Corpora in Business English - Research Paper Example

Table of Contents Introduction Corpora and its role in Business English Corpora in the modern business environment 3 Various types of corpora and chief contributions 8 Conclusion 7 References 8 Corpora in Business English Introduction Among the several new subdivisions within the developments in English Specific Purposes, an important development has been that of Business English. This is significantly assisted by the services of corpora, especially in solving various problems of linguistics. In other words, the role of corpora in solving the linguistics problems of Business English is often emphasised, and pertinent researches in the area have been conducted. ‘Business English’ has been a familiar concept in the world of EFL. Its significance to business enterprises will only grow further due to its relevance in the modern world. In this study, the focal point has been underlining the valuable role of corpora in Business English and in attempting to show the various types of corpus as they play a key role in Business English. Thus, it aims at showing how the quality of Business English can be improved using corpus-based tools and materials. “A corpus is a collection of pieces of language text in electronic form, selected according to external criteria to represent, as far as possible, a language or language variety as a source of data for linguistic research” (Sinclair 2004: 19). Corpora and its role in Business English A corpus is made for the study of language; other collections of language are made for other purposes. A well-designed corpus will reflect this purpose. “The contents of the corpus should be chosen to support the purpose and therefore in some sense represent the language from which they are chosen” (Sinclair 2004: 126). The role and contribution of corpora in Business English can be understood as vital as it is central to several of the Business English strategies. To understand the important role of corpora in Business English, its significance for linguistic purposes may be especially noted. “A linguistic corpus is a collection of texts which have been selected and brought together so that language can be studied on the computer” (Wynne 2004: 98). Nowadays, Corpus Linguistics offers some of the most powerful new procedures for the analysis of language. The impact of such dynamic and expanding sub-discipline is making its presence in many areas of language study. One of the most notable parts of the contributions of Corpus Linguistics may be understood in the context of Business English. In the modern world, where there is a great significance for English language, especially in the background of high development of business activities all over the world, the “employees and executives alike, now have to work hard to improve their Business English in order to increase the success rates” in their business interactions which, in turn, will help them to seize better business opportunities. This is especially significant in the present scenario of “work settings, which are gradually becoming more culturally and linguistically diverse. English is the key to overcoming such diversity” (www.whitesmoke.com/business-english.html). In this way, Business English offers “the best way for people to learn English specifically tailored to the needs of the work place” (www.whitesmoke.com/business-english.html). Business English is considered as the best tool for English learning for business people as it concentrates more on the way people interact in all language skills and assists business executives in efficiently managing the pursuit of their corporate objectives. Speaking Business English enables one to better negotiate with potential business partners, offer professional customer support and interact well with all their business clients. “Being able to give cutting-edge business presentations in English followed by the proverbial ‘small talk’ that leads to ‘big business’ is what Business English is all about” (www.whitesmoke.com/business-english.html). In this crucial activity of the Business English, the most effective tool is provided by the corpora. It is most notable, for example, that Business English can be most efficiently taught by including the corpus-driven knowledge and communicative task feedback. “Two main goals are pursued in this reciprocal relationship: corpus-based data evaluation in the academic context and corpus material design by focusing on language and content needs in task performance” (Curado 2000: 56). The estimates of Krishnamurthy (2001) point to the effective implementation of corpus in the language programmes of Business English which is guided by the principles that “a corpus can give us accurate statistics” and “a corpus can provide us with a vast number of real examples” (Krishnamurthy 2001: 83). Corpus Linguistics strategies and techniques are found most useful in performing the corpus exploitation from a pedagogical standpoint. In the teaching of Business English, incorporation of corpus driven data and communicative tasks in the language syllabus are perceived to be effective tools. Evaluation of the corpus information in the academic context proves the relevance of corpus strategies in the activities of Business English. Also the subject area of BIT (Business and Information Technology) serves as a common core backdrop where EAP (English for Academic Purposes) and EPP meet, providing feedback for Business and Computer English, given their related study programs (Curado 2000: 189). The role of Corpus Linguistics in the strategies of Business English has been, thus, proved by several such researches. Many scholars in English for Specific Purposes have used corpus data for practical purposes and various studies have been conducted on the relation between Corpus techniques and Business English. These studies have helped to improve the overall performance of Business English with the use of corpus techniques. Corpora in the modern business environment The contribution of the Corpus information to various purposes of Business English is an often recognised factor. Within the last ten years, ESP teaching has considerably developed from a grammar-based syllabus presentation to a subject-specific learning approach. The techniques evolved by corpus have promoted the study of Business English and the application of such instruments has fostered direct involvement with the content and language. Genre and register variation in Business Science and Technology can be explored and analysed with great accuracy for teaching purposes. “Such lexical diversity can be found, for instance, in e-mail writing, featuring lexical items and phrases that can either resemble conversational input or provide a dimension that is closer to academic writing... Corpus data enables the realisation of important language functions” (Curado 2000: 42). Corpus studies also focus on special terminology, such as academic and technical vocabulary. The role of Corpus Linguistics in the strategies of Business English can be very well understood in an evaluation of the corpus-based phraseology in the development of language study techniques. It is most significant that the strategies adopted by Business English have been based on the Corpus Linguistics information. In the modern business environment, “corpus-based phraseology has brought new insights to the study of language use and in particular to the role of evaluation in language” (Curado 2000: 6). New quantitative studies reveal that rather than choosing individual words and their meanings, the average writer and the speaker often chooses larger building blocks. The meanings of words are much