncts (Morrow 1989). His study on the
use of conjuncts within written Business English used news stories from the Wall Street
Journal and articles from Economic Enquiry to try and discover if conjunct use in the
two discourse types differed. He found higher conjunct use in the academic journal texts
as opposed to the business news stories. He attributed the differences in conjunct use, for
example, to the need for greater explicitness in the academic articles.
31 Both are worthwhile tasks, but this thesis has concentrated more on the latter suggestion here rejected by Dudley-Evans & St John.
There is much to be lauded in the approaches used in these two studies. Both relied on
authentic material and both were addressing questions that are of potential difficulty to
business students when using English. Both finish their articles with implications for
teaching and both realise the limitations of their studies and suggest that larger studies
should be forthcoming that could benefit from a larger corpus of authentic material. Thus
any discussion on the limitations of these studies is built into them already and
recognised by the authors themselves. A further limitation of these works (although it
must not be seen purely as a criticism) is that, again, they are concerned only with
written text.
A second band of discourse studies grew up along the lines of the first point made by
Allen & Widdowson above (Lenz 1987, Micheau & Billmyer 1987, Maier 1992) -
looking at how language was used in communication and how different discourse
strategies can be used in business situations. This time, studies were also carried out into
spoken language.
3.6.1.2 Strategies
Turn-taking strategies were very much at the heart of 1980s analysis of discourse in the
field of Business English. This trend is exemplified by work done by Lenz (1987) and
Micheau & Billmyer (1987). Lenz (1987) carried out a discourse analysis on a corpus of
six technical meetings. He was interested in the turn-taking rules operating in these
kinds of meetings. He utilised the conversational system of Sacks et al. (1978) and later
on Sinclair & Coulthard’s (1975) model of classroom interaction. Lenz believed that
As long as discourse analysis neglects the turn-taking rules in operation, it cannot show consistent results as the discourse structures evolving at different phases of the speech event are dependent on the turn-taking rules employed by the participants. (Lenz 1987:162)
Lenz found both similarities and also significant differences in the turn-taking patterns of
the participants, as compared to the models of both Sacks et al. and Sinclair & Coulthard.
There was little silence in the technical meetings, meaning that the discontinuous talk
(silence) idea of Sacks et al. was not to be found as ‘The chairman seems to feel
responsible and takes over before a discontinuity could arise. All we find in our data are
short gaps between two turns’ (Lenz 1987:163). Also found were significant differences
in turn size, with multi-unit turns being common.
Retrospectively, we can say that the participants in Technical Meetings rely on the same selection mechanisms as in conversation, but they use additional techniques to introduce and terminate extended turns. (Lenz 1987:167)
Lenz summarised by saying that turn-taking strategies have a great effect on the
pragmatics of a meeting. This finding was re-iterated in the often-quoted study of
Micheau & Billmyer (1987), who studied the differences in discourse strategies between
native and non-native speakers in a case study simulation exercise. They had two main
objectives in doing this. Firstly, to gather empirical evidence about native speaker
speaking and patterns of interaction, in an attempt to identify patterns of how they did
what they did. Secondly, to gather those discourse strategies used by non-native speakers
and to identify those that did not conform with the native speaker patterns. Once these
had been identified they could then be used as a base for teaching them how to fit in
better with native speakers. The results showed that non-native speakers (NNS), had
serious problems with both frequency and quality of participation. The findings are
summarised below:
1. Violations of turn-taking
- inability to predict end of turn
- insertion of attention-getting devices e.g. 'excuse me'
2. Problems with turn allocation strategies
- reluctance to bid
- pauses after nomination
3. Problems with turns
- significant intra-sentential pausing
4. Use of 'high-considerateness' frames - over politeness did not help get a turn
Fig. 13 Problems related to NNS discourse patterns
Native speakers, it was found, used such devices as latched utterances - phrases used to
ensure smooth transition from one speaker to the next - and showed an ability to build up
a strategic argument over a period of time. It was also noted that native speakers placed
high value on the quality of the interaction, and not the quantity of it.
Other studies on discourse strategies comparing native and non-native speakers have
found similar mis-matches of native speaker and non-native speaker behaviour. Maier
(1992), in her study into the differences in politeness strategies used by native and non-
native speakers of English, used Brown & Levinson’s (1987) model of politeness
strategies, gathering data from eighteen writers, eight native speakers and ten non-native.
As with Micheau & Billmyer, she found significant differences in the strategies used
where ‘Several of the non-native speaker letters gave the impression of being somehow
too casual, too desperate, too personal or too detached’ (Maier 1992:194). She also found
that ‘The native speakers used more negative politeness strategies to preserve the
addressee’s face: they mitigated their apologies more, they expressed thanks more often,
they were more pessimistic and less direct’ (Maier 1992:202).
These last two studies both compared strategies used by native speakers of English to
non-native speakers. This leads to the next section, where the influence of culture on the
language of business is discussed. A body research has already been carried out into how
inter-cultural factors can affect language and discourse or, more specifically, how the
language use32 of one culture is interpreted by the other in business meetings and
negotiations. This next section therefore reviews some of the numerous examples of
32 Language here refers to English, i.e. situations where both parties are using English and not their own native language, and how the influence of their own culture affects their use of both language and discourse strategies, leading to possible misunderstandings.
these studies, starting with intercultural studies of written discourse, followed by a look
at research into spoken discourse.33
3.6.2 Culture
Written: The styles and rhetorical features of English, French and Japanese business
letters were compared by Jenkins & Hinds (1987). Despite the fact that business letters
are quite similar in format, ‘Differences in the prescriptive treatment of business letter
writing among cultures should, in fact, be expected, based on our knowledge that
persuasion is a rhetorical exercise and that rhetorical organization may vary considerably
from culture to culture’ (Jenkins & Hinds 1987:329). Their results were very interesting
in that they found that
American business letter writing is reader oriented, French business letter writing is writer oriented, and Japanese business letter writing is non person oriented, reflecting an overall tendency to frame communication in terms of the relationship between people rather than in terms of the people. (Jenkins & Hinds 1987:330)
· Thus in the United States ‘The purpose of the business letter is to attempt to get the
reader to appreciate the benefits of doing what the writer wants’ (1987:330).
· In France ‘The importance of the correspondence is that it constitutes evidence in
cases of litigation...Thus the primary virtues of the French business letter are
prudence, conciseness, and precision’ (1987:333). They noted that ‘the most obvious
difference here is in the salutation. There is more rigid observance of formality and
respect in French use’ (1987:33) and the letter ‘rarely...attempts to personalize or to
establish a friendly tone’ (1987:335).
· In contrast, in the Japanese business letter, ‘The concern is with the format and
language which will most effectively establish or maintain the appropriate relationship
between reader and writer’ (1987:336).
33 For a detailed and interesting theoretical overview of cross-cultural communication see Scollon & Scollon (1995), who discuss many of the factors mentioned in this review (and many more) including power and politeness aspects of culture.
Jenkins & Hinds related their findings to Hall’s (1976) ideas of high and low context
cultures. In low context cultures a message is more explicitly coded in the spoken
message than in a high context culture where, in a sense, a reader has to ‘read between
the lines’ to gain the actual message. As they find that the letters differ in terms of
emphasis used, this distinction seems to fit rather well34 (1987:341). Hinds’ (1987)
distinction between what was termed writer-responsible cultures and reader-responsible
cultures also comes into play here. Thus, in these different approaches to writing, the
relationship between the author and the reader is essentially different: the former using
devices to not only convey information but also say how the information is being given,
e.g. through use of meta-text, the latter making the reader ‘do the work’ in understanding
the message. This is, of course, perfectly normal when writing within one’s own culture,
but when the writing styles are applied in cross-cultural situations, this can lead to
problems.
This reader- or writer-oriented distinction proved useful for Mauranen (1993), who
examined the use of meta-text in Finnish and English articles on economics. She found
that the Finnish texts used much less meta-text so that
Finnish discourse does not explicitly indicate what the text is going todo, and in this sense does not prepare the reader for what is to come.Nor does it orient the reader very much in retrospect, either.
(Mauranen 1993:16)
She continued by saying that ‘In contrast, native speakers of English often use devices
which anticipate what is to follow and how text segments relate to each other’ (Mauranen
1993:16). Interest in meta-text was also expressed by Lampi (1992) whose study into
Chairman’s Statements in Finnish35 and English annual reports investigated use of
rhetorical strategies in terms of meta-language, discourse structure and assumptions of
shared knowledge. This study, though small in nature (six Finnish and six UK annual
reports) agreed partially with Mauranen’s assertion of Finnish being a reader-
34 Japan is a typical high context culture, the US and France typical low context cultures.35 This concerns statements that had been translated from the original Finnish into English, so the comparison is between two sets of English texts and not Finnish to English.
responsible culture. The British annual reports formed a homogenous discourse group,
but the Finnish reports seemed to be divided into two groups: one group that represented
well-established international Finnish companies, and the second group comprised of the
smaller, newer companies just starting out on the internationalisation process. What is of
note here is that the first group resembled more closely the British style of discourse,
whilst the second group, of newer companies, were more ‘Finnish’ in their discourse
style. This suggests that discourse patterns in texts can change and grow according to
circumstances.
Further differences in discourse styles between Finnish and English writers (Yli-Jokipii
1994) have also been found. She studied the differences in the use of requests between
Finnish, American and British writers of business letters. Differences were found not just
between the Finnish and native speaker group, but also between American and British
writers, though this was less marked. Finns tended to use ‘non-intruding detached
behaviour’ (1994:252) when making requests, whereas ‘American writers preferred
explicitness’ (1994:253) and the British writers ‘employed less overt tactics’ (1994:253).
At the level of genre analysis, O’Brien and Jones’ (1998) study on the language of
minutes taken from business meetings in France and the UK found several differences in
both linguistic content and format (both sets were written in English). For example, in
the French documents there were no lists of Apologies for Absence as there were in the
British, nor were there sections concerning Matters Arising or Any Other Business.
Grammatical differences were noted, for example, in that the French used more active
verbs, the British speakers more passive forms. Thus culture cannot only be seen to affect
the discourse structure of writing, but also the very content of the documents themselves.
The concept of genre will be considered more closely later on in this chapter.
It is clear from these few examples above that there are considerable variations of style
and content in business writing that are affected by cultural differences and this in turn,
can affect a cross-cultural meeting of business parties. Studies have shown that the same
can be said for spoken exchanges as well.
Spoken: The dangers of misunderstandings in a cross-cultural negotiation were central to
the work of Neu (1986), who realised that
Certainly in a business setting, cultural and/or linguistic mis-understandings...can be dangerous both to the negotiator as an individual, and as a representative of his/her company. (Neu 1986:41)
Her data was collected from students doing simulated negotiations and she used multi-
variate statistical techniques to see what differences there were in negotiating styles and
format. In all, thirty negotiating events were chosen and transcribed. She found nine
stages that took place during a negotiation and showed that they did not take place within
a linear pattern, but rather cyclically. Beneath the stages she found that
.... there are five underlying linguistic behaviours which characterizeAmerican English negotiations. These behaviours demonstrate thatnegotiations consist of giving information, promoting interaction,discussing procedural matters, conceding, and agreeing.
(Neu 1986:46)
Neu went on to create teaching materials directly from the research she had carried out,
emphasising that knowledge of how native speakers negotiate can be transferred, via
teaching, to non-native speakers. Garcez (1993) also stressed the need for the results of
intercultural discourse research to be available to the classroom teacher. Garcez took a
microethnographic approach to analyse the point-making styles of negotiators in business
negotiations between American and Brazilian leather goods companies. He found that
‘American negotiators make their points in a direct, self-explanatory way, while the
Brazilians make points in an indirect way which demands a high degree of conversational
involvement from their interlocutors’ (Garcez 1993:103). He stressed that the discourse
skills highlighted in his study should be taught both to business students and to business
people, in order to increase their knowledge of potentially business-damaging discoursal
variation between cultures.
Interest in the area of discourse in cross-cultural settings has increased in recent years and
a lot of literature has started to appear in this area.
· Firth36 (1995a) looked contrastively at how accounts - a justification or excuse for an
action or speech - are used by Danish and Middle-Eastern business people in the dairy
industry. He found that rather than being purely negative features of discourse,
accounts can be used ‘in a proactive, creative sense’ (Firth 1995a:199).
· Bilbow (1997) studied the verbal behaviour of western ex-patriates and local Chinese
people in Hong Kong using a 140,000 word corpus - the Meeting at Work (MAW)
Corpus. He looked at two kinds of speech acts, directing (requests and commands) and
suggesting (suggestions and proposals) and how they were used in the two groups. He
found that the Chinese spoke a lot less than the ex-patriates, accounting for only 35%
of talking time, and that they also used directing strategies a lot less than the ex-
patriates.
· Neumann (1997:73) ‘focused on identifying and analysing differences in the
requesting behaviour of German and Norwegian managers’. A corpus of face-to-face
and telephone conversations was used and he found that ‘Norwegian speakers choose
more indirect linguistic strategies than native speakers of German. Germans utter
twice as many requests as do Norwegians and appear to prefer strategies that have
been classified as direct’ (Neumann 1997:90).
· Mulholland (1997) also studied request systems, this time between Australian and
Asians, and examined how cultural assumptions were linguistically encoded.
Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris (1997a) were able to present an overall model to cover
cross- and inter-cultural discourse. This model is shown below in Fig.14. It is seen from
this model that in intercultural discourse situations there is an interplay between
discourse and culture. Culture, here, also has the added element of corporate culture, and
several writers have noted the influence of corporate culture on discourse patterns or
indeed language use as a whole. The influence of a corporate culture on language is
inextricably linked to the concept of power within companies. Thus, the next section will
look at both how corporate culture can affect the language used and also how power
relationships operating within the companies, or between companies, can affect discourse
events.
36 See also Firth (1995b) for a collection of papers on the language of negotiation.
NATIONAL CULTURE
CORPORATE CULTURE
INTERACTIONS
GENERIC TYPES OF DISCOURSE
INDIVIDUAL LANGUAGE SYSTEMS
Fig.14 A model of cross- and inter-cultural discourse (Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris 1997a:14)
3.6.3 Corporate culture, power and language
The concept of power relationships in business settings stemmed from the work of
Hofstede (1980). In a mammoth study on the business relationships of over 116,000 IBM
workers world-wide, Hofstede developed four factors that he found to underlie the
behaviour patterns of the workers: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individuality
and Masculinity. Whilst all of these factors are important, discussion here will only focus
on Power Distance, which refers to the level of inequality ‘formalized in hierarchical
boss-subordinate relationships’ (Hofstede 1980:65). In some cultures such as Sweden,
Ireland and New Zealand, the distance between a boss and subordinates is quite short and
they can in some ways be seen to work as a team. In other cultures this distance is quite
great, with the boss exerting authority and the subordinates seen in a much more
subservient role. Countries mentioned in the latter category were the Phillipines, Mexico
and Venezuela. Further research has shown in a variety of linguistic situations the power
relationships between interlocutors directly affect the kind of language used and in some
cases this is also found to be concomitant with the corporate culture of the companies
involved.
3.6.3.1 Corporate culture
Watson (1997) spent one year working in a Midlands (UK) telecommunications
company. His intent was to study the management and workers in an ethnographic
manner, similar to nineteenth century studies of remote tribes. Watson’s study is of
interest here because during his stay in the company he was able to discover two separate
discourse patterns emerging within the company, related to two opposing corporate
cultures. The company had been taken over a year before and new incoming management
were in opposition to the old - they had previously been rivals in a very competitive
market. In this rather tense environment two separate managerial discourses were found:
1. Discourse A: Articulated by consultants hired to create a Ôwinning cultureÕ. The
discourse of ‘empowerment, skills and growth’ (1997:220). Thus all the positive things
of company life - what it could and should be.
2. Discourse B: ‘the alternative control, jobs and costs discourse’ (1997:221). This was
associated with the new management - fads, fashions, management initiatives, headcount
reductions.
Discourse A represented the old management - those who were in the company before it
was taken over. ‘Discourse A is used in the reference to getting the right results for the
business and considering the customerÕs end of things rather than simply, in Discourse
B terms, producing output’ (1997:225 - Watson’s italics). Thus Watson was able to
discern how two separate corporate cultures - in this instance forced into the same
working environment - engendered two separate discourse patterns. In turn, this was
linked to the wielding of power - the speakers in the Discourse B group were the new
owners and thus ‘spoke a different language’ to the original workers. Watson concluded
by saying ‘To put it very simply, management is talk. And work organisations are
constituted through the dialogues and discursive processes which that talk creates and
expresses’ (1997:226). This thought is reiterated by Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris (1997b)
who, in attempting to define communication in business organisations, observed that ‘no
ÔorganisationÕ exists prior to communication: organisations are talked into being and
maintained by means of the talk of the people within and around them. Among the
Ôcompeting discoursesÕ that shape daily organisational life, some become dominant’
(1997b:4). Their view of communication and language is a holistic one based on an
intrinsic interrelationship between culture and organisational culture where language is
seen ‘not merely as a linguistic code but [it] embodies a whole system of beliefs, a vision
of the world’ (1997b:5). Thus, their definition of culture is a multi-dimensional one
(1997b:221) which, ‘includes, amongst other things, both organisational and national
culture’ (1997b:221).
Yli-Jokipii (1994) highlighted this link between culture and corporate culture in her
study of requests in British, American and Finnish business writing. She noted that the
‘corporate environment formed the social context in which the request occurs’
(1994:253) and that it can be found that American business writers identify themselves
more with the company than the British do. Thus the British writers perhaps ‘rather see
themselves as individuals than as employees performing an institutional role, and thus
refer to self more frequently with a first person singular pronoun than plural’
(1994:254). Thus, culture and corporate culture are seen to be working together to affect
linguistic output.
The influence of corporate culture has also been studied by Nickerson (1998). She took
an interdisciplinary approach relating ESP research to corporate culture to see how the
two interact. Her approach was thus one ‘where language is not considered as separate
from the corporate environment within which it is used, but rather as an intrinsic part of
that environment’ (Nickerson 1998:282). A questionnaire was sent to 107 British
subsidiaries working in Holland (with a 35% response rate) enquiring into the type and
quantity of English used by the Dutch workers. She found that ‘the relationship that the
subsidiary has with its Head Office in Britain clearly influences the amount and type of
written English required’ (1998:291), and that ‘it is clear that analysing English business
writing in isolation is not sufficient because of the potential influence of the corporate
culture’ (1998:292).
An important factor in the research carried out by Nickerson and Watson, noted above, is
another factor involved in the relationship between culture and corporate culture: power.
The next section, therefore, considers how power relationships can affect Business
English discourse.
3.6.4 Power
Power relationships between interlocutors or correspondents can be seen from at least
two angles: at an intra-company level between bosses and subordinates within the same
company relying on the relative rank of the people involved, or at an inter-company level
dependent on the relative power in-built into the situations (the superstructural layer of
Charles 1996).
Intra-company: Intra-company power relationships were seen clearly in the research of
Watson (1997) and Nickerson (1998). West (1981) had also hinted at the relationship
between language and the relationships between workers. His functional study of
industrial language use noted the relationship between structure - language where
information and facts are passed from person to person, consideration - language
concerned with the affective side of communication, and metalanguage - varying ways
of checking that the message had been understood.
The findings of this survey have provided further evidence of the relationship between these three aspects of industrial language use. While it cannot be said that particular proportions are likely to indicate ‘good’ or ‘bad’ working relationships there is a clear indication that the ratios reflect the degree of rigidity and formality in supervisor-employee relations. (West 1981: 30)
More recent research carried out into power and linguistic choice at an intra-company
level has found that the key factor is not always power itself, i.e. hierarchy, but can also
be the amount of perceived relevance the subject under discussion has to a given
individual or department. Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris (1997b) in their studies of both
UK and Italian meetings, had assumed that hierarchy would directly affect the level of
formality of meetings and consequently the language used. However, they found that it
was the perception of relevance that set the tone of the meeting, though hierarchy
provided the ‘pecking order’ for the subjects under discussion (1997b:207).
Inter-company: As with intra-company power relationships, research has also been
conducted at an inter-company level.
Charles (1996) discussed the relationship of power and language in negotiation
situations. She applied a modified version of Brown & Levinson’s (1987) model for
politeness strategies in spoken language (Charles 1996:24). She found that the length of
the relationship between the two negotiating parties had a distinct bearing on the
language used. She divided them up into Old Relationship Negotiations (ORN) and New
Relationship Negotiations (NRN). She noted that
Differences between the two groups were discernible in the kinds of topics initiated, the rhetorical moves produced, and, above all, in the face saving strategies used. (Charles 1996:33)
The two concepts of politeness and hierarchy in relation to power and language are
joined together by Scollon & Scollon (1995) who suggest that ‘power (that, is hierarchy)
is interrelated to politeness levels’ (1995:49). These concepts have been the subject of
research in business writing where the relationship of politeness to power has been
studied.
Yli-Jokipii (1992) noted that ‘politeness is connected with the investment of power that
the linguistic choices comprise’ (1992:101). She studied a small corpus of business
letters at the levels of syntax, semantics and pragmatics and showed that power can be
given away by the writer if they employ discourse strategies that are too polite. She also
commented on the relationship between power, quantity of text and politeness. The
shorter the letter, the less polite it is, the more power is kept in the hands of the writer.
She continued her study into power relationships in Yli-Jokipii (1994), discussing the
roles of buyers and sellers in written documents. Here she suggested that ‘No matter who
physically composes the message, it is this ‘corporate role’ of the Buyer or Seller that
bestows that person, within the framework of the prevailing institutional norms, with
more social power or less than the other party’ (1994: 54). She discussed the differences
in cultures in terms of power in correspondence and showed that, for example, Finnish
writers are inclined to ‘remove power from self to other’ (1994:225).
This difference in power status and its effect on language use according to the roles of
the writer is also noted by Barbara & Scott (1996). In a study of Invitations for Bids
(IFBs) they found that choice of modality reflected the power attached to the purchaser
or the bidder in the bid situation:
IFBs are quite impressive in their inequality of both rights and discourse. The Purchaser enjoys a number of rights and has almost no duties; the Bidder has a lot of duties and very few rights.
(Barbara & Scott 1996:16)
This is shown in the language used in the text:
The language reflects the power and the rights of the Purchaser, who is explicitly allowed control over the process. The Bidder has to meet many more obligations, characteristically signalled by shall or an equivalent. (Barbara & Scott 1996:6)
The PurchaserÕs rights were shown through phrases such as ‘reserves the right to’ and
the BidderÕs duties were shown by repetition of ‘shall’ to imply necessity, i.e. not the
future meaning of it.
At the beginning of this section on discourse and genre, it was stated that its divisions
were in a sense arbitrary, serving a function only of highlighting certain features of
business language research. Thus the sections can be seen to overlap at many points. This
is seen most clearly in the case of genre studies. Several of the authors now already
mentioned, Lampi/Charles,37 Mauranen, Yli-Jokipii and Barbara & Scott, for example,
have contributed to the study of Business English as a genre more or less along the lines
of Swales’ (1990) definition, and a more detailed look at questions of genre is now,
therefore, timely.
3.6.5 Genre: a brief overview
The term genre and the concept of genre analysis represent a broad and often confusing
area of English language research. The term itself has no unified meaning and is
perceived differently by the three main schools of genre analysis: the ESP, the New
Rhetoric School from the USA and the Australian School (Hyon 1996).38 Even within
each of the schools there is diversity of opinion and Kress (1993:31) quite succinctly
remarks that the term ‘comes with a considerable baggage of accumulated meaning’.
This work will concentrate mainly on work done in the ESP school, though some
mention of the concepts of genre from the other schools is unavoidable, notably that of
Ventola (1983, 1987).
Genre analysis has evolved as an important system of analysis in ESP over the last
decade, notably following the ideas of Swales (1981), with work on article introductions
and (1990) where a detailed theoretical framework for genre analysis in EAP is
presented. Swales’ conceptualisation of genre has been summed up by Barbara & Scott
(1996:1) as follows:
‘Genre:1. shares a class of communicative events2. shares communicative purposes and an intended audience3. shares restrictions on form and content recognised by the insiders in the relevant discourse community4. has a specific nomenclature recognised as in 3’.
In this ESP model, genre has been primarily seen as ‘a tool for analyzing and teaching
the spoken and written language required of nonnative speakers in academic and
37 Mirja-Liisa Lampi née Charles are the same person38 This division will be discussed later on in more detail.
professional settings’ (Hyon 1996:695). Genre research in ESP can be broadly divided
into two phases. Firstly, earlier work based on analysing the moves and steps involved in
discourse - structural move analysis - and, secondly, later work which has broadened the
definition of genre analysis to look at how extra-linguistic features and more recently
intercultural aspects, have affected the both the form and sequencing of language.
Swales’ work in 1981 and later in 1990, where his definition of both the discourse
community (1990:24-27) - broadly speaking a community sharing a language with
common set of public goals, mechanisms of communication, common genres and
specific lexis - and genre as a whole are set forth, has proved a useful methodological
starting point for a lot of research in ESP, mostly in the fields of EAP and writing.
SwalesÕ enthusiasm for genre analysis is shared by Dudley-Evans (1987), who argued
for genre analysis as a system of analysis in ESP stressing that ‘we need a system of
analysis that shows how each type of text differs from other types’ (Dudley-Evans
1987:73). This system of analysis, he suggests, must do the following things:
1. It must group together texts that are similar in rhetorical purpose, form and audience.2. It must show how the texts are different from others and between themselves. 3. It must provide information about rhetorical structure and form that can be of use in the classroom (Dudley-Evans 1987:72).
He argued that genre analysis is able to do all of these things. Dudley-Evans’ work has
been mainly in academic writing (e.g. Hopkins & Dudley-Evans 1988 on discussion
sections in articles and dissertations) and its implications for use in the classroom (e.g.
Kay & Dudley-Evans 1998). His work, like that of the majority of research using the
genre analysis model, has been into written language. Thus, in terms of Business English,
genre analysis has, unfortunately, only been utilised sparingly and much more work
needs to be done. Indeed, the first and perhaps most important question concerning
genres in Business English still needs to be satisfactorily resolved - that of actually
defining the genres that belong to Business English. Therefore, the next section considers
the question of genre in Business English, followed by a discussion of the two main
stages in the development of ESP-based genre analysis: moves, steps and cycles and
extra-linguistic aspects of genre.
3.6.5.1 Business English genres
It should be stated that Business English cannot be seen as a genre in itself, except in the
sense of being an umbrella term that covers a multitude of smaller and separate genres
that go to create it. However, successfully defining all those genres is no easy task.
