The Language of Business Studies Lectures: A corpus-assisted analysis (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS) Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences.

Editor Andreas H. Jucker

University of Zurich, English Department Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]

Associate Editors Jacob L. Mey

University of Southern Denmark

Herman Parret

Jef Verschueren

Susan C. Herring

Emanuel A. Schegloff

Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp

Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp

Editorial Board Shoshana Blum-Kulka Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Jean Caron

Université de Poitiers

Indiana University

Masako K. Hiraga

St.Paul’s (Rikkyo) University

University of California at Los Angeles

Deborah Schiffrin

David Holdcroft

Georgetown University

Sachiko Ide

Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

Sandra A. Thompson

Thorstein Fretheim

Catherine KerbratOrecchioni

John C. Heritage

Claudia de Lemos

Teun A. van Dijk

Marina Sbisà

Richard J. Watts

Robyn Carston

University College London

Bruce Fraser

Boston University University of Trondheim University of California at Los Angeles

University of Leeds Japan Women’s University

University of Lyon 2 University of Campinas, Brazil University of Trieste

Paul Osamu Takahara

University of California at Santa Barbara Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona University of Berne

Volume 157 The Language of Business Studies Lectures. A corpus-assisted analysis Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli

The Language of Business Studies Lectures A corpus-assisted analysis

Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli University of Florence

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Camiciottoli, Belinda Crawford. The language of business studies lectures : a corpus-assisted analysis / Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli. p. cm. -- (Pragmatics & beyond, ISSN 0922-842X ; new ser., v. 157) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Academic language--Data processing. 2. Business education--Data processing. 3. Lectures and lecturing--Data processing. I. Title. P120.A24C36 2007 401'.41--dc22 2007003849 ISBN 978-90-272-5400-9 (hb : alk. paper)

© 2007 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents Preface

ix

List of acronyms and abbreviations

xi

List of tables and figures chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Rationale for the study 1 1.2 The university lecture: pros and cons 2 1.3 Aims of the study 4 1.4 Target readership 6 1.5 Overview of the book 6 chapter 2 Background to the study: The merger of discourses 2.1 Introduction 9 2.2 Spoken discourse 9 2.2.1 The linguistic/discursive approach 10 2.2.2 The interactional approach 13 2.3 Academic discourse 15 2.4 Disciplinary discourse: the field of economics 21 2.5 Professional discourse: the world of business 25 2.6 A conceptual framework for analyzing business studies lectures 28 chapter 3 The business studies lecture corpus: Design, collection and analysis 3.1 Introduction 31 3.2 Corpus design 31 3.3 Collecting the data 34 3.4 Transcribing the data 36 3.5 Methodology: an integrated approach 39 3.5.1 Quantitative and qualitative analysis 39

xiii

1

9

31




3.5.2 3.5.3 3.5.4

Comparative analysis 41 Behavioural observation 42 Participant feedback 43

chapter 4 Speaking to the audience 4.1 Introduction 45 4.2 Speech rate 46 4.3 Lecture style 49 4.3.1 Discourse dysfluencies 52 4.3.2 Reduced forms 54 4.4 Lexical informality 57 4.4.1 Vagueness 58 4.4.2 Idioms 62 4.5 Syntactic informality 65 4.5.1 Ellipsis 66 4.5.2 Non-restrictive which-clauses 68 4.6 Lexical density 73 4.7 Summary of findings 76 chapter 5 Interacting with the learners 5.1 Introduction 79 5.2 Discourse structuring 79 5.2.1 Lecture macrostructure 80 5.2.2 Macromarkers 84 5.2.3 Micromarkers 89 5.3 Evaluation 94 5.3.1 Relevance markers 96 5.3.2 Affect markers 100 5.4 Lecturer-audience interaction 104 5.4.1 Questions 105 5.4.2 Comprehension checks 108 5.4.3 Dialogic episodes 109 5.5 Audience responsiveness and feedback 113 5.6 Summary of findings 115

45

79

Table of contents 

chapter 6 Teaching the discipline and the profession 6.1 Introduction 119 6.2 Disciplinary/professional orientations: a descriptive profile 120 6.3 Real vs. hypothetical worlds 122 6.4 Argumentation 125 6.5 Specialized lexis 127 6.5.1 Global analysis 128 6.5.2 Keyword analysis 131 6.5.3 Connections to Business English 135 6.5.4 Compounds and buzzwords 138 6.6 Metaphors 142 6.6.1 Global analysis 144 6.6.2 Comparative analysis 147 6.7 Summary of findings 148

119

chapter 7 151 Beyond speaking: Multimodal aspects 7.1 Introduction 151 7.2 The visual mode 153 7.2.1 The analytical framework 154 7.2.2 The analysis 155 7.2.2.1 Visual typologies in the BSLC 158 7.2.2.2 Comparative analysis 163 7.3 The nonverbal mode 165 7.3.1 Methodology in nonverbal studies 168 7.3.2 The analysis 169 7.3.2.1 Interpersonal episodes 170 7.3.2.2 Nonverbal behaviours of the lecturers 171 7.3.2.3 A microanalysis of one lecturer’s nonverbal behaviours 177 7.4 Summary of findings 181 chapter 8 Final remarks 183 8.1 Introduction 183 8.2 Aims, findings, pedagogical implications and research prospects 183 8.3 Methodological insights 188 8.4 Business studies lectures and interdiscursivity revisited 189

