Conclusion

As mentioned in the introduction section, this project has two main deliverables. One is the creation and analysis of the corpus, and examination of the most common lexical features, namely most frequent words, keywords, most frequent four-word clusters and collocations. The second deliverable is the development of teaching resources that can be immediately used in the BE classroom that apply principles of the lexical approach.

The corpus created for the purpose of this study comprises nearly one million tokens, the analysed lexical features were: the 50 most frequent lexical words, 50 keywords and 20 collocates of the 50 top frequent content words/nodes, and the 50 most frequent four-word clusters. Previous research and the provided overview of the literature in the field have revealed the usefulness of the corpus analysis in linguistics and its pragmatic pedagogical applications.

This research has led to the following conclusions on the lexical features on Irish ARs: the language of the Annual Reports of Irish companies, effectively seen as a sample of language of Business in Irish context, is highly specific and the terminology used is notably specialised and business-oriented. Secondly, the collocations occurring in the ARs tend to form what is referred to as compound nouns, and essentially constitute terminology that is strongly embedded in the language of business. Additionally, the presence of the most frequent components in the collocations and clusters was noted, which confirms the notion that English language is patterned, which in turn validates the requirement for lexical approach in BE. (Sinclair, 1991, as in O’Keeffe et al., (2007:63), Lewis, 1993:91)

In terms of direction of the future of this project, the results are intended to be published on the dedicated website, where the sample teaching materials/templates will also be available for download. Further analysis of the AR genre can be pursued, analysing the ISEQ 20 list in consecutive years, thereby creating a richer, bigger corpus that is bound to reflect the language of Annual Reports of Irish companies over a definite period. This may offer deeper insights and may lead to a deeper understanding of the language of business in the Irish context and its lexical features. This in turn could inform and enrich the pedagogy of BE overall.

In this manner the analysed corpus can be investigated further in order to obtain a much more thorough understanding of the given texts, or in order to obtain more materials and information, such as data on semantic prosody or statistical significance analysis of collocations. Additional analysis may also be in order to investigate dispersion. i.e. “how evenly are syntactic constructions a, b, c distributed in a corpus” (Gries, 2017:597). Further investigations can be employed such as semantic analysis, which would require tagging the corpus and employing linguistic annotation. This would in turn necessitate additional software tools (e.g. Sketch Engine, or TagAnt). The potential analysis of tagged corpora could support the part-of-speech (POS) investigation which was not a focus of this research. In addition, the use of corpus linguistics techniques may be combined with discourse analysis of BE or ARs genre analysis. Additionally, the current corpora can be extended to include (a) more ARs of companies registered in Ireland – to obtain broader, more representative view o the BE in the Irish context, (b) ARs of the same companies, but in consecutive years – to reveal more characteristics and patterns of the language, (c) a comparative multilingual corpus approach could be applied – to facilitate translation of the ARs, or (d) parallel corpora can be created using ARs from other English-speaking countries, and finally (e) an equivalent of a ‘learner’ corpus can be examined in parallel/compared, i.e corpus of ARs created by companies using Business English as Lingua Franca. This paragraph does not exhaust the possibilities of more advanced analyses that can be further performed.

Similarly, this study can easily be replicated in many other disciplines and scenarios, and in any other context of language use and teaching. Taking the ESP route, different texts stemming from different fields can be investigated such as engineering, CS, marketing and communication, sales, yoga teaching etc. Likewise, further analysis of different genres of Business English in Ireland could take place, and texts such as emails, transcribed meetings, training sessions or webinars can easily be investigated and applied to inform creation of teaching materials, as demonstrated here. As it emerges from the current and previous research corpus analyses, corpus investigation is very useful and effective in helping to understand how language is used in specific contexts. More attention should be paid to the use of language corpora as reliable sources of information for the creation of syllabi and materials.

To conclude, it is hoped that the ARIC corpus can contribute to the pedagogy of BE as a whole and can assist ESP and BE teachers to master this field of study using CL and corpus analysis methodology. It is also conceivable that this thesis may inspire teachers and researchers to perform the corpus analysis themselves. It may be a first step towards deeper analysis of Annual Reports of Irish companies. The information derived from the corpora that result from this and similar projects could inform further creation of the authentic pedagogical materials and which can be made publicly available online or integrated into specific language programmes.