Dudley-Evans (1987) argued that genres should be reduced down to the smallest possible
components and be listed as separate genre. There have been some attempts to list the
various genres of Business English, for example, Dudley-Evans & St John (1996:8-9)
cite Bucholz’s (1989) list of genres used in business communications. However, as with
most genre analysis, this list concentrated only on written genres. Tompos (1999) has
been able to expand on previous work to produce a list of business-related genres that
covers not only written, but also spoken forms. The spoken genres are presented below:
introduction to place of work: office, lab, production unit, machines etc.introduction to own job, responsibilities and working conditionsdescription and explanation of equipment, technological processes, etc.warnings and instructions, e.g. safety instructions‘professional’ telephone conversations: with professionals from the same field/with lay-people/clients or professionals from another field.business-related telephone conversationsinterviews with professionalscounselling non-professionalsnegotiations: with professionals from same field/with non-professionalsprofessional meetings, workshop discussionsshort professional talks to non-professionalssocialising/personal conversations at workother ?
Fig. 15 Spoken genres in Business English as identified by Tompos (1999)
It can be seen, therefore, that attempts at definitions of Business English genres are very
limited. Work on genre at a more general level, however, is more abundant.
3.6.5.2 Moves, steps and cycles
Despite the difficulties in capturing all the potential genres of Business English, genre
analysis has added fresh insight into the processes of various business activities.
Dudley-Evans (1987) mentioned two unpublished works that look at business
negotiations (Anderson 1987) and company board meetings (Ross 1987). Both these
works are of interest in that they focused on spoken language and both of them found
four (Anderson) or five (Ross) move patterns in the structures of the meetings. Dudley-
Evans concludes that ‘it is interesting to note that they found a four or five move pattern
repeated cyclically throughout their data’ (1987:76-77).
A similar move pattern was found by Bhatia (1993) in a very important work which
studied company sales promotion letters and job application letters. Bhatia found a
similar seven move organisational structure within both.
The concept of communication being cyclical in nature, found by Anderson and Ross
above, can be found elsewhere in the literature. Hopkins & Dudley-Evans had noted it in
the academic writing of articles and dissertations (1988). Neu (1986), in her discourse
analysis of US native speaker negotiations, found that the communication patterns were
not linear, but rather were recursive. She noted that ‘American English negotiations have
been found to consist of nine episodes, four of which are mandatory’ (Neu 1986:45) and
that this process is cyclical (1986:46).
Ventola (1983, 1987), in her work on service encounters in Finland and Australia, also
found that simple linear representations of communication patterns were not satisfactory.
Ventola’s methodological starting point was that of the Australian genre analysis school
which has been heavily influenced by HallidayÕs social semiotics and his concept of
register, and her work encompassed register, discourse and genre analysis. Ventola had
been unhappy with the notion that service encounters could be presented as linear events.
Instead she presented them in the form of flow chart, so that as the conversation or
discourse unfolds, the flow chart could show ‘the interactive development as choices of
various paths’ (Ventola 1983:245).
Ghadessy & Webster (1988), in an article concerning the applications and teaching of
business letters, suggested that business letters be considered in terms of their form and
function. They regarded business letters as belonging to a genre of persuasive writing -
and they specified three basic types of letter - informative, request (ive) and directive
(Ghadessy & Webster 1988:115). These could be used to either initiate or respond to
communication. The form a letter takes is in relation to the potential function it has, and
the elements they describe are used in different combinations, dependent on the context.
Genre study into moves and steps has continued but has expanded its brief into analysing
intercultural differences. O’Brien & Jones (1998), as noted earlier, looked at the
differences between British and French minutes. In terms of spoken interaction, Bargiela-
Chiappini & Harris (1997b) conducted a study of the generic properties of business
meetings based on a corpus of recordings of formal and informal British and Italian
meetings. They presented the following generic model:
1. meetings are explicitly task-oriented and decision-making encounters;2. meetings involve the co-operative effort of two parties, the chair and the group; and3. meetings are structured into hierarchically-ordered units.
(Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris 1997b:208)
Based on their gathered data, they were able to present a generic structure for corporate
meetings. This is shown in Fig.16 on the next page.
Thus, the meetings are divided into three phases and the transition between the phases is
handled by the chairperson. Within each phase there are many moves which they define
as ‘utterances which present claims, explain or give support to a claim, challenge a claim,
shift topic, resume a topic etc.’ (1997b:210). Exchanges are clusters of moves which are
‘self-contained units of discourse realising well-defined sub-tasks within the management
of meetings’ (1997b:211) and take place in three directions: chair to group, group to
group and group to chair. Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris suggest this model is important,
as it provides a method of analysis for meetings of many people - meetings represent a
much more diverse environment for linguistic expression than, for example, service
encounters accounted for by VentolaÕs (1987) flow chart model (Bargiela-Chiappini &
Harris 1997b:206-207). When comparing the generic structure of British and Italian
meetings utilising this model, they were able to deduce several differences whereby in
Italian meetings the structure was much looser, the role of the chair was weaker, and
Italians tended to use successful interruptions more to get their speaking turn than their
British counterparts.
MEETING
Opening Debating Closing Phase Phase Phase
Exchanges Exchanges ExchangesTrans- Trans-
Moves itional Move itional MoveMove Move
Fig.16 Generic structure of corporate meetings (English meetings) (Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris 1997b:209).
3.6.5.3 Extra-linguistic aspects of genre study
This area has already been covered in previous sections so a simple re-iteration of the
most notable of these writers will be sufficient here. In this category can be included
Lampi/Charles (1992, 1994, 1996) with her work on power in negotiation situations,
Mauranen (1993), Barbara & Scott (1996), Yli-Jokipii (1992,1994) and O’Brien & Jones
(1998).
3.6.6 Discussion: approaches to researching the ‘gamut’ - discourse and genre
The research into Business English reported on here began with early discourse analysis
cohesion studies (Johns 1980 and Morrow 1989), and went on to strategy analysis (Lenz
1987, Maier 1992 and Micheau & Billmyer 1987). The study continued with cultural
issues in writing, (Hinds 1987, Jenkins & Hinds 1987, Mauranen 1993, Lampi 1992, Yli-
Jokipii 1994 and O’Brien & Jones 1998) and cultural issues in spoken negotiations, (Neu
1986 and Garcez 1993). Further aspects of cross- and inter-cultural discourse patterns
were discussed by Bilbow, Neumann and Mulholland (taken from Bargiela-Chiappini &
Harris 1997a), who themselves provided a model for factors involved in cross- and inter-
cultural discourse. Corporate culture, power and language was discussed in reference to
the work of Hofstede (1980), Watson (1997), Yli-Jokipii (1992, 1994), Nickerson
(1997), Charles (1996), West (1981), and Barbara & Scott (1996). The section concluded
with a report on genre studies resulting from the work of Swales (1981, 1990), Dudley-
Evans (1987), Hopkins & Dudley-Evans (1988) and Kay & Dudley-Evans (1998). Work
on categorising genres in Business English was then discussed mentioning Bucholz
(1989), Tompos (1999), and then research into the moves and steps in genres by
Andersen (1987), Ross (1987), Neu (1986), Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris (1997b),
O’Brien & Jones (1998) and Ventola (1983, 1987). The work of Lampi/Charles (1992,
1996) Mauranen (1993), Barbara & Scott (1996), and Yli-Jokipii (1994), was then
briefly re-visited in the context of genre studies.
The aim of the section so far has been to establish a broad overview of what is known
about Business English. This chapter began with the observation that there has been a
lack of research into Business English (Williams 1988, Robinson 1991, St John 1996,
Dudley-Evans & St John 1996). Yet it has been shown that despite this relative lack,
there has already been quite a substantial amount of research carried out, and this is
increasing all the time. The research included in this section has been presented
relatively uncritically to this point, with the emphasis on the content of the research
rather than on any critique of the methodologies and approaches taken. This next section
will now review the literature of this previous section and critically discuss the
methodological implications of the research. Where possible, discourse and genre issues
will be dealt with separately but it will be seen that there is a distinct overlap in the
problems faced by these two related approaches.
3.6.6.1 Discourse
There is no doubt that discourse analysis work done in the 1980s and 1990s has been
valuable for both ESP and Business English, yet at a methodological and indeed
pragmatic level it has certain shortcomings.
The contribution and shortcomings of discourse studies are discussed by Bhatia (1993:6-
10), who firstly largely discounts work done in grammatical-rhetorical analysis, for
example by Trimble (1985) and later work done in the field of interactional analysis. In
terms of the grammatical-rhetorical analysis work of Trimble (1985), he praises his
attempt ‘to discover how specific linguistic features take on restricted values in the
structuring of scientific communication’ (Bhatia 1993:7) but concludes that in general
‘the analysis yields only limited information on discourse structuring in scientific
discourse’ (Bhatia 1993:7). This lack of information has led to ‘mis-leading
generalisations’. Bhatia gives the example of how the concept of definitions misguidedly
assumed an important role in the teaching of the rhetorical structure of scientific
discourse beyond their actual importance. Other assumptions based on rhetorical analysis
are mentioned by Hutchinson & Waters (1987) who comment that
... there was a more or less tacit assumption in this approach that the rhetorical patterns of text organisation differed significantly between specialist areas of use..... However, this point was never clearly examined and indeed paradoxically, the results of the research into the discourse of subject-specific academic texts were also used to make observations about discourse in general.
(Hutchinson & Waters 1987:12)
Bhatia (1993:8) termed grammatical-rhetorical analysis the writer’s discourse - in that
analysis is carried out from the point of view of the writer - and it considers how certain
language choices are made by them. Interactional analysis, the next stage, he therefore
terms the reader’s discourse (1993:8), where discourse is viewed as an interactive
process between reader and writer.
Bhatia’s concern here was to summarise previous approaches to the study of discourse,
criticise them and lead the way to his definition of genre analysis. This became clear in
his criticism of interactional analysis, saying that it fails to pay enough attention to ‘the
socio-cultural, institutional and organizational constraints and expectations that shape the
written genre in particular settings, particularly in the case of highly specific academic
and professional genre’ (1993:10).39
Dudley-Evans & St John are also critical of discourse analysis (1998:89), highlighting
the fact that a failing of discourse analysis is that it still, like register analysis, isolates
texts from the environment from which they come. It also highlights another inherent
problem with the whole movement - its concentration on written text. The implication of
the word discourse, though intended to include speech discourse, is largely used only in
terms of writing and, indeed, largely scientific writing and the world of EST. A further
serious problem with discourse analysis approaches has been that of defining the moves
and steps that the said discourse is comprised of. The naming and analysis of steps and
moves have been done on an intuitive level by the researcher40 and there is also the
further problem of the sequencing of these steps.
Two further key problems need to be highlighted here: the limited size of data gathered
in the studies; and the lack of transfer of results to the classroom. A brief survey of some
of the work reviewed reveals the emphasis of work done in this field with some examples
of the corpus size used in the investigation.
It can be seen from Table III below that discourse (and indeed genre) approaches tend to
fail in these two respects: the corpora used are not large enough and transferral of results
into the classroom, at least in Business English, has been very limited.
Sample size: It was already noted in Section 3.6.1.1, that the two studies into cohesion in
written texts, Johns (1980) and Morrow (1989) both suffered the same limitations - that
of taking data from a small and therefore not potentially representative corpus. Johns
used twenty letters, twenty reports and ten textbooks, whilst Morrow used a corpus from
the Wall Street Journal of 23,095 words and from the journal Economic Inquiry of
39 All of these factors play a role in genre analysis.40 See Williams (1988) for comments on this.
33,925 running words. Thus, these studies can be seen as interesting and useful but
limited in their potential application.
TABLE III: EXAMPLES OF DISCOURSE/GENRE STUDIES IN RELATION TO THE SIZE OF THE DATA GATHERED AND THE TRANSFER OF RESULTS TO THE CLASSROOM
AUTHOR SIZE AND REPRESENTATIVENESS APPLIED ELEMENT
Johns X -20 letters/20 reports MentionMorrow X - 31 news stories/9 journal articles MentionLenz X - 6 meetings No mentionMicheau & Billmyer X/? - 6 NNS/ 45 NS MentionMaier X - 8 NS / 10 NNS MentionJenkins & Hinds X - corpus size not stated MentionLampi (1992) X - 6 Fin/6UK Annual Reports Later
materialsYli-Jokipii + - over 200 letters MentionO’Brien & Jones X - English 22,603 words / French 12,217 No mentionNeu + MaterialsGarcez + - four days of meetings MentionCharles + Later
materialsBarbara & Scott X/? - five IFBs No mention
Key: + = Good X/? = Satisfactory X = Not satisfactory
The authors, as was noted earlier, do in fact mention these limitations and also do stress
the importance of transferral of these results to the classroom. Similar criticisms of
corpus size can also be levelled at all the other researchers mentioned with the exception
of Yli-Jokipii, Neu, Garcez and Charles. However, in fairness it should also be noted
that the corpus size for the works presented was probably sufficient for the stated aims.
Indeed, in some cases, small amounts of data have been deliberately chosen, for example,
Mauranen chose texts from a single discipline from a much larger bank of data in order
to ‘focus on differences between national rather than disciplinary cultures’ (1993:7).