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

References

193

Appendix A – Transcript samples from the twelve lectures of the BSLC

213

Appendix B – Specialized lexis in the BSLC ranked according to frequency

227

Name index

231

Subject index

235

Preface This book represents the culmination of several years of work focusing on the discourse of business studies, one of the most dynamic and popular disciplines in institutes of higher education worldwide. The research began in 2000 under the auspices of an Italian inter-university English-language project entitled Small Corpora and Genre Analysis: Academic Discourse in the Humanities and Social Sciences. As a member of the research team of the University of Florence, I was involved in the creation and investigation of a corpus of lectures given by business academics. Unlike corpora of written discourse which lend themselves well to distinct collection and analysis phases, spoken corpora are typically investigated ‘along the way’ in the form of preliminary or limited-scope studies. For this reason, some of the material in this volume expands on previous publications. In Chapter 5, the analyses of discourse markers and relevance markers build on articles that appeared in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Crawford Camiciottoli 2004a) and the volume Academic Discourse: New Insights into Evaluation (Crawford Camiciottoli 2004b), respectively. In Chapter 6, the study of domain-specific metaphors extends the findings of an article published in the volume Evaluation in Oral and Written Academic Discourse (Crawford Camiciottoli 2004c). In Chapter 7, the investigation of non-verbal behaviour further develops a study that appeared in the volume Academic Discourse, Genre and Small Corpora (Crawford Camiciottoli 2004d). In the summer of 2002, I had an extremely rewarding experience at the English Language Institute of the University of Michigan as a Morley Scholar. It was then that the idea for this book began to take form. I am particularly grateful to John Swales for his advice and guidance towards realizing this goal when it was still in its infant stages. At that time, I also had the opportunity to read Alan Partington’s (1998) Patterns and Meanings: Using Corpora for Language Research and Teaching which inspired the core methodology adopted in this study. Since then and throughout this project, I have benefited from the support of several colleagues and friends. I would especially like to thank Gabriella Del Lungo, Inmaculada Fortanet, Polly Walsh and, again, John Swales and Alan Partington, for all taking the time to read drafts of chapters and provide insightful comments. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions allowed me to incorporate new and broadened perspectives into the final version.


I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to all the professors who agreed to participate in this research. By authorizing the recording of their live lectures or by kindly sending their lectures directly to me, they made this study possible. Finally, I wish to thank my husband, Adriano, for his unfailing encouragement and patience throughout this long endeavour.

List of acronyms and abbreviations BASE BEC BSLC BSLCtag BSTM BSTMtag CANBEC CANCODE CLAWS EAP EBM EFL ESL ESP L1 L2 MDLC MDLCtag MICASE NNS NRWC NS NS/BR NS/US NVC SIE SMEs T2K-SWAL

British Academic Spoken English corpus Business English Corpus Business Studies Lecture Corpus Tagged 20,000-word sample from the Business Studies Lecture Corpus Business Studies Text Materials corpus Tagged 20,000-word sample from the Business Studies Text Materials Corpus Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System English for Academic Purposes European Business Module (guest lecture series) English as a Foreign Language English as a Second Language English for Specific Purposes First Language Second Language Multi-Disciplinary Lecture Corpus Tagged 20,000-word sample from the Multi-Disciplinary Lecture Corpus Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English Non-native speaker Non-restrictive which-clauses Native speaker Native speaker of British English Native speaker of American English Nonverbal communication Sentence-initial ellipsis Small and medium sized enterprises TOEFL 2002 Spoken and Written Academic Language

List of tables and figures

chapter 2 Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2

The two-way discursive link between the professional world and the business studies classroom The interdiscursive nature of business studies lectures

27 29

chapter 3 Table 3.1

The Business Studies Lecture Corpus (BSLC)

Table 3.2

Mark-up for the BSLC

34 38

Speech rate distribution in the BSLC Distribution of average words per minute in the BSLC Stylistic analysis of the BSLC Discourse dysfluencies in BSLC vs. MDLC Reduced forms in BSLC vs. MDLC Vague expressions in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Idioms in BSLC vs. MDLC Sentence-initial ellipsis (SIE) in BSLC vs. MDLC Non-restrictive which-clauses (NRWCs) in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Lexical density and lexical variation in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Dispersion plot of pause fillers in the BSLC Sample of concordance output of false starts in the BSLC Dispersion plot of false starts in the BSLC Dispersion plot of reduced forms in the BSLC Sample of concordance output of gonna in the BSLC Sample of concordance output of kind of in the BSLC Sample of concordance output of NRWCs in the BSLC

47 48 50 54 55 59 64 67 70 74 52 53 53 56 56 61 71

Example, instance and case in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Verbs used in macromarker patterns in the BSLC Macromarkers in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Micromarkers in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM

82 86 87 90

chapter 4 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 4.8 Table 4.9 Table 4.10 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6 Figure 4.7 chapter 5 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures Table 5.5 Table 5.6 Table 5.7 Table 5.8 Table 5.9 Table 5.10 Table 5.11 Table 5.12 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5

Co-occurrence of micromarkers in the BSLC Relevance markers in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Affect markers in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Questions in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Comprehension checks in BSLC vs. MDLC Dialogic episodes in BSLC vs. MDLC Audience responsiveness in six BSLC lectures Lecturer-audience interaction and levels of audience responsiveness in six BSLC lectures Dispersion plot of macromarkers in the BSLC Dispersion plot of relevance markers in the BSLC Dispersion plot of affect markers good and bad in the BSLC Dispersion plot of questions in the BSLC Sample of concordance output of comprehension check okay? in the BSLC

93 98 102 106 108 110 113 114 88 100 104 107 109

chapter 6 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4 Table 6.5 Table 6.6 Table 6.7 Table 6.8 Table 6.9 Table 6.10 Table 6.11 Table 6.12 Table 6.13 Table 6.14 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3

Disciplinary overview of the BSLC Hypotheticality in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Meta-argumentative devices in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Top sixty lemmas of specialized lexis in the BSLC Content-specific three-word lexical bundles in the BSLC Top thirty keywords in BSLC vs. MDLC Keywords in BSLC vs. BSTM Common specialized lexis: BSLC vs. BEC keywords Common specialized lexis: BSLC vs. CANBEC keywords Word compounds in BSLC vs. BSTM Business buzzwords in the BSLC Lexical items grouped by root metaphor category Discipline-specific metaphors in the BSLC Discipline-specific metaphors in the BSTM Hard-soft cline of business studies Dispersion plot of the lemma firm in the BSLC Dispersion plot of the lemma produce in the BSLC

121 124 126 129 131 132 134 136 137 140 142 144 145 147 120 130 130

A framework for analyzing visuals in academic speech (Rowley-Jolivet 2002) Overview of visuals in the BSLC Distribution of visual typologies in the BSLC Visual typologies in BSLC vs. BSTM

