Abstract
Business people spend a considerable amount of their working lives participating in different types of meetings, talking and listening. What makes business meetings difficult to grasp for both researchers and learners is the vast number of factors contributing to them, such as the size of a company, the purpose of the meeting and the relationships among the people involved. This article will try to examine how people in business communicate in meetings to get their work done and will also analyze some of the most recurrent features of the business meeting genre. I will draw on a particular corpus (CANBEC)—a unique resource which brings together descriptions of meetings of different types, both within and among companies, involving speakers, whose roles and responsibilities vary, and who represent a range of nationalities and differing first languages—and on the research carried out by Handford (2010). The analysis of keywords, concordance lines, and discourse provided him with thorough insights into certain aspects of business meetings, such as the structural stages of meetings, participants’ discursive practices useful in meetings, interpersonal language, creativity, power and constraint, and many other factors. In conclusion, I will make practical suggestions for implementing the knowledge of the business meeting, as a genre into the Business English classroom, as well as for the design of educational materials, which will help prepare students to participate efficiently in business meetings of various kinds.
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Notes
- 1.
CANBEC is undoubtedly a specialized corpus of a genre. The corpus was compiled from authentic internal and external meeting data, taken from 64 meetings recorded in 26 companies located mostly in the UK; although data were also collected in Japan, Ireland and continental Europe. Company sizes involved in the project varied, ranging from multinationals with over 50,000 employees to small businesses with a few employees. Data were provided by both the manufacturing and service industry. The companies represented the following sectors: manufacturing, pharmaceutical, IT, leisure, finance and consultancy. The majority of speakers were British L1-English speakers, but 20 % were non-native English speaking employees. Most of the recordease were male (79 %), and a majority of these were either upper- or middle-managers (Handford 2010).
- 2.
In literature the term strategy is also used, and there is a potential overlap between the two. Yet, the term strategy implies an intentional choice of how to proceed, whereas practices tend to remain at a more automatic level. Practices defined as shared or sanctioned communicative conventions explain how much an individual’s spoken workplace communication can occur spontaneously or automatically, as a result of that person having been apprenticed in a particular professional community. Strategies, on the other hand, belong to the realm of conscious intent (Handford 2010, p. 30–31).
- 3.
The table listing word frequencies in meetings and everyday conversation can be found in Handford (2010, p. 99–100).
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Appendix—Sampled BE Textbooks
Appendix—Sampled BE Textbooks
Cotton, D., Falvey, D., Kent, S. 2010. Market Leader. Intermediate. London: Longman.
Cotton, D., Falvey, D., Kent, S. 2006. Market Leader. Upper-Intermediate. London: Longman.
Gomm, H. 2005. Intelligent Business. Video Resource Book. London: Longman.
Johnson, C. and Barrall, I. 2006. Intelligent Business. Upper-intermediate. Skills Book. London: Longman.
Trappe, T., Tullis, G. 2006. Intelligent Business. Upper-intermediate. London: Longman.
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Sobkowiak, P. (2015). Business Meetings as a Genre—Pedagogical Implications for Teaching Business English. In: Pawlak, M., Waniek-Klimczak, E. (eds) Issues in Teaching, Learning and Testing Speaking in a Second Language. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38339-7_14
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