Lack of classroom application: The second factor emerging from the table above is that
there has been a failure to transfer results of discourse analysis work to the classroom and
this may partly be as a result of researchers not clearly specifying the pedagogic
implications of the research. There has been some transfer of discoursal ideas to the
classroom, for example, in the Nucleus Series (e.g. Bates & Dudley-Evans 1976) but this
has happened only to a very limited extent in Business English. Neu (1986), as can be
seen from the table above, is an exception in this area. Her research work fed directly
into classroom materials that would ‘promote understanding and proficiency in cross-
cultural negotiations’ (1986:47). Knowledge of discourse patterns was utilised in a series
of resource books published by Longman in the 1980s. An example of this, Negotiating
(O’Connor, Pilbeam & Scott-Barrett 1992), presented the moves and steps in the
negotiation process in the form of functions alongside the linguistic exponents of them.
For example in the section How to keep a conversation going, the conversation between
two people has notes in the margin to explain the moves taking place, e.g. asks a
question, answers, adds a comment, reacts, adds a comment (1992:11). This kind of
extra information can be very useful for students and more of it should have filtered
through to Business English materials by now. Additionally, Robinson (1980) noted most
work on discourse materials that has been done is for higher level students, leaving lower
levels out (Robinson 1980:26).
A further, and possibly controversial criticism, that can be made of some of the discourse
studies presented earlier, is that they deal in the obvious, i.e. they spend a long time
telling us what we already know. A good example of this is Lenz (1987), whose results
of research into discourse patterns in technical meetings found that there were was little
or no silence in the meetings due to the influence of the ‘chair’. This result, as well as
being highly predictable, is also dependent on the ‘chair’ recorded in the studies.41
Despite the criticisms mentioned here, the focus of discourse analysis approaches was
clearly on communication and it is unfortunate that it has not had more influence in the
Business English classroom. Arguably, the most fruitful work done has been that on what
differentiates native and non-native speaker patterns in discourse strategies. These studies
have been able to point to potential clash points in cross-cultural business situations
41 The technical meetings recorded for the Business English Corpus, however, do display the same features, though this will not be dealt with in detail in this study.
(Micheau & Billmyer, Neu, Jenkins & Hinds, Mauranen, Lampi and Garcez to name a
few). This relation of culture and extra-linguistic features of discourse is one feature of
genre analysis, and the next section will provide a brief critical analysis of genre analysis
both at a general level, and with regard to Business English in particular.
3.6.6.2 Genre
The concept of genre can still be seen to be a controversial one. Although it has been,
and is, a fruitful methodological approach to the study of language, it has been subjected
to criticism on several counts. This criticism has been in relation to its very definition, its
concept of nomenclature, its definition of discourse community and its pedagogical
application where it has been criticised for being over-prescriptive and too much
concentrated on written genres.
Definitions: It was noted in Section 3.6.5 that the three major schools of genre research
have different interpretations of genre (Hyon 1996). Even when concentrating on the
ESP school of genre, Swales (1990:33) calls genre a ‘fuzzy concept, a somewhat loose
term of art’ and Louhiala-Salminen (1999:107) points out ‘The notion of genre seems to
be an elusive concept, not easy to catch, describe and analyse’. This, of course, has
immediate pragmatic implications, initially for research, and subsequently for teaching.
If it is not possible to define a genre successfully, how can analysis begin and the
information be passed on to students? Obviously a line has to be drawn somewhere. Yet
the problem of where to draw the line in determining what is a genre and what is not still
largely operates at the level of the individual researcher’s intuition.
Dudley-Evans (1987:77), in reference to different types of academic article, asked the
question whether academic articles could be considered one over-arching genre, or
individual genres in their own right. Dudley-Evans proposed seeing each type as a
separate genre. He also suggested that in determining whether a genre is a genre or not,
the researcher should ‘take seriously the terms used by those who write, edit or read
articles’ (1987:77), i.e. the members of the discourse community, or indeed, communities
concerned. Yet breaking down genre into minute areas is arguably both time consuming
and potentially confusing for students.
This problem, of saying where one genre stops and another starts, is immediately obvious
in the work by Tompos (1999), quoted previously on Business English genre. Genre have
been defined as ‘sharing the same class of communicative events’ (Swales 1990). Taking
just one example given by Tompos - socialising/personal conversations at work - it is
hard to say whether socialising be considered a genre along the lines of this definition.
Whilst socialising situations can possibly share the same class of communicative events,
the communicative purpose can vary greatly. St John quite rightly notes that in business
the communicative purpose of socialising ‘is to establish a good working relationship
through less formal channels and hospitality rather than merely socialise’ (St John
1996:10). Thus the communicative purpose of socialising in business with clients can be
quite different than that of chatting to a colleague. Additionally, it is also hard to define
any specifically recognisable nomenclature for business socialising.
Nomenclature: Nomenclature itself has been found to be misleading at a cross-cultural
level, (Dudley-Evans 1997), and at an intra-cultural level (Barbara et al. 1996). Dudley-
Evans (1997), reported on work done by Mauranen (1993, 1994) on how Finnish student
writing was perceived by British lecturers. Mauranen found that the lecturers were very
tolerant of grammatical or lexical errors but very intolerant of differences in discourse
style. Simply put, the genre conventions for the essay or assignment in Finnish
universities are different from those in British universities and ‘What might have been
seen as a cultural difference was in fact attributed to a weakness on the part of the
students’ (Dudley-Evans 1997:354). He concluded by warning that nomenclature in a
genre is not universal across cultures and will vary from one academic tradition to
another (Dudley-Evans 1997:357). Yunick (1997:332) in the same volume also agrees
that ‘cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparisons of genre is problematic’ and that
British and American text conventions should not be seen as international conventions.
At an intra-cultural level, Barbara et al. (1996) surveyed communication in Brazilian
businesses sending questionnaires to companies, asking about the most frequently-used
documents in business. Their results showed that there was a
...clear mismatch between what the researchers meant by the labels used to refer to different types of documents, namely, project, proposal, report, prospectus, memo, presentation and meeting, and the respondents’ perception of the meaning of these terms. It also became apparent that the terminology mismatch is not only between research and organisation, but also between organisations.
(Barbara et al. 1996:69)They continued
There are therefore indications that the same label is being used to refer to different document types, and conversely, that different labels may be referring to the same document type. The pattern is still far from clear. Moreover, it raises a point of theoretical interest: if the discourse community is central to the notion of genre (Swales 1990) and the discourse community itself uses a variety of terms with no straightforward one-to-one relationship between term and function, this raises questions about the potential fuzziness (fuzzy edges or fuzzy membership) of the discourse community itself.
(Barbara et al. 1996:69)
Discourse community: Dudley-Evans & St John (1998), also point out the difficulty
behind the ideas of defining a discourse community, as a person may belong to more than
one discourse community at a given time and also the fact these communities may be
‘large and amorphous’ (1998:92) and therefore difficult to actually define. This can be
said to be especially true of Business English owing to the vast number of discourse
types to be found in it.
More recent work, however, on business correspondence (Louhiala-Salminen 1999),
points in the opposite direction - that a given discourse community, far more readily than
those outside it, even if well-educated - can identify key genres from within the
community itself. This is true here both at a cross- and intra-cultural level. The concept
of discourse community is set at perhaps a more general level than Swales’ (1990)
definition, to cover the idea of a business ‘community’. Louhiala-Salminen gave four
faxes of different types to four groups of respondents: native speakers with business
experience, native speakers without business experience, non-native speakers with
business experience and non-native speakers without any business experience
(1999:107). The respondents were asked to respond to the faxes through a variety of
questions in a questionnaire. It was found that the respondents with business experience
were able to recognise the features of the fax better. For example, a scrawled note on an
original fax that had been sent back to the writer went unnoticed by the non-business
respondents (only 4% noticed the note, as opposed to 49% of business people). Thus the
‘native-speaker factor did not differentiate the groups in this respect at all’ (1999:110).
Non-business people commented more on the form or tidiness of the faxes whereas the
business people, ‘reconstructed the situation and saw themselves as actors in it’
(1999:110). In her conclusion she comments that
... in spite of the wide variety of the quality and nature of the messages that are transmitted by fax, there seems to be an understanding among business practitioners about the notion of a business fax.
(Louhiala-Salminen 1999:113)
This would go to suggest that members of a community - discourse or otherwise - are
able to recognise the key genres that belong to it better than outsiders - even across
cultural boundaries.
Pedagogical issues: One of the criteria for having an ideal system of analysis for ESP
was that it should provide information of ‘pedagogic value’ (Dudley-Evans 1987:72).
This emphasis on getting the message across to the classroom has been much more
evident in the Australian school of genre analysis, for example with the LERN42 project
set up in the 1980s. The Australian concept of genre has always been concerned with the
empowerment of students, though mainly at primary and secondary, rather than at
tertiary level. In the ESP tradition of genre this, to a large extent, has not happened. This
led Hyon to observe that ‘many researchers have presented their descriptions of
genre...but have not detailed methodologies for presenting this content in the classroom’
(1996:702). 42 Literacy and Education Research Network.
Kay & Dudley-Evans (1998) examined the concerns of teachers related to genre and
noted their problems with regard to the use of genre in the classroom. These worries
were basically two-fold. Firstly, that genre is prescriptive rather than descriptive - a
reproduction of product as opposed to being student-centred. This rigidity therefore
‘disempowers’ rather than empowers. Secondly, there has been too much concentration
on writing and not enough on speech.
Prescriptive-descriptive: Teachers were concerned that the placing of linguistic
boundaries around genre forced a prescriptive approach to its teaching. However, it must
be noted that prescription in language teaching is certainly not confined to the teaching of
genre, and is therefore a pedagogic issue, not a genre one. O’Brien (1999, personal
communication) suggested using a ‘dynamic concept of genre’ to avoid prescriptiveness,
saying that the ‘answer lies in process-oriented teaching as much of the prescriptiveness
comes from a product-oriented approach’. This echoes Flowerdew (1993:306), who
stated that students need the skills to adapt to new genre, ‘emphasizing the process of
acquiring new genre, rather than the product’.
Written - not spoken: Teachers were also concerned about the overwhelming focus on
written genres at the cost of spoken. This concentration can, to some extent, be seen to
result from SwalesÕ conception of genre and discourse community. This has been
criticised by Gunnarsson (1999). She noted that Swales makes clear distinctions between
spoken and written discourse where ‘the difference between the spoken and the written
medium is crucial for the type of community involved’ (Gunnarsson 1999:144). Using
data from a study of a local government office in Sweden, she proposed a model that
combines both written and spoken discourse. She criticised SwalesÕ model, saying that it
is a valid approach for describing communities of experts (e.g. stamp collectors), but less
for other types of communication. It is valid for describing products, but not processes.
Her model of communicative community integrates both speech and writing, combining
at once the concepts of SwalesÕ discourse community with the sociological concept of
speech community. Within the model she distinguishes four types of communication
communities (1999:146), local-private, local-public, distant-public and distant-private.
The emphasis is on the idea that the ‘individual acts within a social structure, and it is
this social structure that determines the outcome’ (1999:141). It may be that future
applications of this model can lead to more studies that combine spoken and written
discourse seen within the social context in which they occur, thus solving the problem of
over-emphasis on written text in genre studies.
3.6.6.3 Discussion
Whilst the problems of genre analysis pointed to here are of concern, there can be no
doubt that it is, and will continue to be, one of the key areas of studies in Business
English and in ESP as a whole. Though still insufficient, work has started on transferring
the results of genre analysis to the classroom (Hyon 1996). Swales (1990:203-231)
devoted time to looking at transferring his theories into practice. Flowerdew (1993) gave
suggestions on how genre teaching can be implemented in the classroom. He suggested
six types of activity so that rather than trying to master a given genre, students could
apply genre techniques to a wide range of genre in order to understand them better. His
suggestions included computer concordancing which, for example, could be used to see
how the word please is used in different genres. More work is needed.
In a study such as this, which looks at business language at both a macro- and micro-
level, the concept of genre can be incorporated and accommodated in such a way as to
give coherence to the study. Thus, whilst this thesis is not genre analysis research per se,
it is research that takes note of genre and uses its concepts in order to define both the
corpus of Business English and some of the results gained from it. However, this
research has attempted to learn from the failings of genre analysis, and gives more focus
to both pedagogical application and spoken language than previous studies have done.
The whole of the last section has attempted to look at the range of influences on language
use in Business English as pointed to by Pickett. This was preceded by an investigation
of Pickett’s first idea on the layering of business language. It is now time to consider the
third of his ideas concerning the actors in business communication - who communicates
with whom. This leads us into the realm of needs analysis and language surveys, and the
next section will look at how needs analysis has added to our knowledge of Business
English and examine if Pickett’s assumptions were correct.
3.7 Pickett’s Concept 3:
Business communication - needs analysis and Business English
The first two of Pickett’s three main ideas, the poetics and the ergolect of Business
English, have now been discussed. The third main idea he put forward; that in relation to
communication in business - who communicates with whom - now needs to be
considered. Pickett used a three-way distinction: business to general public, business to
business and business to other members of the same business area. The implication, of
course, of this proposition, is that the type of language used in the various situations with
a variety of speakers in different roles would be essentially different. This review of the
literature has already shown the great variety of factors that can affect language choice,
but despite the criticisms by Dudley-Evans & St John noted earlier that Pickett’s model is
very simplistic, it has been reinforced by later writers looking both at specific genre in
Business English, and Business English in general. Barbara & Scott (1996), in an article
concerned with Invitations for Bids, observed that
...texts produced in business situations can be classed as public or private. Public texts include leaflets of various kinds, house organs, several types of reports etc. These are non-confidential documents and their readership is not narrowly specified. Private documents, on the other hand, are such as minutes of meetings and reports on staff selection interviews, that may circulate within the organisation or between organisations, but are usually accessible only to a limited number of people. (Barbara & Scott 1996:4)
Examination of other business documents has led to the same conclusion. O’Brien &
Jones (1998), in their study of minutes in business meetings, noted that
Within the business world we can distinguish between minutes written for internal purposes based on internal meetings (these are usually
very specific); those written for internal purposes based on external meetings (these may be more revealing than those written for other purposes, including, for example, expressions of surprise) and those written to be shared externally based on meetings with external bodies (these will usually be at the more formal end).
