Introduction – The rationale and the research gap

This MA research project has two principal objectives. The first is the creation and analysis of a corpus of annual reports of Irish-registered companies, and examination of its most prominent lexical features. The second goal is the development of teaching resources informed by the corpus analysis, aimed at Business English teachers, learners as well as for non-native English-speaking professionals. It is also hoped that the research will inform and inspire the development of additional BE corpora and relevant corpus-based pedagogical materials. The materials that were developed are underpinned by the lexical approach and the template that is provided can be used by teachers and researchers for the creation of additional materials informed by the corpus data presented. The corpus, the findings, as well as teaching materials will be published online on a dedicated website. In an attempt to “narrow the gap between academia and the workplace” (Zhang, 2013:144), and inform the content of BE teaching and learning the available literature in the field, the findings, as well as possible anticipated limitations and considerations will be discussed in this thesis. 

It is commonly accepted that the English language has become the current Lingua Franca of business (Labrador and Ramon: 2020). Major multinational companies are mandating English as the common corporate language in an attempt to “facilitate communication and performance across geographically diverse functions and endeavors” (Neeley: 2012). 

Business professionals, managers, and leaders, in particular, working in a foreign language will typically need to develop, at some stage of their career, a refined knowledge of English. A corpus-based teaching resource can be used to inform teaching and answer many questions on what is perceived as key lexis and collocations required to achieve a high-level command of the target language. All of this linguistic information is important because choosing inappropriate words is very common among nonnative speakers of English and neither intuition nor introspection can accurately inform learners about the appropriate use of lexical items (Sardinha, 2000; Stewart, 2010). 

As studies (Walker 2011) reveal, non-native English-speaking professionals are conscious of their nonnative linguistic status and wish to improve the language they use at the workplace in order to perform more successfully in a business environment. Their command of English affects their standing, the impression they create, their message, and their overall professional success. In response to the need to help non-native English-speaking professionals improve their language use, this study has a twofold aim: to offer corpus-based insights into salient linguistic features of Business English and their context-specific use and to develop sample corpus-based Business English learning materials.

The study focuses specifically on 20 annual reports of 2019 published in Ireland by the twenty ISEQ-listed public companies (ISEC 20). It is evident from the literature that this genre has not been examined in the Irish context before. A previous study in the UK (Rutherford, 2005) conducted a corpus-based genre analysis of annual reports of UK companies by employing word frequencies to identify genre rules and analyse accounting narratives. To the best of the author’s knowledge, no Business English corpora have been created in the Irish context and the present study is the very first of its kind in Ireland.