155

chapter 7 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 7.4

156 158 164

List of tables and figures  Table 7.5 Table 7.6 Table 7.7 Table 7.8 Table 7.9 Table 7.10 Table 7.11 Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 7.3 Figure 7.4 Figure 7.5 Figure 7.6 Figure 7.7

Types of interpersonal episodes in the five lectures Distribution of interpersonal episodes in the five lectures Sample of performance indicator grid Interpersonal episodes and gesturing/gaze in the five lectures Qualitative comparison of gesturing and gaze in the five lectures Qualitative comparison of body posture, proximity and spatial movement in the five lectures A multimodal transcription of a lecture video sequence Scriptural visual in the BSLC (Lecture 12) Scriptural visual in the BSLC (Lecture 2) Numerical visual in the BSLC (Lecture 1) Graphical visual in the BSLC (Lecture 2) Graphical visual in the BSLC (Lecture 11) Figurative visual in the BSLC (Lecture 11) Figurative visual in the BSLC (Lecture 11)

178 159 159 160 161 161 162 162

The interdiscursive nature of business studies lectures (revisited)

190

170 171 172 173 174 176

chapter 8 Figure 8.1

chapter 1

Introduction Business Studies has been characterized as an education for business closely allied to the needs of employers. (Macfarlane 1997: 19)

1.1 Rationale for the study Among the myriad of discourse analyses undertaken over the years, one might wonder why an entire book should be dedicated to something so specific as business studies lectures. Beyond the goal of providing a description of a particular type of language-in-use, there is also a very practical reason. In today’s globalized world where job competition is ever keener, there is a growing demand for academic credentials in business studies. These qualifications often represent the key to breaking into the job market as a newcomer, but also to advancing one’s career as an experienced business professional. Moreover, the interdisciplinary nature of business studies programmes allows learners to acquire knowledge and skills that spill over into a number of fields beyond the traditional core of economics, accounting, management and marketing, giving them the broader multi-disciplinary expertise that is now a highly desirable asset in the dynamic world of business. In fact, most business studies programmes incorporate topics from other disciplines, such as law, communication and information technology.1 Thus, ‘business studies’ can be seen as an umbrella term to refer to the variety of courses that are offered at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels to develop business professionals. As a consequence of these changing trends in the workplace, business education has moved to the forefront of academics. In the UK, with approximately 13% of the total enrolments at university in 2004–2005, business studies ranked at the top of all other academic divisions (UK Higher Education Statistics Agency). According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, since 1970 in the US there has been a constant increase in the number of business studies degrees conferred at both the Bachelor and Master levels. In 2003–2004, they counted close to 22% of all Bachelor’s degrees and 25% of all Master’s degrees. At my own home institution, the University of Florence, according to official statistics for the aca-


demic year 2005–2006, the Business Administration degree ranked second for number of enrolments among all 106 undergraduate degree programmes offered by the university. Business studies programmes attract learners from a range of life experiences and cultural backgrounds, and thus with different requirements. Novices at the beginning of their academic careers need to be introduced to basic disciplinary concepts and strongly guided in their learning. Other learners may already have professional experience, as is often the case of students enrolled in MBA or distance learning programmes, and therefore require advanced content, together with more autonomous and flexible learning formats. Yet one factor in particular has had a strong influence on this growing demand: the dominant role of English as the lingua franca in goal-oriented international business negotiations and transactions (Louhiala-Salminen 1996; Nickerson 1999; Candlin and Gotti 2004). This has led to a dramatic increase in the number of non-native speakers desiring to attend business studies courses conducted in English. However, in order to achieve academic success, these students must overcome many well-known difficulties, among which is understanding content lectures in a foreign language. This continues to be an obstacle for many international students even at advanced proficiency levels (Olsen and Huckin 1990; Thompson 1994; Mulligan and Kirkpatrick 2000), but it is one they must surmount; lectures have always been the backbone of university education. For a better understanding of this issue, I will now briefly discuss university lectures, how they have evolved and where they may be headed in the future.

1.2 The university lecture: pros and cons As a teaching methodology, we know that the lecture dates back to Aristotle’s time.2 Today lectures typically take place within the framework of institutionalized education and have been broadly characterized as a type of pedagogic discourse, i.e., the specialized communicative practices of education that are concerned with the transmission and acquisition of knowledge. According to Bernstein (1986), operating within pedagogic discourse are instructional discourse, or the specific knowledge and skills to be transmitted and acquired, but also regulative discourse, which establishes the order and social relations necessary for transmission. This is reflected in university lectures where specific competencies are transmitted (the instructional plane) by an authority figure who maintains and legitimizes the goals of the teaching activity (the regulative plane). Thus, university lectures have been seen as a channel used by an expert to impart information for the benefit of a student audience (Brown 1978). More recently, lectures have been described as an

Chapter 1. Introduction

expository classroom genre (Fortanet 2005), which similarly takes into account both their purpose and the relationship between the lecturer and the audience.3 Lectures conforming to this model have traditionally dominated university instruction. However, in recent years there have been some questions raised about their effectiveness, stemming from a rejection of the view that learning takes place by acquiring and storing information in an essentially passive way. As pointed out by Gold et al. (1991), learning occurs in other ways, such as discussion, reflection and hands-on experience. Taking a stronger position, Lave and Wenger (1991) maintain that effective learning is not achieved through the transmission of knowledge, but through processes of social co-participation that transform newcomers into members of a community of practice, as occurs in apprenticeship. Using empirical data, Bligh (2000) shows that while lectures are effective for disseminating factual information, they are less so for promoting critical thinking skills and developing attitudes compared to the discussion method. Furthermore, there is evidence that lectures may not even be completely successful in transmitting information since they are typically much longer than the average attention span of audiences, which dwindles away significantly after about twenty to thirty minutes (Bligh 2000). The idea of individual learning styles has also been brought into the discussion. While auditory learners can benefit from the lecture method, students with other learning styles (e.g., visual or kinesthetic) are at a disadvantage (Johnson et al. 1991). Yet from the practical and tactical points of view, lectures do offer some advantages, particularly when compared to other less structured and more interactive teaching methods, such as seminars or tutorials. With classes of a hundred or more students, which is unfortunately often the reality of today’s academic world, lectures are basically the only feasible teaching method. They lend themselves well to course pre-planning with detailed syllabuses to structure content, allowing teachers to cover material efficiently and adequately. At the same time, lectures can help students to streamline learning since they can take in content much more quickly than if they had to find it for themselves. Moreover, once a lecture has been prepared, it can be rather easily updated and re-used. These are all plausible reasons why lectures rank high among the preferred teaching methods of instructors, but also of students, as shown by studies carried out in both the US and Europe (Knapper and Cropley 1991; Bourdieu and Passeron 1994). Therefore, in spite of the criticisms weighed against them, lectures in universities are probably here to stay. A compromising response to the critics of lectures can be found in the literature that suggests various ways to improve them. Some of these refer to techniques for structuring lecture content: previews, intermediate progress reports, final summaries, and effective use of visual aids (Gold et al. 1991). With particular reference to the latter, recent technological advances offer us new options. For example, soft-