(O’Brien & Jones 1998:8)
Brieger (1997:38), on Business English in general, suggested the following lines of
communication between business people which more or less replicate PickettÕs:
1. Specialist -----------------------------> specialist2a. Specialist ------------------------------> non-specialist2b. Non-specialist ------------------------> specialist3. Generalist ------------------------------> generalist
For a more detailed examination of whom business communication takes place between,
there is a need to look at work done under the banner of various needs analysis
approaches. These main approaches to needs analysis were briefly mentioned in Section
3.2.7 earlier and have been covered in much greater detail in West (1994), so discussion
will be limited here to questions directly relevant to PickettÕs assertion and will not
cover needs analysis as a whole. However, a brief overview of the early developments in
needs analysis will serve to highlight the key issues under discussion.
3.7.1 Needs analysis and Business English: who communicates with who ?
The literature on needs analysis is abundant and points to its centrality in ESP (Munby
1978:1, McDonough 1984:29, Kennedy & Bolitho 1984:3, Brindley 1989:63 and Riddell
1991:73). The development of needs analysis as an integral part of course design came
with the evolution of more communicative approaches to language teaching. Chomsky's
definitions of competence and performance in the mid-60s had brought about a shift
away from more structuralist approaches, where needs were seen merely as mastery of
grammatical form, to a communicative view of language with satisfactory
communication in the terminal situation seen as the goal of language study. This led to
what was known as Target Situational Analysis (TSA) - an approach that gathered
information on the situations where students would need to use the language, and thus by
implication with whom they would need to communicate. An early example of this was
the survey conducted by the London Chamber of Commerce (LCCI) which, in a broad
study of 593 firms and 11,595 respondents (Stuart & Lee 1972:4), found that listening
and speaking skills were considered the most important (49% of respondents). Other
examples of these early surveys were ELTDU (1970) and Trim et al. (1973). These early
studies were valuable in that they were a valid attempt to find out exactly in which
situations business learners needed English. Some (e.g. Trim et al.) even attached
relevant functional items along with the situations. Simpler versions of these large scale
studies filtered down and were utilised at language school level. Hughes & Knight (1977)
described a needs analysis system for business students developed at their school which
included information on ‘who he speaks to and who he writes to, where he speaks’
(Hughes & Knight 1977:68). Shaw (1982) used what he called an ad hoc approach to
needs analysis, operating along similar lines but using it as a group-work exercise to get
students involved in their own learning.
Interest in TSA peaked with Munby (1978). His model for identifying the needs of
language learners, CNP (Communicative Needs Processor), took target situation analysis
to its logical limits and though much criticised over the years (e.g. McDonough 1984,
Coleman 1988), ‘its importance in heralding the dawn of a new age for LSP should not
be underestimated’ (Riddell 1991:73). The views on language that had inspired TSA
began to change and with it so did needs analysis. Needs analysis approaches have
always clearly expressed the designers’ concept of language framed in terms of need.
Thus needs analysis underwent a process not dissimilar to that of ESP in general - new
methodologies came along and the old were not totally discarded, but were kept, along
with the new, to help isolate learnersÕ needs all the more accurately, it was hoped. West
(1994) described this process in detail and suggested a four-stage evolution taking needs
analysis through TSA, deficiency analysis, strategy analysis, means analysis, language
audits and computer-based/integrated needs analysis. Thus, whilst there was still interest
shown in needs analysis models on who was communicating with whom, the issue
became only one part of a larger battery of questions. Holden (1993), for example, in his
needs analysis for business people, uses TSA, asks who is communicating with whom
and also includes a strategy analysis. The newer definitions of language and therefore
needs also highlighted the problems inherent in any needs analysis approach and these
will be discussed below.
3.7.2 Problems with needs analysis approaches
In terms of Business English and a further understanding of the communication
relationships and the language used in these situations, needs analysis approaches have
certain limitations. They do not address the second, and arguably more important,
implication of PickettÕs idea - that of different language being used in different
situations. In fact, needs analysis approaches can be criticised on at least two grounds:
language and intuition. Firstly, needs analysis approaches largely fail to adequately
address language issues, i.e. they may determine where and to whom a business person
speaks or writes, but they largely fail to indicate the type of language needed to teach the
student to communicate in these situations.43 This is a result of the fact that they have
been primarily concerned with method and not result. By this it is meant that the
literature of needs analysis focuses on a variety of needs analysis methods, rather than on
the results of these methods. Thus models are refined to better understand the needs of
learners, to be fed into course design, but the results of the use of these needs analyses
are not generally publicised, and the knowledge gained by them has not filtered down to
other practitioners in the field. Secondly, virtually all needs analysis models have been
based on the intuition of their creators, thus building into any model a dangerous element
of subjectivity. These issues will now be addressed.
3.7.3 Language and needs analysis
The main problem with most later needs analysis approaches, as was noted above, is that
the work done since the early days of TSA has been more concerned with asking the
43 However, it must said that this is the main function of needs analysis - it is a system for analysing needs - not, unfortunately, a system necessarily for needs fulfilment. Munby (1978) did try, but the task is enormous.
right questions rather than publishing the answers. The early work done in the 1970s, for
example Trim et al. (1973) and Stuart & Lee (1972) was not just interested in presenting
questionnaires - they were surveys that also presented answers. Trim et al. gave a detailed
account of different categories of professions and with whom the practitioners might
communicate. For example, they noted that technical staff may need to communicate
with colleagues, and so will need language for communication as well as specialised
terminology (Trim et al. 1973:68). They also continued by attempting some definition of
the kind of language that might be needed in each situation, for example architects and
engineers would need to give orders, give explanations and negotiate (Trim et al.
1973:69). However, sentences such as the language of negotiations, which abound in
needs analysis questionnaires, do not essentially help the teacher, who then has to decide
what the language of negotiations is and also how to teach it. Thus, whilst these early
attempts at needs analysis helped and guided teachers to a certain extent by suggesting
the possible participants of business communication and even suggesting the type of
language that might be needed, they were unable to go into detail. Later needs analysis
models did not even do that - models were presented and the results were kept ‘in-house’
by their users. A good example of this has been the Language Audit of Pilbeam (1979),
Berggren (1987), Räsänen (1991) and Lynch, Stevens & Sands (1993). The concept of
language audits is ideal for gathering and elucidating information on the very issues that
are of concern here - who talks to who, why and for how long. Once again, however,
results have been firmly kept in-house by the language institutions concerned. Moreover,
all of these approaches have been subject to a much greater flaw - that of intuition.
3.7.4 Perceptions and intuition
Brindley (1989:65) reported on a survey he carried out in 1984 asking one hundred ESL
teachers what they thought were ‘student needs’. He summarised the answers under three
headings:
1. Language proficiency view of needs, where teachers saw need as the gap between current and a desired proficiency level, though this assumes that there is a target proficiency level that is recognised by all teachers.
2. Psychological-humanistic, which emphasised affective needs. Needs were here seen as a gap between current and a desired psychological state; confidence and strategy building were seen as very important. 3. Specific purposes view, aligning course content with learners' occupational or academic goals.
Nelson (1992) reported on a similar but more modest survey carried out amongst a small
group of business language teachers at the Kielikanava Language Centre, Turku, Finland,
asking them what they thought were Business English student needs. With the teachers
being in an ESP situation it might be expected that the specific purposes view mentioned
above would be the main approach adopted by the teachers, yet the Kielikanava survey
proved otherwise. It took place in an informal setting in a teacher training session, in
which the teachers first completed a questionnaire and were then asked to discuss and
explain their comments. The teachers were all experienced, with a minimum of two years
ESP teaching in companies in and around the Turku area in south-west Finland. The
questionnaire asked them to consider their own students and to try and analyse their
language learning needs under the headings target situations, needs, wants, and
constraints. Finally, they were asked what would be essential content of materials in
relation to these categories. Although there were a wide range of answers, all the
teachers (except one) put forward linguistic or grammatical items as needs - mastery of
prepositions, verbs or just a general need for grammar. However, fluency, appropriacy
and confidence were all mentioned, though seen as slightly less important. In the
discussion that followed the completion of the questionnaire, it became apparent that the
teachers had very wide views on student needs, especially in terms of target situations.
The teachers tended to favour one or the other situation, some seeing telephoning as very
important, others not. Thus the concept of need was found to be a very relative one,
depending on the individual teacher’s own views.
This problem of defining exactly what needs are has also been a point of debate in the
literature, as Brindley pointed out ‘teachers' approaches to ‘needs’ will be heavily
influenced by their practical experience as well as by their personal philosophy’
(Brindley 1989:65). Chambers (1980:27) pinpointed the problem by noting that ‘whoever
determines needs largely determines which needs are determined’.
The results of the small survey mentioned above (Nelson 1992) shows teacher
perceptions of student needs rather than actual student needs. For example, in terms of
target situations, telephoning was considered an important need for students by some
teachers. However, the same survey done with different teachers might well have thrown
up a completely different result. What this small survey served to highlight, therefore,
was that the previous experience and predilections of the teacher/researcher can clearly
influence the data-gathering process. Items can be included or excluded on a
questionnaire depending on how important they are considered by the writer.
Work in the 1990s on needs analysis tried to address the problems related to identifying
language needs and intuition and attempts were also made to address the language issue
in needs analysis.
3.7.5 An attempt to overcome the question of language in needs analysis
Nelson (1992, 1994a, 1994b) used a tailor-made computer program to analyse the needs
of Business English students. The concept of need was extended to the finding of suitable
teaching materials carried out by the use of a computer database of Business English
teaching materials. In Nelson’s system a profile of the learnersÕ needs is gained by the
computer and then linked to a database of published Business English materials. The
computer program is pre-programmed to find suitable materials set at both ability level
and target situation. Thus an attempt was made not only to define the situations where a
student would be using Business English, but also to suggest the kind of language that
might be needed in each instance. Additionally, a list of key grammatical areas attached
to each target situation was suggested to help the teacher in designing lessons (Nelson
1992b:78-82). Nelson, however, mentioned the main problem with this kind of listing is
that it has ‘been compiled introspectively and therefore only represents what we have
found useful. It is not meant to be exhaustive, nor does it try to suggest that there is a
one-to-one relationship between a specific grammar point and a target situation’
(1992b:78).
3.7.6 An attempt to overcome the question of intuition in needs analysis
The question of intuition in needs analysis questionnaire design is difficult to overcome.
However, Nelson (1997) has attempted to at least minimise the effects of it by using a
‘pre-questionnaire’ questionnaire. The pre-questionnaire was used in an Oxford
University Press project to create an electronic needs analysis system for both Business
and general English to be situated on their World Wide Web site. In order to try and
avoid the intuition problem, Nelson carried out a survey to determine just what questions
it would be useful to have in the final needs analysis questionnaires. The survey sent
questionnaires world-wide via the Internet, not only to teachers, but also to potential
student44 users of this needs analysis service - 89 students and 45 teachers replied. The
respondents were asked a variety of questions concerning needs analysis. The pre-
questionnaire answers confirmed to a certain extent the intuition of the writer of the
questionnaire, i.e. most questions were seen as relevant - but differences were found
between the students’ and the teachers’ answers.45 Further, several issues were raised by
both the teachers and the students that affected the final design of the needs analysis
system created that had not been expected by the original ‘intuitive’ design, for example,
some question formats were changed owing to answers received.
3.7.7 Language and needs surveys
In the 1990s there were several needs analysis-type surveys, though the methodology had
moved on considerably since the early days of TSA. Van Hest & Oud-de Glas (1990)
carried out a survey of surveys into foreign language needs in industry, mostly in
continental Europe but also to a lesser extent in the UK and US. They found surveys to
be relatively abundant, but lacking in statistical analysis - sampling, validity and
reliability checks were rarely carried out to verify the results of the data gathered - and
44 This was quite a revolutionary step as some writers, e.g. Chambers (1980:29), regarded students as an actual constraint to the teaching process. Although other writers such as McDonough (1984) preferred to see pragmatic issues as ‘options’, there seems to have always been a profound mistrust by needs analysis writers of students’ ability to specify their own needs. 45 These differences will be examined in more detail in Section 3.8.3.
response rates were found to be dangerously low (1990:12-13). More recent surveys,
however, can be seen to satisfactorily address the questions raised in this section, on
business communication in general, and on specific genres of Business English. Barbara
et al. (1996) surveyed business communication in Brazil, sending out 1,347
questionnaires and from replies gained used 214 as the basis of their data. They found
that reports, memos and meetings were the most common business genres that their
respondents participated in. It was also found that industrial and large organisations used
English the most and 72% used English to conduct business internally or externally.
Louhiala-Salminen (1996) studied the development of written correspondence in Finnish
companies. She found that written skills were given most importance by respondents
(51%)46 and that the fax was the most important medium of delivering the message. It
was also found that the language used in correspondence was seen to have changed, it
was less formal, more to the point and more speech-like (1996:49-50). Thus, it can be
seen that knowledge of the communication patterns of business people are starting to
become more widely available.