more intrinsically connected than is traditionally assumed. “A given word is statistically likely to trigger other words and frequently also a set of connotations, as evidenced by the concept of semantic prosody” (Dam- Dam-Jenson 2006: 46). In the consideration of meaning as the extended units of meaning rather than limited concept of lexical meaning, the implication of the techniques provided by Corpus information becomes very clear. The relevance of corpora in the learning of Business English thus becomes evident. In order to better understand the relevance of corpora in the Business English context, an examination of the semantic associations of words found in the business lexical environment can be instrumental. A lot of research has been carried out before corpora evolved relevant techniques and strategies in spoken as well as written Business English. Some of the essential studies on the contribution of corpora in Business English confirms “how words in the Business English environment interact with each other on a semantic level...based on an analysis of corpus data” and they prove “that not only do words in the business environment have semantic prosodies - that is they are found to regularly collocate with word groups that share semantic similarity. But they also have prosodies that are unique to business. This is separate from the prosodies they generate in the ‘general English’ environment” (Mike 2006: 79). Thus, it is most essential to understand the role of corpus in Business English as contributing to the strategies of Business English learning. The use of corpus in the genre of Business English, especially in the formulation of words in the Business corpus environment has been significant. In the creation of language that is being used today in the Business world and the kind of language that people are conducting business in English and the contribution of corpus has always been stressed. “A corpus is only as useful as what goes into it” (www.fllkorea2.mireene.com). Therefore, the development of a language for conducting business and a range of styles and registers are all significantly assisted by the use of corpora tools and techniques. Various types of corpora and chief contributions There are various types of corpora such as the corpora of academic and Business English. These can be useful tools for modern business executives in carrying out their routine official chores. The merits of building corpora from a pedagogical perspective can also be well understood as the contribution of corpora in Business English. These are useful tools in the strategies of Business English. “They provide a concentrated vocabulary lists for academic and Business English which can be used in the design of materials. They are based on real conversations, so dialogues or texts can be extracted for classroom or course book use” (McCarthy & Walsh 1997-2007: 59). The other chief contributions of Business Corpora, in the context of Business English, are also significant to note. “Business corpora are also widely used by publishers, materials writers and instructors in teaching Business English courses. Written business corpora contain a wide range of written samples that one might expect to encounter in the workplace such as (faxes, emails, reports, funding proposals, memos, websites, and business newspaper articles). With regard to spoken Business English, a wide range of contexts can be found which are covered in the corpus data” (McCarthy & Walsh 1997-2007: 127). It is therefore important to note that the contribution of corpora in Business English has been widely acknowledged. The scholars of various types are of the common opinion regarding the role of corpora in the Business English. Such as the fact that these strategies of Business English caters for the needs of modern business environment and are very much assisted by the various types of corpora. In order to understand this special role of the Corpus information in the strategic development of Business English, the evaluation of the written and spoken business English learning can be crucial. There have been various efforts to understand the functioning of Business English and in one such effort it was found that “by using key words and unusual frequency instead of looking for a pure frequency, those words used commonly in business showed up very clearly and created a semantic world of business that was very clear to see” (www.users.utu.fi/micnel/BEC/poskeywords.htm). The lexis found could be encapsulated to a large extent within a limited number of semantic categories. These categories include: business people, companies, institutions, money, business events, places of business, time, modes of communication and lexis concerned with technology. Perhaps more significantly, the key lexis of Business English was found to be overtly positive in nature, with very few negative words featuring at all. The analysis showed that “Business English was semantically divorced from lexis concerned with personal issues, society, family, house and home and personal activities” (www.users.utu.fi/micnel/BEC/poskeywords.htm). Therefore, considering the fact that Business English has been one of the most significant techniques of learning the language in the modern business environment, the role of Corpus information becomes all the more relevant and essential. Conclusion The above discussions bring to fore the fact that Business English plays a crucial role in the success of modern organisations; and corpora, as a language tool, has been instrumental in the transformation of Business English as an inevitable part of corporate success. An ultimate evaluation of the different strategies of Business English in the background of corpora makes it apparent that the contribution of the latter has been vital to the development of the former. The legacy of corpora and the different types of corpora in Business English and its strategies are of great significance. Several scholars who have discussed the contribution of the corpora towards Business English are unanimous in their opinion regarding the role of corpora in the development of Business English. Therefore, it becomes conspicuous that corpora have played a pivotal role in the development of Business English. References Bowker, L. & Pearson, J. (2002). Working with Specialized Language: A practical guide to using corpora. London: Routledge Curado-Fuentes, A. (2000). A lexical Common Core in English for Information Science and Technology. Caceres: Universidad de Extremamadura, Servicio de Publicaciones Dam-Jenson, H. & Zethsen, K. K. (2006). Pragmatic patterns and the lexical system: A reassessment of evaluation in language. London: Routledge http://fllkorea2.mireene.com/blog/owl_issue3_find_out.pdf - (Accessed on April 20th 2008 at 14:00) http://users.utu.fi/micnel/BEC/poskeywords.htm - (Accessed on April 19th 2008 at 09:00) http://www.whitesmoke.com/business-english.html - (Accessed on April 19th 2008 at 07:30). Krishnamurthy, R. (2001). The Science and Technology of Corpus. Corpus for Science and Technology. In Aguado, G. & P Duran. La investigacion en lenguas aplicadas: enfoque multidisciplinar. Madrid: Universadid Politecnica. McCarthy, M. O. A., & Walsh, S. (1997-2007). An Introduction to Corpora in English Language Teaching. Thomson ELT. Mike, N. (2006). Semantic Associations in Business English: A Corpus-Based Analysis. Sinclair, J. (2004). Developing Linguistic Corpora: A Guide to Good Practice Corpus and Text - Basic Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press Wynne, M. (2004). Developing Linguistic Corpora: A Guide to Good Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press Read More