The concept of Business English has undergone some major shifts in the last few years because of a number of developments, such as advances in genre theory and the coming together of English for Business Purposes and Business Communication, inspired by the realization that there is a gap to be bridged between the academy and the globalized business world. Drawing on advances in the analysis of business discourses, especially in applied genre analysis, this state-of-the-art review revisits the frameworks currently used in English for Business Purposes and Business Communication (or, more generally, Professional Communication) to suggest an integration of the two approaches for the design of English for Business Communication (EBC) programmes. The study incorporates an extensive review of much of the relevant published work in all the three areas mentioned above to identify some of the main issues in EBC, and illustrates a gradual shift in the rationale for the design and implementation of EBC programmes.
The concept of Business English has undergone some major shifts in recent years because of a number of developments: first, developments in genre theory, which has moved far beyond the surface-level textual analysis of genres to incorporate in-depth and substantial analysis of context, including professional practice; second, the gradual convergence in terms of research, theory and pedagogy of two approaches to the teaching of Business English – English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Business Communication studies – that at one time were considered quite separate; third, the realization that there is a gap to be bridged between the academy and the professions; and finally, the overwhelming use of new forms of media in the business world. As a result of these and many other developments, there is an urgent need to revisit and review not only the concept of Business English and the context in which it is learnt and taught today, but also the framework within which it has been conceptualized, developed, taught and learnt, and, ultimately, assessed and evaluated. Drawing on recent work in a range of areas relevant to the teaching and learning of Business English, this state-of-the-art review will outline the gradual shift in the rationale for the design and implementation of programmes
n this field. Moreover, the convergence of the two different approaches mentioned above – English for Specific Purposes, which in the context of business is often referred to as English for Business Purposes (EBP), and Business Communication studies – has led us to propose an integrated approach, which we call ‘English for Business Communication’ (EBC). The article begins with an overview of EBP and the various developments that have taken place in the field, such as variation in functional language description, needs analysis, curriculum design, methods and materials development, assessment and evaluation, and disciplinary variation. It then goes on to propose the concept of EBC, showing how this is an outcome of the gradual convergence of interests and concerns seen in both EBP and Business Communication studies. Building on this, the article then looks at the critical issues and challenges faced by EBC, which are the result of a number of developments: the discourse practices of business communities, corpus-based analytical approaches, the growth of English as a lingua franca for business, concerns with sociolinguistic issues, and the need to bridge the gap between the classroom and business. Additionally, it considers the challenges posed by Business Communication studies in the light of the key role this plays in the more broadly conceived notion of EBC. Finally, suggestions are made for opportunities for replication studies. Despite recent developments, there is still an emphasis on the analysis and description of discourse variation in academic and professional communities in all forms of disciplinary contexts; this continues to provide a rationale for the design of EBC programmes, although the methodologies and frameworks used for analysis and the depth of that analysis have undergone considerable changes, resulting in a variety of new findings. Thus the main purpose of this article is to review as much as possible of the research published in the last few years in order to offer an evidence-based account of recent and current theory and practice in EBC, and to indicate which way this field is likely to go in the coming years. 2. Overview of English for Business Purposes (EBP) Before discussing the issues and challenges confronting EBC practitioners arising from historical developments in theoretical studies, we begin with a brief account of variation in functional language description, as this has provided, and continues to provide, the foundation for the design of EBP programmes. 