3.7.8 Discussion
At the beginning of this section two central question were implied: with whom do
business people communicate, and what language do they use to do it? It would appear
that after a review of the literature of needs analysis the answers to these questions are
still not totally satisfactorily answered. It is still not known in any systematic way who
different groups of business people communicate with. Perhaps because of the very
complexity of business, this would be a very difficult and ultimately fruitless task, as
communication partners vary so widely from job to job. However, needs analysis has
shown us by the very complexity of its design, that business people do communicate with
a variety of people on a daily basis. It may be useful, therefore, to see Pickett’s categories
46 This finding is incidentally confirmed by Nelson (1997), who found that students reported writing skills to be the most important - ahead of socialising and meetings. Whilst Nelson’s survey cannot be considered as statistically reliable, it does add credence to Louhiala-Salminen’s study.
simply as umbrella terms and teachers and researchers can use a more focused needs
analysis approach to determine the details.
In terms of language use, Pickett’s three-way distinction has been studied mostly with
regard to language used business to business - both inside and outside needs analysis
work. For example, Nelson (1997), in the Oxford University Press needs analysis system,
enquired about the communication partners of business students. Nelson asked the
business people questions concerning contact with colleagues, clients, business contacts
and suppliers in a very simplistic approach to this question. Interestingly, three out of the
four questions related to business to business communication. Studies outside the
business to business paradigm have been carried out by, for example, Ventola (1983,
1987) and Kalaja (1992) - work done on service encounters, and research on the
discourse of advertising (Cook 1992), which must be seen as a key interface between
business and the public.47 The whole of this review of the literature bears witness to the
fact that the central thrust of research has thus been business to business communication.
The review of the literature so far has attempted to map out what is already known about
Business English and discuss its central issues (summarised in the diagram below).
FACTORS INVOLVED IN THE DISCUSSION OF BUSINESS ENGLISH
technical/sub-technical words formulaic phrases
corporate culture hierarchy
register cohesion
ergolect BUSINESS ENGLISH poetics
47 Cook, however, concentrates on the discoursal features of advertising rather than on any interaction between advert and consumer in a linguistic sense.
perceived relevance politeness
discourse strategies genre power culture
Fig. 17 Factors involved in the discussion of Business English in this chapterYet empirical studies have not told the whole story of Business English. As has been
noted in the literature, Business English has grown up via its materials and its teachers,
rather than by its research (St John 1996, Dudley-Evans & St John 1996). As this study
will later attempt to empirically determine how successful Business English materials
have been on a lexical level, it is now necessary to look at more intuitive attempts to
define Business English through its materials, and examine research that has already been
carried out into the accuracy of both Business English and EFL materials in general.
B What Business English is thought to be
3.8 Business English materials
Business English materials have been summarised in Robinson (1991), Dudley-Evans &
St John (1996), St John (1996), Johnson (1993), Brieger (1997) and Flinders (1998a) -
and Nelson (1994 a,b) has created a large computer database of these materials for on-
line reference. Therefore, instead of offering a simple description of the materials
available, this section will concentrate on methodological issues concerned with Business
English materials. This will largely concern the debate that has continued in ESP over the
level of specificity necessary in ESP - and in this case Business English - materials. This
section will also consider attempts to categorise the materials by different authors and
then go on to critically review the accuracy of the materials by discussing them in
relation to research done both inside and outside the field of Business English.
3.8.1 General or special English ?
At the beginning of this review of the literature, the development of ESP over the last
thirty to forty years was presented. During this same period there has been a concurrent
development in the materials used in teaching. The methodologies of past years, from
register and discourse analysis in the sixties and early seventies, on to functional/notional
and communicative approaches, have given rise to a great variety of materials. Arguably,
the very term ESP has implied that there are specific areas of English or Englishes tied to
an occupation or study area. This has been confirmed to an extent by the concentration
there has been on some form of special needs analysis as the starting point of ESP
courses as noted in the previous section. For most writers if it is not the starting point
then it seems to be at least an indispensable element. Yet despite this apparent agreement
that some form of needs analysis must be done, it was noted that there have been more
divergent views on exactly what those needs might be, and how they are turned from
needs to means - i.e. how those needs can be met.
Accordingly, there has been dissension on whether or not subject-specific material should
be used to teach students operating in a certain professional area. This matter was raised
by Arthur (1983) in a survey review of Business English materials. She noted that
because the term Business English is rather ‘nebulous’ (1983:167), there had been
disagreement over what form the materials should take. She asked if materials should
offer general English in a business context taking account of a ‘restricted register’ of
English or if they should be more concerned with discourse patterns and functions. This
seems to have been a burning question in the early 1980s. Hutchinson & Waters
(1980:181) stated ‘there is no justification for subject specific ESP materials’. Although
their purpose in writing this statement was not as drastic as it first appears - they do not
deny the motivational elements of subject specific materials - they represent a school of
thought that has focused on the underlying competences of language and how they may
best be acquired, rather than focusing so closely on the specific language itself. This
underlying competence, it is argued, can be acquired more from general English
materials than concentration on a specific linguistic area.
By contrast Pickett’s concepts of ergolect and poetics tend to lead in the opposite
direction - there is a special language that needs teaching, and by implication, materials
should reflect this. Thus, the learning of Business English is at least partly a matter of
acquiring the formulaic patterns that most transactions consist of:
[ the student] ... already knows the routines and transactions to which business English will refer, since these are almost behavioural universals. His task will, therefore, be the more narrowly linguistic one of acquiring the expressions.
(Pickett 1988:90)
He continued in a later article, ‘it is the words that are unfamiliar, not the situations’
(Pickett 1989:6). This was obviously pointing to a different notion of competence to that
expressed by Hutchinson & Waters. Whilst Hutchinson & Waters realised that there can
in some senses be special ‘Englishes’, they argued that in terms of learning to use them,
it is a more general approach that is needed. They suggested that if lessons concentrate
purely on linguistic items, there can be no real communication. They are, therefore, not
concerned with the surface structures themselves, as Pickett seems to be, but the
acquisition of the underlying competences needed to cope with typical situations.
Mountford (1988) agreed with some aspects of Hutchinson & Waters’ views in that he
realised the problems encountered with ‘authentic’ materials. However, he criticised ESP
materials development, saying that there had been an over-preoccupation with writing
‘special’ material. His experiences of teaching in Thailand led him to see certain
constraints on the use of ESP materials in the classroom. These included institutional
factors, such as time and money, teacher factors, such as training and differing levels of
their competence, and learner factors, which he believed are often not given as much
consideration as they should be. He criticised the approach where
... the relevance and appropriacy of teaching materials must derive from the language of the target situation, whether or not there is any evidence that the student's interest in his or her area of study or work as a motivating purpose will automatically carry over into the ESP classroom. (Mountford 1988:83)
These issues have been in the background of the development of materials for business
English since their beginnings in the early 1970s and, it must be said, still continue
today. Ayers & Van Huyssteen (1996) in their review of Business Opportunities (Hollett
1994) commented on the tension between materials designed for very specific areas, i.e.
what they would consider ‘real’ ESP materials, and what are basically general English
course materials with something of a business context added on. In the case of Business
Opportunities they say that ‘it seems that a grammatical syllabus has been drawn up, and
a list of ‘business situations’ ‘matched’ to those structures’ (1996:74). They concluded
the review by saying that ‘for a book to be truly ESP, there needs to be a more in-depth
coverage of the communicative events which occur in a particular context and the
language covered has to be determined by those events through a detailed linguistic
analysis’ (1996:75). Whilst this may or may not be true, teachers - the end-users of these
books - have come down firmly on the side of the Business Opportunities approach (if it
can be called an approach).
Flinders (1998a) commented on a short survey48 of Business English teachers and the
ideas about the materials they use. Business Opportunities (Hollett 1994) and Business
Objectives (Hollett 1991) were both at the top of the list of the most-used books along
with several other course books that adopt a similar style - Business Class (Cotton &
Robbins 1993) and New International Business English (Jones & Alexander 1996), for
example. The survey carried out for this thesis also found these books to be in the top
five sold in 1996. However, whether this popularity is an endorsement of the
methodology used by the books or is simply due to the effective marketing of the
publishers it is not possible to say.
The generality of Business English course books was also noted by Robinson (1991) and
she suggested three reasons for this: the role of Business English as a mediating language
between public and business, the wide range of students who may be termed ‘Business
English’ students and the ‘open door’ policy of many language schools which leads to
48 Materials For Teaching Business English - carried out at a BESIG workshop in London September 1997. Also see the PMC bibliography for full references of these books.
very heterogenous groups of students who need to be accommodated. Materials, she
noted, must not be so specific that they would alienate certain members of a given group
(Robinson 1991:98).
The tension between materials’ specificity and usefulness had been discussed earlier by
Pilbeam (1987), who questioned whether published materials could be used at all on ESP
courses and especially on Business English courses. As a Business English trainer of
many yearsÕ experience, Pilbeam recalled the early days of teaching where ‘each case
was special’ (1987:119) with the result that materials had to be designed in haste with a
resultant loss in both quality and creativity. Published materials at that time were not
seen as sufficiently relevant for ‘specialist’ Business English courses. The standard and
amount of materials, however, has risen since then and Pilbeam presented eight criteria49
by which he believed, if successfully adhered to, Business English published materials
could readily be used in the classroom.50 Even so, he also stated that ‘published ESP
materials must always be a compromise’ (1987:119).
3.8.1.1 Discussion
The debate on the specificity of ESP teaching materials has continued. As Pilbeam had
already noticed back in 1987, the amount and quality of Business English materials has
grown all the time and Business English nowadays represents the single biggest growth
area in ESP. It will be seen in the following sections that along with this growth, there
have been some attempts to incorporate research into the materials (Dow 1999).
However, the starting points of this thesis have been the facts that a) there has not been
enough research, and b) there has not been enough crossover from research to
classroom/materials. This thesis accepts the points made by Hutchinson & Waters - the
skills and strategies of learning are central to a successful learning outcome. However,
their focus on the generality of language, rather than on the specific lexis of a discipline,
49 Specificity, appropriateness, validity, flexibility, suitability, quality, length of production time and cost. (Pilbeam 1987:120-123).50 It should also be noted that as a major writer of Business English ESP material it is perhaps inevitable that Pilbeam should come down on the side of using published materials.
needs to be put into perspective. An ESP course that relies solely on area-specific
terminology would probably be both too limited, and also potentially very boring for
students. However, as the term ESP does imply a specificity of purpose, the key lexis of
a given discipline must play a central role in the teaching process. This thesis has
attempted to discover the key lexis of Business English so that it can be integrated into
Business English materials and courses of the future. This lexis does not, and should not,
represent the only element of an ESP for business course - but without Business English
lexis at the heart of the course, the specificity and arguably the effectiveness of the
course will be diminished. The ideas of Ayers & Van Huyssteen (1996) noted earlier are,
therefore, preferred by this research. The communicative events of Business English have
been collected in the BEC and materials have been written to take advantage of the
linguistic analysis the language has been subjected to (example materials can be found in
Appendix 11 in Vol. II of this thesis).
After this discussion of materials at a general level, it is useful to now look more closely
at exactly what kinds of materials have been produced in the Business English market.
Business English materials have become increasingly abundant over the last decade, and
there have accordingly been attempts made to categorise them. By looking at these
categorisations it should be possible to analyse them more easily. In the next section
these attempts at categorisation will be examined before going on to a more detailed
evaluation of the validity of the materials themselves.
3.8.2 Categorising Business English materials
Categorisations of Business English materials, although differing in terminology and
approach, have tended to make the same distinctions between the materials on the
market. Four separate categorisations of materials will be considered here, Johnson
(1993), St John (1996), Brieger (1997) and Flinders (1998b).
St John (1996:9-14) gives perhaps the fullest account of Business English materials and
puts forward the following description:
1. Materials for business communication skills: These are materials that ‘focus on the
core skills of business activity’ (1996:9). This area covers that aspect of communication
that is not concerned with specialised knowledge, but the general communication skills
that we all need to function in different walks of life. Non-language skills are also
included here, for example non-verbal communication and organisational skills. In this
section she includes books such as those in the Longman Business English Skills Series,
for example, Negotiating (O’Connor et al. 1992), Socializing (Ellis & O’ Driscoll 1992),
and Telephoning (Bruce 1992).
2. Materials for business contexts: These are the ‘hard-core’ ESP materials where the
nature of the business forms the interaction. Examples of this are the Business
Management English Series by Brieger & Comfort, which include books with a
relatively high ‘business’ content such as Personnel (Brieger & Comfort 1992a) and
Finance (Brieger & Comfort 1992b).
3. Materials for business studies: Business studies materials have borrowed a lot from
actual business courses: Uber-Grosse, (1988) in her article The Case Study Approach to
Teaching Business English stated that the Harvard Business School first used case studies
over seventy years ago and St John notes that this has led to the widespread use of case
studies and simulations for training purposes. In terms of teaching Business English,
Uber-Grosse says that case studies ‘teach language through content, rather than through
grammatical or lexical exercises’ (1988:131). She says that they typically use authentic
materials where the students are presented with a problem to solve. In Business English
they have been used quite widely and examples include Portfolio (Howe 1987) and Case
Studies in International Management (Sawyer-Lauçanno 1987).
