Readers who have a professional or academic interest in Business English may be interested in the latest issue of Journal of Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes (Volume 2, Issue 3, Special Issue on Business English).
The issue contains a number of interesting articles, with both a practical and an empirical focus. Writing from a educational perspective, Dana Di Pardo Leon-Henri describes a pedagogical intervention in a higher education Business English course. Similarly, Oleg Tarnopolsky and Larisa Slipchenko describe “a system of learning activities” used in Business Telephoning courses. Two additional Business English courses are presented by Jessie Choi and Somali Gupta. Erica Williams offers practical insights into the kinds of problems associated with English for Marketing Communications courses and presents some solutions. Finally, Slavica Čepon, Nadežda Stojković and Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević present a comparative study of Business English education in tertiary settings in Slovenia, Serbia, and Montenegro.
The issue contains a numbed of empirical studies that focussed on different formal aspects of Business English. For instance, Rachelle Ballesteros-Lintao and Marilu Rañosa Madrunio look into the language used in Philippine consumer-finance contracts and note that “a significant number of words … keep the consumers from getting a clear grasp of the material”. Ljiljana Vukićević-Đorđević talks about the ways in which metaphors are used in Business English to render economic terms less “vague and incomprehensible”, and Tatiana Permyakova and Tatiana Utkina examine the cognitive metaphors produced by Russian learners of English at a university setting. Robert Szabó uses a systemic-functional approach to analyse email communications. Zsófia Freund empirically looks into the genre-specific language of European Commission call for proposals with a view to generating what she describes as an “education and training programme word list”. Shireen Taha and Tharwat EL-Sakran discuss the use of visuals in Business English texts and provide guidelines for their effective use.
Some empirical studies, like Daniela Kirovska-Simjanoska’s presentation of simulated job interviews and Katarina Ilić’s discussion of attitudinal implications of Business English Education, looked into the psychological aspects of learning Business English. Finally, Samir Kumar Panigrahi describes an experimental study that compared the vocabulary acquisition of Business English students who had received English-Medium Instruction against students who had been educated in vernacular languages in India.
As the overview above suggests, the issue contains a really diverse collection of studies, which is made even more interesting on account of the geographical dispersion of the settings that are described. If you are involved in teaching or researching Business English, I would strongly suggest that you take a look.
Featured Image: Dictionary of the Frisian Language, by Hindrik Sijens @ Flickr | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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