In the last 20 years, critical approaches to language and literacy education have established themselves as an academic field, with an abundance of empirical studies applying Critical Literacy principles in classes and curricula at schools and universities. Noticeably absent from the contexts of implementation are courses in Business English and…

Email has revolutionised the way in which professionals work and companies operate, and yet has received surprisingly little scholarly attention in English for Specific Purposes and has an unexpectedly muted presence in many Business English textbooks. The dearth of research into email use in globalised business settings may be one of the factors…

The primary focus of this article is the investigation of how current applied linguistic research into the nature of call centre communication breakdown in business processing outsourcing (BPO) sites such as India and the Philippines, can impact English communications training program content and design for this industry. It is argued that a…

English has come to be widely used for the specific purpose of advertising to reach international target groups in various countries. However, few studies to date have investigated the use--and effects of--English in advertising in Eastern European countries. This study investigated the effect of English in advertisements from Polish glossy…

With the increasing number of business professionals operating globally, knowledge of successful English lingua franca in business contexts (BELF) has become an important element in overall business know-how. Here, we report on a research project focusing on everyday BELF communication at work. It consists of an extensive survey, and related…

This article examines the role of written and spoken English vis-a-vis written Chinese, Cantonese and Putonghua in the four key service industries that have driven Hong Kong's economy in the past decade. The study forms part of a long-standing and continuing investigation into the impact of Hong Kong's transition from British colony to Chinese…

The international business community relies heavily on English Lingua Franca (ELF) as a shared means of communication, and English business language programmes thus feature prominently within the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Business ESP programmes, however, have little focus on active listening, which previous research has…

The constant and continuous need for the university to work towards producing graduates who meet and exceed the requirements of their chosen industry has prompted the effort to gather feedback from those industries. The effort by researchers of an engineering-based university in the East Coast Region of Malaysia to collect information on the…

A key challenge facing professional communication teachers is the need to bridge the gap between the culture of the classroom and the reality of the workplace. One area of difference between the two contexts is the way in which collaborative activities surrounding the construction of written text are enacted. Differences in collaborative practices…

This article describes the design and implementation of a business proposal module for final-year science students at a tertiary institution in Hong Kong. It is argued that in the needs analysis process, the present situation analysis (PSA), that is, personal information about the learners and factors which may affect their learning, is just as if…

The purpose of this article is to report on some of the preliminary results of an on-going study on the use of discourse strategies in e-mail negotiation. The analysis aims at showing how relations between the participants develop through the use of specific discourse strategies in their e-mail communication which covers a period of three months,…

Studies of professional genres and professional practices are invariably seen as complementing each other, in that they not only influence each other but are often co-constructed in specific professional contexts. However, professional genres have often been analyzed in isolation, leaving the study of professional practice almost completely out,…

This paper reports on a study of business student and faculty views at the Lebanese American University as to the students' language proficiency levels, writing in particular, and what the specific writing needs are in order for students to be effective in their course work. The role of the English and business faculty is also investigated.…

The intertextual nature of workplace writing is well attested, and the efficacy of intertextuality as a tool for investigating the ways in which genres are linked in workplace settings is also recognized (Berkenkotter, 2001; Bhatia, 2004). Intertextuality not only accounts for the links between texts, but is also an important factor influencing…

This paper reports on an analysis of meetings data which forms part of a broader study investigating the use of English as a lingua franca in international business meetings. This discourse analytic stage of research builds on an initial survey which explored the use of English for International Business (EIB) in a particular European…