4. English materials in a business setting: Most of the Business English materials
available today fall under this category. This category includes ‘course books and
supplementary materials’ (1996:12-13). Examples of these in wide use are Business
Opportunities (Hollett 1994), Business Objectives (Hollett 1991) and Insights into
Business (Lannon et al. 1993). Examples of supplementary materials given by St John
include In at the Deep End (Hollet et al. 1989).51
St John summarises the categories in the following diagram (1996:9):
Business Communication Business ContextsSkills
Business Studies Methodology
(English) Language in Business Settings
Fig. 18 Business English categories of materials - St John (1996:9)
Johnson (1993) takes a slightly different approach to categorising teaching materials.
She follows what is basically a chronological approach, starting with the early approach
of looking at specialist lexis and ending up with the latest books concerning business
skills. Her categories are as follows:
1. Focus on specialist lexis: Johnson (1993:205) notes that early course books presented
specialist vocabulary to students and focused on ‘randomly selected structures and
vocabulary and there was no consideration of how the learner might apply the language
in real-life’. More recently, however, with the emergence of the Lexical Approach in the
late 1980s and 1990s, there has been a re-birth of lexis as a central theme of Business
English materials.
2. Focus on Gambits: Johnson defines gambits as ‘fixed expressions that can be used in
meetings, for example, to put oneÕs point of view, agree or disagree’ (1993:205).
Almost all Business English books have used this approach in one form or another - but
books such as The Language of Meetings (Goodale 1987) exemplify the approach.
51 For full bibliographical details of these books please see the PMC bibliography.
3. The Case Study Approach: This was a sub-section of St John’s categories (Materials
for Business Studies) but Johnson gives it special mention in its own right. As we saw
from St John above, this idea has been borrowed from pure business teaching and is a
method whereby students are presented with a hypothetical life-like business situation
that they must resolve. In terms of Business English teaching, the language skills needed
to resolve the issues is the main focus of the activity.
4. Focus on Business Skills: This is a focus on the communication skills needed in a
business environment, for example, socialising, entertaining and presentation skills
(1993:205). Johnson gives a long list of materials using this approach.
Published materials for Brieger (1997) are not stressed or discussed directly and are thus
relegated to an appendix at the back of the book. However, he does categorise the books
under eight headings: coursebooks, language, listening, communication skills,
vocabulary, professional context, activities/case study/role-play and reading. Examples of
book types are listed under each heading.
Flinders (1998b) also attempts to categorise Business English materials. He suggests that
there has been a shift from 1980 to the present day in that there has been a move from
using authentic materials to using ready-made published materials. He continues by
saying that the 1990s saw the rise of what he calls the media mix - so that in the
classroom today, students get a mixture of books, photocopies, audio and video, PC
disks, CD ROMs and use of the Internet. He presents definitions of Business English
materials by suggesting five main course components:
1. Language knowledge2. Communication skill3. Professional context (sub-divided into companies, business areas and countries)4. Cross-cultural area5. Management skill
This short section has given an overview of the wide range of Business English materials
available at present and their development over the last twenty to thirty years. Attention
now turns to the validity of the materials summarised above and an analysis of how well
they reflect the world that they are supposed to give linguistic insight into.
3.8.3 Analysis of the validity of Business English materials in relation to intuition
The influence of intuition on all the approaches and methods within ESP is a recurring
theme of this work. It has been noted especially within needs analysis but also in genre,
discourse and register analysis. Use of a researcherÕs intuition in many ways is
inevitable - if a given factor is not known about, then hypotheses need to be created in
order to explain it and intuition can often play a key role in formulating ideas. This is a
normal and valuable part of scientific thought and practice. However, when intuition
plays an important part not only in the creation of ideas but in the fabric of the results
themselves, one starts to get on to more shaky ground. Materials writers in ESP and
indeed Business English have used their intuition to create models of language for
students that purport to be Business English. Yet under more rigorous examination some
of these materials have been found to be lacking in one form or another. Furthermore,
there is no firm definition of just what Business English actually is. Therefore Business
English materials, more than anything else, represent what the writers of the materials
believe Business English to be via their intuition.
Powell (1996) attacked this use of intuition in Business English materials, arguing that
‘the list of instances where the materials writers intuition has proved false is almost
endless’ (1996:5). He especially criticised the language of textbooks used for teaching
meetings, presentations, graphs and telephoning, claiming that all of them present an
unrealistic picture of the language actually used. However, Powell, in criticising the use
of intuition by other writers, was still using his own intuition to do so. Therefore, it is
necessary to examine actual research that has been done in order to critically evaluate
Business English materials writing as a whole in relation to this question of intuition.
Factual indications of the presence of faulty intuition were seen in Nelson (1997) in the
Oxford University Press needs analysis survey noted earlier. Nelson was interested in
looking at the question of intuition with regard to course design and wanted to see if the
teachers’ ideas of what students wanted matched what the students themselves said they
wanted. Identical52 questionnaires were sent to teachers and students asking them to state
their preferences on their business language needs and the format of the final needs
analysis questionnaire. Key differences were noted.
· Students wanted the results of the language questionnaire to be given to them in terms
of functions and notions, whereas the teachers predicted that students would want the
results shown in terms of the situations and tasks where they would need the language.
· Teachers consistently made mistakes in judging the value of target situations to the
students - for example, students saw specialist vocabulary to be twice as important for
them than the teachers predicted they would.53
The Oxford University Press study has not been subjected to statistical validation and can
only point to possible trends and not make any definitive statements about intuition.
However, when combined with other research it does seem to be pointing in the same
direction. Although most of the work on the differences between real-life language and
EFL/TESOL54 language has been carried out outside the field of Business English, it can
still be seen as very relevant to the issue here, as what little work there has been done in
Business English has come to very similar conclusions. Comparative studies into
materials and real-life have covered a variety of items in ESP/ESL research both in the
UK and in America. These have included use of grammatical items (Kennedy 1987,
Holmes 1988), refutation (Pickard 1992), service encounters (Scotton & Bernsten 1988,
Ventola 1987), direction giving (Scotton & Bernsten 1988), complaints (Boxer &
Pickering 1995), intonation patterns (Cauldwell & Hewings 1996) and lexis (Ljung
1990). These studies from outside the field of Business English will now be looked at in
more detail, followed by analysis of work directly related to Business English.
52 The questions were identical in meaning, but the students’ questionnaires avoided all kinds of EFL jargon. 53 This also reinforces the points made on specialist lexis as being central to ESP courses made in Section 3.8.1. 54 Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.
3.8.4 Studies of intuition outside Business English
Holmes (1988) examined the use of doubt and certainty in four well-known ESL
textbooks using a combination of two corpora to compare findings to an examination of
the books.55 Her results showed that whilst in some cases, doubt and certainty - in fact the
use of epistemic modals - was adequately covered, ‘some textbooks were positively
misleading’ (Holmes 1988:40). She noted that other books give information of Ôvariable
qualityÕ (1988:40). Interestingly, she also dismisses earlier attempts of analysis of this
issue on the grounds that the research had not been corpus-based, but along rationalist,
i.e. intuitive lines. Kennedy (1987) looked at quantification - more specifically the use of
approximation - and how it is used by native speakers. Two corpora and the Oxford
Concise Dictionary were consulted and compared to input from teachers who were asked
to give their own intuitive input on the subject. The results showed that the intuition of
the teachers gave the largest range of types of approximation terms, but that on its own
was not enough. The vast amount of intuitive information needed ordering and
... the frequency data which the computer-based examination of these types in large corpora now makes possible were also necessary to give the descriptive information pedagogical value.
(Kennedy 1987:282)
Ma (1993a), in his review of the literature of small corpora concordancing, gave further
examples of work done in this field citing Pickard (1992), who noted that the language of
refutation used in textbooks was not actually used in real-life. Scotton & Bernsten (1988)
considered two language situations - asking for directions and service encounters - and
compared them to how these situations were presented in TESOL teaching materials.
They noted that ‘Most textbook direction-giving dialogues contain only three parts’
(1988:373) and that ‘interactional demands on the direction-seeker are not normally
considered in the TESOL classroom’ (1988:373). The textbooks also lacked all the fillers
and non-fluencies of actual English discourse. In terms of the service encounters they
found that in the real-life encounters, the native speaker actors tended to use the Ôbald
55 It must be noted here that the books she chose - even for 1988 - were old, with the earliest going back to 1967. Therefore, it is likely that had she chosen more ‘up-to-date’ books she would have got different results.
imperativeÕ can in requests, whereas the non-native speakers tended to use more overtly
polite phrases such as would you please?. This more direct way of making requests, they
said, should be taken into account when making materials and also in teaching. Mason
(1989), in a small-scale study of service encounters at a chemist’s shop in the UK, found
the service encounters to be quite different than she had expected and noted the lack of
use of the phrase Here you are beloved of EFL textbooks. She also found:
The use of ‘dead’ as an intensifier is quite commonly heard in certain areas of Britain, but apart from its use in the instruction of drivers (‘Drive dead slow’), does not seem to have found its way into grammar books or ELT textbooks because it is generally deemed to be ‘incorrect’. (Mason 1989:90)
Ventola (1987), also researching service encounters notes that in her opinion
The textbook dialogues did not appear to be very well equipped to teach students the many ways in which linguistic patterns vary when language is used to realize social activity. (Ventola 1987:232)
The lack of reality and the reliance on over-polite discourse strategies are themes that
will be returned to as these complaints are widespread concerning published materials. A
third theme is highlighted by Boxer & Pickering (1995) in their survey of complaints and
how they are presented in EFL materials. They took seven EFL textbooks, four from the
US and three from the UK, and studied them to see how the language of complaining
was presented. Their main finding was that the textbooks again oversimplified the real-
life situation and presented, for the most part, only examples of direct complaints. Boxer
& Pickering stress the need for students to also be aware of indirect complaints, as they
have a ‘rapport-inspiring function in social conversation’ (1995:45). In their conclusion
they warn:
One of the dangers of relying on native-speaker intuition for the creation of language textbooks is that we wrongly emphasize explicit rather than tacit knowledge of how we speak.
(Boxer & Pickering 1995:56)
Thus the third major criticism of materials can be seen to be the over-emphasis of overt
uses of language at the expense of the implicit - the direct over the indirect. This, too,
will be returned to later when discussing Business English materials.
Another study looking at spoken language, this time at intonation rules and how they are
presented in ELT textbooks (Cauldwell & Hewings 1996), again noted the over-
simplification and, indeed, erroneous information given. Suggesting a discourse
approach to the teaching of pronunciation, they showed how intonation patterns used by
native speakers when giving lists and asking questions differed intrinsically from the
over-simplified patterns presented in most textbooks. They gave as one example from
textbooks that when asking yes/no questions, a speaker will end the sentence with raised
intonation. They gave real-life examples that showed this is not always true, and basing
their ideas on the work of David Brazil, they suggested that ‘falling tones in questions
indicate that the speaker is Ôfinding outÕ, rising tone indicates that the speaker is
Ômaking sureÕ’ (1996:332). They criticised the rules presented in the books on three
grounds: that they present only a limited part of the language, they fail to show how rules
interrelate, and that the rules fail to show why the tendencies expressed in them exist and
why speakers deviate from them (1996:333).
Research has also been carried out comparing real-life lexis and that found in EFL
textbooks. Ljung (1990), 56 created a one million-word corpus of TEFL textbooks used in
Swedish schools and compared it to several corpora, notably COBUILD. The methods
and approach used will be discussed later in more detail, but here it is important to note
that he found discrepancies between the ÔrealÕ vocabulary found in the natural language
corpora and the materials used for teaching it. A frequency count showed that 204 words
out of the top 1,000 were not shared by the two corpora, indicating a significant
difference in emphasis, notably between concentration on concrete terms in the EFL
corpus to more abstract terms in COBUILD. In his conclusion, he noted that
... there is reason to be critical of the TEFL texts on two major counts, i.e. the low general level of lexical sophistication and the absence of a
56 This is one of the closest works to this thesis previously carried out, and in part, helped inspire it.
clear increase in vocabulary difficulty as we move from the early to the later school years. (Ljung 1990:44-45)
He went on to note that the materials do not adequately prepare the students for the tasks
of the real world. All these examples go to show that materials writers intuition is not a
sufficient basis alone on which to write materials and it will be seen in the next section
that similar problems to those noted here have also been found in Business English
materials.
3.8.5 Studies of intuition in Business English
Perhaps the best-known study into the differences between Business English materials
and real-life language was carried out by Williams (1988), in her functional analysis of
the language of meetings and the materials used for teaching them. Her study began
because she was unconvinced that ‘the language taught by the textbooks reflects the
language that is commonly used in meetings, nor that the language taught is of any
particular use to students when they participate in meetings’ (1988:45). In this small
scale study of three one-hour meetings between native speakers of English in Hong
Kong, she found a significant gap between the ‘real’ language of the meetings she
recorded and the materials she analysed that are used in teaching English for meetings.
Of the exponents taught by courses to realize functions, there was virtually no correspondence with the forms actually used in meetings. Of 135 exponents taught to realize 12 functions, 7 (5.2 per cent) were in fact used. Of the 7 used, one was said by the textbooks to be rude.
(Williams 1988:51)She also noted that when selecting language exponents it appeared that writers did so by
using ‘introspection or a kind of educated hunch, rather than empirical research’
(1988:46). Thus, it can be seen that Williams’ findings very closely match the work of
Scotton & Bernsten, Ventola, Boxer & Pickering and Cauldwell & Hewings in noting a
lack of reality in the materials, an emphasis on over-polite forms of the language and a
preoccupation in focusing on the explicit forms of the language as opposed to the
implicit. This study, whilst potentially very significant, was too small for any
generalisable findings - a fact Williams herself noted - yet the results ‘do suggest that a
more wide-ranging comparison between language taught and language used could
provide some interesting insights’ (1988:53). Indeed, other work done in this area serves
only to strengthen Williams’ distrust of Business English materials.