ware that was originally developed for business presentations (e.g., Microsoft PowerpointTM) can be used to structure information and present it to students during lectures in an extremely efficient way. In addition, lecturers can now use interactive whiteboards (e.g., MimioBoard™) to electronically capture, save and share whiteboard notes, diagrams and drawings. Another way to assist students in assimilating content during lectures is to use reinforcement strategies. Repetition of key concepts and important points, or short review tasks or quizzes incorporated directly into the lecture can be helpful. The heightened awareness of the relational dimension of learning (Lave and Wenger 1991) has triggered a trend towards more interactive lectures where students take part in buzz groups, controlled discussion and brainstorming sessions (Ferris and Tagg 1996; Nesi 2001; Morell 2004). In addition, various interpersonal devices can be used as a way to engage listeners as much as possible. These include questions (Bamford 2005), asides (Zorzi 1999; Walsh and Crawford Camiciottoli 2001) and inclusive personal pronouns (Rounds 1987; Fortanet 2004a). Many of the strategies to improve the effectiveness of lectures have been devised with essentially L1 audiences in mind as a way to arouse and maintain interest, while promoting higher order learning at the same time. L2 lecture audiences have the same needs, but compounded by limited English language proficiency.

1.3 Aims of the study In response to both the growing popularity of business studies and the lecture comprehension problems of international business students, this book offers an in-depth look at the language of business studies lectures. Using an authentic corpus, I aim to shed light on the linguistic, academic, disciplinary and professional features of the lectures, and how these are influenced by the settings and the participants. This is important for a number of reasons linked to both learning and teaching. First of all, several linguistic variables associated with the spoken mode can have an impact on lecture comprehension (Flowerdew 1994). Understanding to what extent speech-like features characterize the lectures is particularly valuable for L2 learning contexts where students may have little experience with the ‘nonstandard’ lexical, syntactic and phonological forms often found in live speech. It is equally important to distinguish the features that reflect the academic nature of the lectures, particularly those that encode lecturer-audience interaction. Knowing how the lecturers interact with students to facilitate learning is useful to reinforce and promote the dialogic approach to teaching, which encourages two-way critical reflection in the classroom (Freire 1970).


Business studies lectures represent a nexus between the academy and the profession. In this sense, they may be viewed as a sort of situated learning experience (Lave and Wenger 1991), going beyond the mere transmission of factual information to stress the relational and social aspects of learning within a given community of practice. In fact, the ultimate goal of business studies lectures is to induct novices into the practices of the business community. However, in order to become legitimate members, they must master its language. Therefore, identifying key disciplinary and professional features is a step towards helping them achieve this goal. The above discussion suggests that the language of business studies lectures is multi-faceted, representing the merger of different types of discourse: spoken, academic, disciplinary and professional. This is the broad hypothesis underpinning my study. At first glance this may seem to be a matter of simple common sense, but upon further reflection, it becomes clear why it is not. In fact, in order to verify this hypothesis, we must show precisely how this merger occurs by first identifying, analyzing and interpreting specific features that draw from the different discourses, and then by exploring how they interpenetrate to create this particular variety of socially-situated language. Towards this aim, I seek to answer the following research questions: 1. How does the language of business studies lectures reflect the spoken mode? 2. How do the lecturers use language to interact with audiences to facilitate learning? 3. How do the lectures reflect the disciplinary and professional orientations of the community of practice? 4. How do the lecturers exploit the visual and gestural modes for instructional purposes? 5. How do the spoken, academic, disciplinary and professional dimensions converge in the lectures? To address all of these questions, it is necessary to adopt a new methodological approach that brings together different research traditions. Using language corpora makes it possible to accurately identify, quantify and compare discrete features. Follow-up qualitative discourse analysis is useful for greater insight into the empirical data obtained. Observational methods are needed to study extra-linguistic features. Ethnographically-inspired techniques (e.g., interviews, field methods) achieve ‘thick’ or explanatory descriptions that consider the social processes and contexts of language use (Bhatia 2002; Hyland and Hamp-Lyons 2002). This study will integrate elements from all these methodologies to provide a uniquely panoramic and interpretive account of business studies lectures.


1.4 Target readership Because this book deals with a type of discourse that incorporates key areas of language study and domains of usage, it will hopefully be of interest to several audiences. These range from professionals who study and teach language to newcomers who are just coming into contact with the community of practice. Therefore, the usefulness of the findings can be viewed from various perspectives. From the descriptive perspective, the study contributes to the growing body of linguistic evidence available to discourse analysts working in the area of spoken language in general, as well as those who focus more specifically on academic speech. In addition, the disciplinary and professional dimensions of the study should prove interesting for analysts of economics and business discourse, respectively. From the methodological perspective, the study can provide insights for linguists who work with corpora, particularly small specialized corpora that are well suited to combining computerized textual processing with forms of qualitative analysis. From the teaching perspective, EAP practitioners should be interested in the findings that can be applied towards designing more effective lecture comprehension teaching materials, while ESP practitioners working in the area of English for Business Studies will find useful discipline-related notions. Business studies academics who work with international audiences and desire to enhance the effectiveness of their lectures can discover more about the language used in this particular setting. Finally, from the learning perspective, the students who make up the audiences of business studies lectures can draw some benefits from this book. Of course, international business students are clearly not interested in theoretical aspects of language or detailed linguistic analyses. However, the wealth of examples provided throughout the book can be exploited by English language teachers to introduce these students to the authentic language and communicative practices they will experience both during lectures and in the world of business. This can have a positive influence not only on their present academic needs, but also on their future careers.