2.1 Variation in functional language description English for Business Purposes, as a relatively recent development, has its roots in ESP, which has traditionally drawn its strength from linguistics, particularly sociolinguistics, through the analysis of functional variation in language use in academic as well as occupational contexts. English for Academic and Occupational Business Purposes (EA/OBP) grew out of mainstream ESP studies, which in turn drew its inspiration from applied linguistics, in particular from the work of Halliday, McIntosh & Strevens (1964: 87) on functional variation in English, which put forward the notion that ‘language varies as its function varies; it differs in different situations’. They defined any variety of language distinguished according to its use as a REGISTER, differentiated as a sub-code of a particular language on the basis of statistically significant variation in lexico-grammatical features. Since then, numerous studies have identified and described the characteristic features of various academic and professional registers, such as scientific English, business English and legal English. Swales (2000) pointed out that the work of Halliday et al. (1964) on register analysis proposed a simple relationship between linguistic analysis and pedagogic materials, based on relatively ‘thin’ descriptions of the target discourses. Outsiders to a discourse or professional community are often unable to follow what specialists say and write, even if they can understand every word (Swales 1990). Even being a native speaker in such a situation may not help if one lacks insider knowledge, including the conventions of the genre and professional practice. It is hardly surprising that in subsequent years the ESP tradition has been heavily influenced by analyses of academic and disciplinary discourses within the framework of GENRE ANALYSIS (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993), which, as Widdowson (1998) pointed out, was a significant advance on register analysis. He highlighted the aspect of communicative efficiency through genre knowledge, claiming that: It is to further such communicative efficiency that extensive work has been done in the ESP field on genre analysis by such people as Swales and Bhatia (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993). This seeks to identify the particular conventions for language use in certain domains of professional and occupational activity. It is a development from, and an improvement on, register analysis because it deals with discourse and not just text: that is to say, it seeks not simply to reveal what linguistic forms are manifested but how they realize, make real, the conceptual and rhetorical structures, modes of thought and action, which are established as conventional for certain discourse communities. (Widdowson 1998: 7) The rationale for such developments has been that communication is not simply a matter of putting words together in a grammatically correct and rhetorically coherent textual form, but more importantly, one of having the desired impact on the members of a specifically relevant discourse community, and of recognizing the conventions for how the members of that community negotiate meaning in professional documents. In this sense, communication is more than knowing the semantics of lexico-grammar; in fact, it requires an understanding of why the members of a business or disciplinary community communicate the way they do (Bhatia 1993, 2004). This may require, among a number of other inputs, the disciplinespecific knowledge of how professionals conceptualize issues and talk about them in order to achieve their disciplinary and professional goals. Genre theory has thus become a favoured tool for the analysis of professional and academic discourses (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993). In order to handle the complexities of professional genres, especially in business contexts, genre theory has also become increasingly multidimensional and multi-perspective (Bhatia 2004), allowing the researcher to see ‘as much of the elephant as possible’, as the saying goes, through the integration of a number of different methodologies (Zhang 2007) such as textography (Swales 1998), interpretive ethnography (Smart 1998), corpus analysis (Santos 2002; Nelson 2006; Fuertes-Olivera 2007), participant perspectives on specialist discourses (Louhiala-Salminen 1996; Locker 1999; Rogers 2000; Nickerson, Gerritsen & van Meurs 2005, Gunnarsson 2009), cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives (Bilbow 1999; Gimenez 2001; Vergaro 2004; Planken 2005; Vuorela 2005; Palmer-Silviera, Ruiz-Garrado & Fortanet-Gomez 2006), multimodal analysis (Nickerson 1999; Brett 2000; O’Halloran 2006) and observation analysis (Louhiala-Salminen 2002), to name only a few. The implication for ESP/EBP is that text-based analyses within register or genre analysis have increasingly been found inadequate for explaining and accounting for the typical discursive and professional practices (Bhatia 2004, 2008a, 2010) of various business communities. There is thus an urgent need for study of the context of discourse in all its many forms, including how participants undertake discursive tasks and perform professional actions, and of what they achieve through these discursive and professional activities. We shall take up some of these aspects in more detail in section 4. 2.2 Needs analysis The starting point for most Business English or EBP instructional programmes has been a careful research-based specification of the needs of a specific target group of learners, and based on such specifications, the design of a syllabus, always keeping in mind the resources available, in terms of both availability of time and teaching expertise. After designing the syllabus, one can then go on to develop pedagogic materials, decide on an appropriate language teaching methodology and, finally, choose testing and assessment procedures. The specification of the needs of specific groups of learners has been a defining feature of ESP activity, especially in the context of EBP (Ellis & Johnson 1994; West 1994, 1997; Jordan 1997; Dudley-Evans & St. John 1998; Johns & Price-Machado 2001; Richards 2001). The specification or analysis of the needs of a specific target group of learners for academic or occupational purposes has been approached in terms of the linguistic, communicative, discursive or strategic competence that the target group may