Shields (1994), in a similar study, looked at the use of agreement and disagreement in
business meetings and in textbooks and again found significant differences. He found
that Business English textbooks tended to teach agreeing and disagreeing in formulaic
and explicit terms, e.g. I agree or I think you’re wrong. From the meetings Shields
attended he found participants much more likely to express disagreement by use of a
longer pause before speech or a phrase such as yes but.
Yli-Jokipii (1994), in her study of requests in business correspondence from different
cultures, compared the presentation of requests in real-life correspondence with
textbooks from both the UK and the US. The same themes were again noted:
The text books provide less variation and sophistication than real-life calls for the British being more monotonous in their choices than the Americans. In fact, the British real-life and the corresponding instructional material occasionally represented the two extreme ends in the frequencies of the choices and the investigation. The American instructional material showed a tendency to avoid the conventional and formulaic ways of requesting, an aspiration affecting even flexible choices. The real-life situations seemed to call for greater implicitness than the instructional material is able, or chooses, to pursue. For example, the textbooks prefer explicit devices to indicate the action in the request, whereas the real life writers employ more covert means such as the passive, circumstantial, or evasive orientation. The discrepancies between instructional material and real-life practice are wider in this respect in the British data than the American.
(Yli-Jokipii 1994:249 - my italics)
She does say that the US textbooks were meant for native speakers and that the UK ones
were for learners (1994:251), thus the samples represent examples of text written for
very different target audiences, making any comparison a little unfair on the UK authors.
However, her findings match precisely those of the other studies mentioned so far.
Similarly, in another study of business correspondence, Maier (1992) noted in respect to
materials published to help in business writing that
...these books focus solely on issues of form, ignoring the often more crucial matters of style and content. A survey of books on business correspondence revealed a similarly disturbing lack of attention to such issues, yielding several volumes of ‘model letters’ from which a user may choose. (Maier 1992:189)
Ma (1993b) studied the difference between a corpus of 50 business letters and published
materials for its teaching and also noted several differences, for example, use of the PS
section of letters was not covered in the materials, but widely used in real-life. In terms
of business writing materials one possible reason for discrepancies between real-life and
materials is suggested by the work of Louhiala-Salminen (1996). She notes the situation
of permanent change in Business English and, in a questionnaire and interview-based
survey of Finnish business people, she described the feeling of teachers facing the rapid
technological shift from the ‘business letter’ to faxes and email:
It seemed to me that we, i.e. educators, students as well as the business people themselves, were all slightly lost, not knowing where we stood, when the basis of our concept of communication, The Letter, had suddenly almost disappeared, and we did not have anything to compensate the ‘store of phrases’ which had been a suitable resource to draw on in most writing situations.
(Louhiala-Salminen 1996:38)
Her findings showed that the fax is now the dominant medium of business
correspondence and that written skills are just as needed as spoken skills (1996:49). Even
a detailed study of all Business English published materials fails to find adequate and
detailed work on how to write faxes; thus, reality is so far not displayed within available
materials.
3.8.6 Discussion
The key problems found in Business English materials presented above can be
summarised as follows:
1. Materials present an oversimplified and unreal picture of the business world.
2. The language found in the textbooks differs from that used in actual business.57
3. There is a concentration on politeness and pleasantness that is not matched by real-
world experience.
4. There is a concentration on the explicit forms of language use to the detriment of
implicit forms.
5. The language, both structure and lexis, found in Business English materials, is entirely
based on the intuition and experience of their authors.58
It should be stressed here that the intention of the previous section was to highlight
shortcomings in the materials. Thus, the negative aspects of the materials have been
stressed. Recent writers, it should be noted, however, have been less critical of Business
English materials. The materials under examination in the previous section are from the
1960s to 1980s (with the exception of Louhiala-Salminen 1996), and it is clear that both
ESP and Business English materials have had time to develop and grow since then.
Dudley-Evans & St John go so far as to say that
We would suggest that the discrepancy between the textbooks and actual data is much less than it was at the time of Williams’ original investigation ... and that published textbooks are now based on a good mix of sound teaching experience and informed understanding of how different texts work in business communication.59
(Dudley-Evans & St John 1996:40)
Dow (1999) concurs with this idea in the conclusion to his article on negotiating and
non-native speakers and presents a picture of Business English materials that is, if not
entirely rosy, certainly a positive one. He believes that ‘Discourse, genre and lexico-
grammatical research does genuinely appear to be informing best classroom practice’
57 Michael Lewis, in his talk at the 1997 BESIG conference in Reutlingen, boasted that he could speak two languages - English and EFL - as the two are totally different, he said.58 There are exceptions - Key Words in Business (Mascull 1996) for example, is based on the COBUILD corpus of business texts - though this is only written text. Many course books today also use authentic business texts but these are again limited and chosen for inclusion by the authors.59 The author of this thesis is a practising Business English teacher and agrees with this statement - materials seem to be getting better all the time, though there is still some way to go before they match the ‘real’ language found in the business world.
(1999:98) and this is also being reflected in some materials. Business English materials
thus have certain faults and limitations in terms of their accuracy and their
oversimplification of the complex language of business. Conversely, it can be said that
they are considerably better than they were ten years ago. In order to improve further,
Business English materials need to receive more information directly from language
research - sidelining the use of intuition. The final section of this chapter will now
summarise all the key themes presented so far and suggest where Business English might
benefit most from further research.
3.9 The review of the literature: summary and conclusions
This review of the literature of Business English has ranged from early register analysis
studies, through discourse and genre to needs analysis and the evaluation of Business
English materials. It has presented a picture of an area that is at present at an important
stage of its development. By this it is meant that for too long, development in Business
English product and practice has been at the whim of the intuition of its practitioners.
This is now changing, and empirical work in this field has slowly been accumulating and
at time of writing is starting to gather momentum. Being materials-driven has had certain
benefits for its practitioners, such as the practicality and teacher-friendliness of its
materials (Dudley-Evans & St John 1996:40), but it has been seen that intuition alone can
never be enough. Intuition is a valuable servant but a dangerous master. This last section
uses four distinct but overlapping dichotomies to summarise this review of the literature:
micro- vs macro-level knowledge, single vs multi-disciplinary knowledge, intuitive vs
empirical knowledge and research knowledge vs classroom practice. It will show what
has been achieved and what still needs to be achieved in a search for knowledge of what
Business English is. It will note that although much work has been done, one vital area of
Business English research has been neglected - Business English lexis. Finally, an
introduction to a possible methodology for research into Business English lexis will be
set out, leading to a full exposition in the following chapters.
3.9.1 Macro- vs micro-level knowledge
It is perhaps the nature of all good research that the target of its study is examined in
minute detail so as to incrementally add to our knowledge of the world. This approach to
research has underpinned most of the literature reviewed here. Early register analysis
work concentrated on certain grammatical items or lexis in a given register, mathematics
(Kirkham 1978), or medical (Wingard 1981), for example. Under the heading of
discourse analysis, research was carried out into, for example, cohesion in business
letters (Johns 1980), or conjuncts in business news stories (Morrow 1989). Turn-taking
rules in technical (Lenz 1987) and business meetings (Micheau & Billmyer 1987) were
also studied. Continuing further into the review, work can be found on the use of meta-
text (Mauranen 1993), politeness (Yli-Jokipii 1992), requests (Yli-Jokipii 1994) and
power (Charles 1996). Each of these works has therefore focused on a small area and
studied it with great care. It must be stated that no criticism of this neither should be, nor
is offered here. Yet at the same time the overall effect of this state of affairs has led to
limitations. In terms of Business English teachers and work in the classroom, the studies
have come in such small ‘units’ that it has been difficult to gain an overall view of the
state of Business English as it stands. The field is littered in a sense with ‘gems’ of
micro-level information, but these gems seem to be strewn at random waiting to be
found, rather than arranged in any systematic or easily accessible manner. It has been
shown that even the major banners under which research has been done, for example
genre analysis, are confusing. Furthermore, it requires a vast accumulation of micro-level
knowledge before it can start affecting the classroom on the macro-level.
What is needed, it is argued here, is research that can present a picture of Business
English both at micro- and macro-level. Ljung (1990) went part of the way there in his
study of TEFL textbooks in comparison to the ‘real-life’ language found in various
corpora. Ljung was able to present an overall picture of the lexis found in over thirty
textbooks and draw conclusions from this about the books at a macro-level. Yet Ljung
concentrated only on the differences between the textbooks and real-life language and
only at the single word unit level. Therefore, similar methodology will be used in this
thesis not only to look at materials, but also to study how Business English differs from
general English, thus defining it at a macro-level. However, the literature has also shown
us that language should not be seen in isolation of its context. These contexts represent
the micro-level genres of which Business English is composed. Thus, macro-level
knowledge of Business English will be gained in this work by collation of large amounts
of micro-level knowledge. In doing this, this thesis will take advantage of previous
methodologies from register to genre analysis and take a multi-disciplinary, rather than
single-discipline approach.
3.9.2 Single vs multi-disciplinary knowledge
The various methodologies discussed in the review of the literature were all found to be
both useful and to possess shortcomings. Register analysis in its early state divorced
linguistic features from their context and studied language only at the level of the
sentence - the approach was unable to say why language occurred where and when it did.
There was also an almost total concentration on written language. Discourse analysis
shifted attention away from the sentence level and studies on discourse strategies also
took spoken language into account - but language was still to a large extent seen away
from its social context. Genre analysis has been able to join language, social context and
communicative purpose together but has run into problems of definition and
prescriptiveness. Again it has focused mainly on written language. It is argued here that
any linguistic study of Business English should draw from the positive aspects of all
these previous approaches. The study of lexis proposed in this thesis will thus utilise
aspects of register and discourse analysis and use the concept of genre to orchestrate and
give order to the work. Additionally it will take into account both written and spoken
language. In this way language can be studied in detail whilst still being firmly placed in
its social and communicative context.
3.9.3 Intuitive vs empirical knowledge
This dynamic has been noted throughout this review of the literature, though it has been
especially prevalent in needs analysis and materials development. The dichotomy has two
implications. Firstly, empirical research is needed to replace the intuitive approach of
most Business English practitioners. Secondly, the empirical data collected must be large
enough to offer a representative picture of the language it is studying. The small size of
research data and inability of the results of these works to be generalised have been noted
throughout this review. In order to create a data bank of sufficient size, the use of
computer-based technology and corpus linguistic methodology is necessitated. It has
been noted during the review that many writers have suggested the need for this
approach, for example, Cowan (1974), Pickett (1986b) and Yang (1986). It is, however,
not suggested that intuition be done away with entirely, nor would it necessarily lead to a
better study if it were. However, the validity of informed choices made on the
interpretation of empirical data is of much greater value than when choice of language is
made entirely intuitively. One further positive aspect in regard to the use of corpora and
computer technology is that they can facilitate work discussed in the final dichotomy,
that of research knowledge and classroom practice.
3.9.4 Research knowledge vs classroom practice
The final theme discussed in this chapter has been that of transferral of research ideas
into the classroom. It was noted that Dow (1999), for example, believed that this transfer
is taking place and that Business English, as a result of this, has improved. However, the
transfer has been slow in coming and the research design of most of the studies looked at
here leave no room for transfer of results into the classroom. Most studies end with a
comment or paragraph by the author saying that the results are important and should be
of use to teachers. Yet little in concrete terms is done in order for this to happen. The
field of Business English is one where the crossover of research to materials needs to
happen much more than it does at present. This entails firstly more studies being
undertaken, and secondly, at the same time these studies having an in-built element that
takes the results into the classroom.
3.10 Afterword: towards a methodology
The above discussion, it is hoped, has synthesised the key issues raised in the literature
reviewed in this chapter. It has shown that much work has been done and much is still
left to do. Many aspects of business language have been studied with regard to a variety
of important factors. Yet, despite all the research, a simple question remains: what is
Business English? The diversity and richness of Business English has been noted many
times, making any answer to this question a complex one. When one thinks of what
makes up a language, business or otherwise, it is easy to think of it in terms of its words -
the very building blocks of communication. Indeed, in terms of Business English, Pickett
suggested that it was largely based around its lexis. Early work in register analysis also
suggested that ÔspecialÕ languages are very difficult to demarcate grammatically. Thus
the lexis of Business English must be of vital importance to our understanding of it. But
what then is the lexis of Business English? At this point in time it is largely unknown.
The Ôcommon coreÕ of Business English lexis (St John 1996) is still missing. Despite
all the research covered here, it has not been able to indicate on a macro-level what lexis
is used by business people. The purpose of the rest of this thesis will be to lexically
examine what is known as Business English. This will be done in a way that, rather than
rejecting previous methodologies, takes advantage of them. This thesis, therefore, rests
on the following assumptions:
1. It is important to gain a macro-level picture of Business English lexis and this can be
achieved by taking account of the contexts and genre from which it is formed. In this
way micro-level pictures can also be formed.
2. The emphasis of the work must be on empirical and statistical means rather than
intuitive. Computer technology and corpus linguistic methodology will help facilitate this
approach.
3. The research design must have an inbuilt aspect that enables easy crossover of research
results into the Business English classroom.
The next chapter takes a detailed look at aspects of the methodology proposed, covering
studies of lexis, collocations, the notions of semantic prosody and colligation, and an
overview of research into multi-word items.