1.5 Overview of the book Following this introduction, Chapter 2 reviews the literature relevant to the study, serving both as the interpretive backdrop for the rest of the book and as the basis for its conceptual framework. Chapter 3 provides a close-up view of the data on which the study is based: the Business Studies Lecture Corpus, consisting of 12 recorded and transcribed lectures (109,449 words). It includes a discussion of corpus design and the collection/transcription of spoken data from both general and


local perspectives. This chapter also describes the methodological approach, which draws heavily on techniques from corpus linguistics but, as previously mentioned, also integrates other types of analysis. The following three chapters are dedicated to the linguistic analysis of the corpus. They correspond to the broad categories of discourse associated with business studies lectures and focus on selected features involved in successful comprehension in L2 settings. Chapter 4 investigates aspects linked to the spoken mode. These include speech rate and lecture style, as well as some specific lexico-grammatical devices (e.g., vague expressions, idioms, ellipsis). Chapters 5 deals with the academic dimension, with particular emphasis on interactional strategies used to facilitate learning. I examine discourse patterns and markers used by the lecturers to guide the listeners through the content, in addition to other forms of interaction that contribute to consolidating the lecturer-audience relationship (e.g., questions, evaluative markers and dialogic episodes). The disciplinary and professional nature of the corpus is addressed in Chapter 6 through an analysis of some domain-specific strategies for constructing and negotiating knowledge, including hypotheticality, argumentation and real-world connections. The impact of discipline is further investigated through the analysis of specialized lexis and metaphorical expressions, while the influence of the profession is studied through the identification of features that reveal ties with the business world. In addition, all three chapters comprise analyses that compare business studies lectures with lectures from other disciplines and with written business studies texts in order to identify their most distinctive features. Chapter 7 looks at the use of visual aids in the lectures and explores an aspect that has traditionally received little attention in language studies: nonverbal cues. This is probably due to the notable difficulties involved in systematically collecting, analyzing and interpreting this elusive type of data. However, by investigating some of the nonverbal signals in video recordings of lectures, I attempt to enhance our understanding of this much neglected issue. Chapter 8 returns to the original aims of the study and reviews the overall findings, with particular reference to pedagogical implications and directions for further research. I also discuss some methodological insights that have emerged along the way. The book concludes with a reflection on the notion of interdiscursivity, explaining how the different discourses have been shown to merge together within the business studies lectures.

Notes 1.

For more on the rise of interdisciplinary studies, see Bhatia (2002).

The Language of Business Studies Lectures 2. For an interesting study showing how modern day lectures have maintained many of the same communicative strategies of antiquity, see Giménez Moreno (1998). 3. Alongside these scholarly descriptions of lectures, I would like to offer (tongue-in-cheek) an ‘alternative’ one found on the Internet. Lecture: The process by which the notes of the lecturer become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either (Retrieved 07/05/05 from http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/lectures.htm).

chapter 2

Background to the study The merger of discourses Discourses have no discrete boundaries because people are always, in history, creating new Discourses, changing old ones, and contesting and pushing the boundaries of Discourses. (Gee 1999: 21)

2.1 Introduction This chapter will provide an overview of the literature relating to several broad discourse areas that come into play in business studies lectures: spoken, academic, disciplinary and professional, with the latter two referring to economics and business discourse, respectively. Because each of these constitutes a very wide field of research in its own right, this review cannot be completely exhaustive. However, by tracing some of the most significant research carried out, I hope to provide sufficient background to properly situate the analysis to come in the rest of the book.

2.2 Spoken discourse Although written discourse has traditionally received more attention in language study, over the years a number of scholars have concentrated on spoken language. This research can be grouped into essentially two major streams: one that focuses more on the distinctive linguistic and discursive features of speech, and the other that places more emphasis on the interactional, contextual and social aspects of face-to-face communication. Business studies lectures are delivered through the spoken channel, but are also constrained by the context of interaction and the social relations of the participants. Therefore, both approaches need to be considered in their analysis. In the following two paragraphs, I will review the developments and trends in these approaches, as illustrated through selected works of particular relevance to this study.

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2.2.1 The linguistic/discursive approach The early studies of this type are typically based on small amounts of data and tend to describe speech by way of comparison to writing. Chafe (1985) concludes that the real time and face-to-face nature of spoken language is reflected in linguistic features denoting involvement and fragmentation. These include first and second person pronouns, mental processes, hedging, emphatic particles, flow-monitoring devices, and dysfluencies, defined by Chafe (1985: 113) as “false starts, afterthoughts, repetitions, corrections and fumblings”, which are usually not perceived as deficiencies and thus do not interfere with communication. Similarly, Biber et al. (1999: 1048) speak of “normal dysfluency”.1 By contrast, formal written discourse shows more evidence of detachment and integration (e.g., nominalization, attributive adjectives, participle forms, relative clauses) linked to remoteness from interlocutors and more time available for editing. Tannen (1982) traces a similar picture by characterizing spoken discourse as interpersonal with an emphasis on involvement and internal evaluation, compared to written discourse which stresses content and external evaluation. Ochs (1979a) points out the unplanned nature of most spoken discourse which often features more referent deletion, demonstratives, active voice, implicit coordination, present tense and left-dislocation as compared to more planned written discourse. Similarly, Givón (1979) notes that spoken language makes frequent use of the topic-comment structure, while the grammatical subject-predicate structure is more characteristic of written language. Halliday (1985, 1989) describes spoken language as a process, having a dynamic structure characterized by complex sentence structures and grammatical intricacy, as well as a preference for verbs and clauses. On the other hand, he considers written discourse more of a static product which features relatively simple grammatical structures, but high lexical content, and thus favouring nouns and nominal groups. He pays particular attention to a text’s “lexical density”, measured by the number of lexical items per clause (Halliday 1989: 63–67), pointing out that spoken discourse tends to have a much lower lexical density than written discourse. Stubbs (1996: 64) nicely sums up this ‘polarized’ view: “[…] much written language is standard, formal, planned, edited, public and non-interactive, whereas spoken language is typically casual, spontaneous, private and face-to-face.” However, even in relatively early studies, both Chafe (1985: 122) and Halliday (1989: 46) warned against the danger of considering spoken and written language as a dichotomy. For example, news broadcasts may have characteristics that are normally associated with formal written prose (e.g., few dysfluencies and high lexical density), while a novel may be purposely written in a conversational style with hesitation fillers, low lexical density and grammatical intricacy. In addition, technological advances have led to the emergence of new modes of communication