need to acquire in order to function efficiently in their chosen area of study or workplace. We offer a very brief review of some insightful studies here, beginning with more general projects before looking at more specific individual studies. Much has been written about the importance of devoting time to data collection before courses get under way; the benefits of periodically evaluating and revising existing ESP programmes are also widely accepted. In the last few decades, various approaches have been advocated by ESP course designers, including target situation analysis, deficiency analysis, means analysis, genre analysis and language audits (Bhatia 1993; West 1994, 1997; DudleyEvans & St. John 1998); West (1994) gives a detailed account. The importance of analysing the language and discourse (genres) of the target situations in which students are or will be studying or working is also increasingly being recognized (Dudley-Evans & St. John 1998; Johns & Price-Machado 2001). A number of large-scale attempts to specify the needs of specific groups of learners in the field of business deserve a brief mention here. An early example was completed in 1994 under the ASEAN-New Zealand English for Business and Technology Project (Khoo 1994), in which a team of researchers from the National University of Singapore and the Regional English Language Centre in Singapore specified some 45 company profiles from six Southeast Asian countries, namely Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines. The profiles provided a detailed specification of the level of English used by speakers in these countries in the four skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening, as well as translation, when engaged in a range of daily business tasks and activities. The purpose of the project was to provide a basis for a further detailed specification of the needs of specific groups of learners, the design of a syllabus, and also for the development of materials. Another significant effort in this direction was carried out in Hong Kong. A research team from six Hong Kong universities investigated the nature and range of the communicative demands that are placed on students of business studies (see Bhatia & Candlin 2001 and Jackson 2005 for details). The study adopted six distinct perspectives: student, teacher, curriculum, writing performance, textual and workplace. A variety of well-established methodological instruments and procedures were used, including questionnaires, focus group interviews with students and staff, classroom observation, corpus development and textual and generic analyses, including the analysis of available EBP programmes. The need for multidisciplinary expertise in the workplace – and the universities’ response to it by their introduction of multidisciplinary academic programmes in business studies – indicated that students required the ability to handle discourses related not only to their major subjects but also to other disciplines. The project findings supported the view that there were some fundamental and pedagogically important differences between disciplines that influence the teaching and learning of academic discourse within university business programmes, and that this has direct implications for the English language courses offered to students coping with such programmes. These conclusions thus supported the view that in order to plan and design effective specialist language teaching courses in the present-day context, it was essential to take into account cross-disciplinary variation (the question of disciplinary differences is revisited in greater detail in section 2.6 below). The curriculum perspective also highlighted the importance of collaboration between the host departments and ESP specialists and teachers. It showed that in most of the ESP (both EAP/EOP) programmes offered, there was a need to integrate language with the specialist content (discipline-specific), keeping in mind the requirements of cross-disciplinary expertise. A more recent study by Zhu (2004) categorized writing assignments from business courses on the basis of their characteristics and the skills needed to complete them. The data included 95 course syllabuses and handouts on writing assignments, 12 student writing samples and six interviews with business faculty. The study pointed out that writing assignments required expertise in both general academic and discipline-specific genres. Analysis of the disciplinary genres indicated that most were intended to initiate learners into the real business world, and hence required them to master a variety of problem-solving tools and information sources. Data analysis also indicated that performing in the disciplinary genres required strong analytical, problem-solving, persuasive, rhetorical and teamwork skills. Along similar lines, another recent needs analysis by Taillefer (2007) focused on the professional needs of economics graduates in France. Derived from 251 questionnaires completed by graduates from 1998 to 2000, the analysis revealed a distinct profile of competent language users, as compared with incompetent users, based on the six-level Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: high levels of competence were seen to be necessary in all four language skills in varied types of communication with both native speakers and non-natives, and graduates expressed difficulty in meeting their target needs, particularly in oral communication. Other interesting examples of needs analysis include Alexander (1999), Edwards (2000), Li & Mead (2000), Johns & Price-Machado (2001), Crosling & Ward (2002), Chew (2005), Cowling (2007) and Goby (2007)