Building a Business English corpus of Annual Reports of Irish companies and developing corpus-based learning materials
My MA Thesis in TESOL
Here is an overview:
English is a must in today’s workplace. It has become a Lingua Franca of business. My thesis recognises the need for non-native English-speaking professionals to improve their practical language use.
In doing so, I analysed 20 Annual reports of companies listed on the Irish stock exchange. For practical reasons, I picked the ISEQ 20, the 20 highest listing companies in 2019.
I used a concordancer (software that analyses texts’ linguistic features) to create a corpus (a large body of text) that I named ARIC and I performed five analyses to reveal:
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50 most frequent words
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50 keywords
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20 top colocates of 50 most frequent words
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50 most frequent clusters (aka word bundles).
My mini-study offers a new Business English corpus that is available here.
It also reveals a variety of lexical features typical of Irish Annual Reports and delivers evidence-based teaching resources that you can access for free if you are a Business English teacher/researcher/learner.
Have fun with it!
ABSTRACT
English has become the Lingua Franca of business (Erling and Thir, 2016, Labrador and Ramon, 2020). Major multinational companies are mandating the use of English as the common corporate language in an attempt to “facilitate communication and performance across geographically diverse functions and endeavors” (Neeley: 2012). Recognising the need to help non-native English-speaking professionals striving to improve their language use, this study, primarily, aims to offer corpus-based insights into prominent linguistic features of Business English of Annual Reports of companies listed on the Irish stock exchange and their context-specific use. It also offers to develop sample corpus-based Business English learning materials that can be readily used in the BE pedagogy.
First, the corpus comprising 20 annual reports of companies listed on ISEQ 20 for the year 2019 was created. AntConc Software was used to perform different types of lexical analysis. These revealed the 50 most frequent content words, 50 keywords, 20 collocates of the 50 top frequent words, and 50 most frequent four-word clusters/bundles. What is evident from the consecutive investigations is that the language of the Annual Reports of Irish companies, which is deemed a representative sample of Business English in the Irish context, is highly specific and that the terminology used is notably specialised and domain-, i.e. business-specific.
Additionally, the presence of the most frequent lexical items/content words in the more complex constructions, i.e. collocations and clusters confirms the view that “the lexis accounts for the organisation and patterning of language” (Sinclair, 1991, in O’Keeffe et al, 2007:60). Corpus-based materials/teaching resources were developed, which can be easily adapted and extended for use in different Business English contexts.
The study contributes to the BE pedagogy in three ways:
It offers a new Business English corpus which will be made publicly available.
It reveals a wide range of lexical features characteristic of the genre of Annual Reports of Irish companies, and
It provides corpus-based teaching resources that can be used by the teachers and researchers in BE instruction and course planning, as well as in self-study.
By providing these key deliverables the study aims to address the research gap existing in the realm of the BE in the Irish context, as well as one that exists between the classroom and the workplace.