Chapter 2. Background to the study: The merger of discourses

that mix elements of the traditional spoken and written channels. A case in point is the e-mail, which incorporates aspects of spoken language (e.g., informality, marked ellipsis, context-bound deixis, lack of punctuation) into a written code (Louhiala-Salminen 2002; Argondizzo and Plastina 2004). Therefore, in order to have a more accurate picture, it is necessary to consider other aspects of speech beyond the channel of transmission. Much work of this type has been based on the functional approach, inspired by Firth’s (1957: 182) linguistic view of “context of situation” and further developed within the tradition of Hallidayan systemic grammar. Halliday’s (1978) concept of register describes language in its immediate context of use according to three fundamental variables: field (the content or informational focus of the discourse), tenor (the roles of the participants in terms of status and relationship) and mode (the way in which the language is transmitted and structured). These variables are then encoded at three metafunctional levels, respectively: ideational (realized through transitivity patterns), interpersonal (realized through mood and modality) and textual (realized through thematic choices). If situational variables are associated with register in the systemic-functional approach, culturally-influenced social actions are instead linked to genre, defined by Eggins and Martin (1997: 236) as: “[…] different ways of using language to achieve different culturally-established tasks, and texts of different genres are texts which are achieving different purposes in the culture.” Eggins (1994: 35) sees the relationship between genre and register in terms of “genre potential”, which she describes as “the possible configurations of register variables allowed within a given a culture at a given time.” Thus, according to systemic linguists, a lecture is a genre realized through the pedagogic register, featuring the informational content of the lecture as field, the lecturer-audience relationship as tenor and face-to-face spoken language as mode. I will return to the concept of genre in the next section dedicated to academic discourse, where it will take on a broader meaning. The systemic theoretical framework has laid the groundwork for studies of spoken language within the tradition of discourse analysis. In Sinclair and Coulthard’s (1975) pioneering study, classroom discourse was structurally described as a series of three-part exchanges (Initiation-Response-Feedback) which contain various functional moves (e.g., framing, focusing, answering). This model has inspired the analysis of speech in a variety of settings, e.g., doctor-patient interviews (Coulthard 1981), service encounters (Ventola 1987), everyday conversation (Francis and Hunston (1992), business meetings (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 1995) and university discussion classes (Basturkmen 2003). Of particular relevance is an early study by Coulthard and Montgomery (1981) which identified a series of move-like units (e.g., informing, commenting, glossing) in lecture extracts, thus showing how this approach can be adapted to describe discourse which is not overtly dialogic, but is nonetheless strongly oriented towards an audience

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and therefore interactively designed. Because breaking down an entire text into functional moves requires detailed qualitative analysis, it is feasible only with relatively limited amounts of spoken data, typically extracts or short samples of speech. However, move analysis still remains a valid option for analysts of spoken discourse as shown by the more recent studies indicated above. The advent of computerized corpora, or large amounts of electronically stored language, and the ensuing consolidation of corpus linguistics as a branch of the discipline, has created opportunities for much larger-scale studies of spoken language.2 Thanks to specially designed software, it is now possible to process vast amounts of text and generate empirical evidence of their particular linguistic and discursive features, and thus more systematically describe language and investigate its variation. When comparing the Lund spoken corpus with the LOB (Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen) written corpus in terms of lexical density, Stubbs (1996) found that, on average, spoken texts showed lower lexical density than written texts, in line with Halliday’s (1989) earlier observations. This tendency is supported by the large-scale work of Biber et al. (1999) based on the Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus of over forty million words. They investigated a range of lexical, grammatical, syntactic and functional features across four core registers: conversation, fiction, news texts and academic prose. In comparison with the written registers, conversation is characterized by low lexical density, more verbs than nouns, marked use of personal pronouns, dysfluencies and informal discourse markers. Further insights about the nature of spoken language have come from research based on the CANCODE (Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English) corpus, a five-million word collection of spontaneous conversation, comprising four interactional settings (i.e., transactional, professional, pedagogic and social). The corpus was developed at the University of Nottingham under a project funded and copyrighted by Cambridge University Press. Starting from the premise that spoken language is best investigated by looking at authentic everyday speech, CANCODE has spawned numerous studies highlighting important distinguishing features that have been largely neglected in standard pedagogic grammars traditionally based on written language. Among these are vague language (Carter and McCarthy 1997; Carter 1998), ellipsis, marked forms of reported speech and idioms (McCarthy 1998), hyperbole (McCarthy and Carter 2004) and non-restrictive which-clauses (Tao and McCarthy 2001). Using this evidence from the CANCODE corpus, McCarthy (1998: 47) convincingly argues that “Spoken language has its own grammar and lexicon, which although coinciding in most cases with the written language, differ in crucial areas that correspond to the goals and relations of the interactants and particular settings.” For this reason, McCarthy (1998) advocates a much higher status of spoken language in applied linguistics in general and


second language pedagogy in particular, as the above-mentioned features can clearly be problematic for L2 learners. On the other hand, corpus-based research has also confirmed that when varieties of spoken language beyond everyday conversation are considered, differences between the spoken and written mode become less distinct. Stubbs (1996) found that in terms of lexical density, spoken radio commentary was more similar to written fiction than to conversation. Biber (1988) notes that variation between speech and writing is necessarily influenced by the particular situational and functional variables involved. His widely acclaimed technique of multi-dimensional analysis (Biber et al. 1998) provides empirical evidence of variation among spoken and written registers. This methodology is based on the multivariate statistical analysis of texts to determine the co-occurrence of specific linguistic features which reflect five major underlying textual dimensions: informational vs. involved production, narrative vs. non-narrative discourse, elaborated vs. situation-dependent reference, overt expression of argumentation and impersonal vs. non-impersonal style (Biber et al. 1998: 62). Again comparing the Lund spoken corpus with the LOB written corpus, Biber’s findings showed that, compared to face-to-face conversation, prepared speech is more informational in nature and that broadcast speech is markedly less narrative. Thus, these spoken registers actually have more in common with written registers such as academic prose and official documents. Another interesting facet of the less than net distinction between spoken and written language has been recognized by Gunnarsson (1998). She stresses the need to integrate studies of text and speech, as the two are frequently not separate events, but instead represent a process that combines written and spoken components into an intertextual chain, thereby supporting Bakhtin’s (1986: 69) affirmation “any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances”. For example, a lecture may be derived from previously written notes, but also incorporate other types of written texts (e.g., handouts and slides). In this way, lectures would be part of a “genre chain” (Swales 2004a: 18), where a given genre is the product of a chronological series of antecedent genres. 2.2.2 The interactional approach The interactional dimension of speech has been the focus of sociolinguistic research, which emphasizes the interrelationship between language and social structure. Important insights have come from the theoretical work of the sociologist Goffman (1981: 137), who sees speech in terms of a “participation framework” in which all those involved manifest a certain stance towards utterances well beyond the traditional distinction of speaker vs. hearer. He further articulates the status of hearers into addressed recipient, unaddressed recipient or bystander, and distin-

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guishes different speaker production formats that include “animator” (the person who physically produces the speech), “author” (the person who authors the speech) and “principal” (the person or organization who endorse the content of the speech) (Goffman 1981: 167). Thus, speakers are seen as assuming an alignment or “footing” from which they projects themselves, which may at times shift to project a different aspect of self (Goffman 1981: 172). In this way, meaning is constantly being re-situated as speech unfolds. Goffman recognizes the triple role of lecturers as principal, author and animator all in the same person who assumes an authorial expert status, i.e., the “textual” self (Goffman 1981: 173). However, this status can change when lecturers shift footing to a more personal self, for example when using parenthetical remarks to digress from the lecture topic. Levinson (1988: 163) later expanded Goffman’s categories into “participant roles” which account for a wider range of role configurations found on both the production and reception ends of communication. He further elaborated the model from a linguistic perspective providing evidence of the grammatical realization of participant roles through deixis (person, time, spatial and social), evidentials and minor sentence types (e.g., imprecatives, exclamations, hortatives). This has led to a number of studies on various types of spoken language, among which can be cited courtroom trials (Matoesian 1999), television news narratives (Lombardo and Piazza 2001) and business meetings (Poncini 2002). The participation framework also offers insights about the nature of interactive discourse in classroom settings. In her analysis of university seminars, Anderson (1999) found that professors signalled their status as indirect recipients of student presentations through introductory frames and lack of acknowledgement tokens, thus orienting the discourse towards fellow students as the primary recipients. Another major line of interactionally-oriented research can be recognized in the work of conversation analysts within the ethnomethodological tradition. Using naturally-occurring spoken exchanges, the ground-breaking studies in this field revealed the sequential organization of utterances through mechanisms such as turn-taking (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974), adjacency pairs (Schegloff and Sacks 1973) and repair (Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977). Such distinctive features act to structure social interaction during ongoing conversation. In this way, the interactional context dynamically evolves with each utterance, which can thus be seen as both “context-shaped” and “context-renewing” (Drew and Heritage 1992: 18). The conversation analytic approach has also been applied to discourse in institutional settings where, unlike mundane conversation, interaction is conditioned by the goal-oriented nature of the talk and the professional/organizational identities of the participants, e.g., news interviews (Greatbatch 1988), medical consultations (Heath 1992) and service encounters (Gavioli 1997). In classroom interaction, McHoul (1990) found that in repair sequences, high school


teachers systematically clued students towards self-correction of errors. Koshik (2002) observed a similar strategy among teachers in a university-level L2 setting who elicited self-correction through incomplete repetition of students’ immediately preceding phrases. Such behaviours clearly reflect their professional identities and responsibilities. As a methodological framework conversation analysis is, of course, inherently linked to overtly dialogic discourse. However, it can be useful to shed more light on the interactional aspects of today’s lectures. In fact, in recent years there has been a move towards more interactive lectures (Ferris and Tagg 1996; Morell 2004) in which lecturers and students engage in direct exchanges in order to promote mutual reflection on topics and issues of learning. This approach recalls Freire’s (1970) theory of dialogical education, a method used to teach illiterate peasants and empower them to transform the oppressive societies in which they live. Yet this idea is equally relevant to any educational setting. Through dialogic encounters, learners develop the ability to critically perceive realities and then act upon them. This section has highlighted the linguistic, discursive and interactional insights about spoken language that have emerged over the years. Although these constitute an important foundation for analyzing business studies lectures, for a more complete picture we need to know more about the context in which they are produced. This leads us into the following discussion of discourse that takes place in academic settings.

2.3 Academic discourse As an initial approach to academic discourse, we might refer to Biber et al.’s (1999: 5) idea of registers as “situationally-defined varieties of language”. Thus, academic discourse might be seen as a register of written and spoken language linked to a situation which, broadly speaking, entails the transmission and acquisition of knowledge. Yet this interpretation appears overly simplistic as it does not take into sufficient account the relational factors that inevitably come into play. For this reason, it is more useful to return to and expand on the notion of genre. Bakhtin’s essay The Problem of Speech Genres first emphasized the idea of language as a product of social relations and not of isolated minds. Thus, speech genres are “determined by the specific nature of the given sphere of communication, semantic (thematic) considerations, the concrete situation of the speech communication, the personal composition of its participants, and so on” (Bakhtin 1986: 78) and develop into “relatively stable types” (Bakhtin 1986: 60). Because this conceptualization of genre embraces both the interpersonal and conventional aspects of texts, it provides greater insight into the nature of aca-

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demic discourse which involves differing social relationships among participants and well-established text types. For instance, research articles and conference presentations are typical of expert-to-expert communication, just as textbooks and lectures are of expert-to-novice communication. In the latter case, there is an asymmetrical relationship between participants similar to what we find in institutional discourse, where interaction is “primarily accomplished through the exchange between professional and lay persons” (Drew and Heritage 1992: 3). Yet participant relationships may be somewhat blurred (e.g., dissertation defences might be classified as ‘expert to neo-expert’) and the purpose of the communication (which may be likened to Bakhtin’s “concrete situation” quoted above) varies considerably. Typical aims of instructional academic discourse would be to impart knowledge, teach skills and practices, induct learners into discourse communities, promote critical thinking and encourage a positive attitude towards learning – all of which would come under a pedagogic umbrella. Research-oriented academic discourse may instead have very different aims, such as contributing new knowledge in a field, promoting one’s own academic standing, obtaining funding for research and gate-keeping for the discourse community. At the same time, it is important to recognize a certain degree of overlapping in roles and purposes. Academics are both instructors and researchers, and they may produce texts having more than one purpose. For example, a textbook can aim to transmit new concepts to learners, to convince peers of its worth (both intellectual and commercial) and, particularly in the case of advanced textbooks, to divulge new research findings (Swales 1995).3 Thus, this multi-faceted nature is perhaps best captured by Swales’ definition of genre as [...] a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains the choice of content and style. (1990a: 58)

Building on variation studies, systemic functional grammar, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, he shows how genres can be recognized by their recurring structural patterns and rhetorical styles which are determined by their communicative purpose. The Swalesian concept of genre has had an enormous impact on studies of academic discourse, generating a plethora of studies on an ever-increasing variety of genres found in the academic world. It has also had far-reaching implications in the analysis of discourse in non-academic settings: legal (Bhatia 1993), business (Akar and Louhiala-Salminen 1999), engineering consultancy (Dudley-Evans 2000) and politics (Trosborg 2000) – to mention just a few. This accumulation of scholarly work has recently led to a ‘revisitation’ of the concept,

Chapter 2. Background to the study: The merger of discourses 

where genres are seen as evolving and becoming “repurposed” according to changing social trends (Swales 2004a: 72). From this expanded perspective, genre analysis will no doubt continue to offer many more insights well into the future. Due to the elevated number of genre-based studies, a complete review is clearly not feasible. However, I would like to mention some important research that will attest to the broad applicability of this approach, looking first at studies of written academic discourse. Beginning with Swales’ (1990a) own seminal study on research articles, this particular genre has continued to receive much attention (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995; Paltridge 1997; Samraj 2002). The genre approach has been extended to other written research-process genres, such as book reviews (Motta-Roth 1995), review articles (Diani 2004) and PhD theses (Bunton 2002), but also to texts that do not come into the public eye or, “occluded genres” (Swales 1996: 45). Some examples are grant proposals (Connor and Mauranen 1999), manuscript submission letters (Okamura and Shaw 2000) and dissertation acknowledgements (Hyland 2004). Written genres linked to instructional settings, such as textbooks (Love 2002) and undergraduate student writing (Kusel 1992; Bloor 1996) have also been illuminated by this approach. On the whole, genre analysis yields not only descriptive insights, but also has important pedagogical implications. The goal of increasing students’ awareness of the generic and rhetorical structure of a range of texts has become a well-consolidated teaching methodology which is particularly suited to EAP/ESP contexts (Dudley-Evans and St. John 1998). Genre analysis has also been applied in studies of spoken academic discourse, both instruction and research-oriented. Thompson (1994) analyzed the rhetorical functions of introductions to lectures and found that in terms of communicative purpose, they seemed to have more in common with textbooks than with research articles. Shalom (1993) concluded that while plenary lecture discussions demonstrated the features of a well-established research genre, poster session discussions were instead not yet clearly defined. Weissberg’s (1993) study of graduate student seminar presentations revealed an affinity with the depersonalized style of written scientific texts, with relatively few features of extemporaneous speech. In his analysis of PhD dissertation defences, Swales (2004a) proposed a four-part structure incorporating several optional sub-elements to account for the considerable variation found in the data he surveyed. Aguilar’s (2004) investigation of the move structure of peer seminars highlights their hybrid nature, sharing some features with lectures, conference presentations and written research articles, but also having an important status as a genre in their own right for the informal dissemination of scientific knowledge. Differences between conference presentations and their written article counterparts have also been addressed. Thompson (2002) found that the personalized narrative passages detected in presentations had been removed from the article write-up of the talk. Rowley-Jolivet and Carter-Thomas

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(2005) observed marked differences in the structuring of information between conference presentations and their corresponding articles in the published proceedings. These studies illustrate how genre analysis can reveal the distinctive characteristics of spoken academic genres, what they have in common with other genres and how both instruction and research may overlap within academic discourse communities. In the next few paragraphs, I will turn to other methodological frameworks applied to spoken academic discourse. Some studies have been ethnographicallyinspired, going beyond situational and linguistic aspects to include the roles, values, assumptions and behaviours of participants (Flowerdew 2002). This type of research relies on the triangulation of data sources and collection methods such as direct observation, interviews with participants, focus group discussions, surveys and biographical histories. Although they are localized in nature and findings are not broadly generalizable, ethnographic studies can provide useful indications to enhance the learning experience. Tracy (1997) investigated weekly departmental colloquia over a two-year period in which both faculty and graduate students participated. She produced recommendations to promote the colloquia as an occasion for successful intellectual discussion. In EAP/ESP contexts, some ethnographic work has aimed at improving lecture comprehension. A long-term study with Chinese learners at an English-medium university revealed a series of key linguistic and socio-cultural features of second language lectures in this setting (Flowerdew and Miller 1995; Flowerdew and Miller 1996; Miller 2002). Working from the idea that lectures are a fundamental component of the culture of learning in universities, Benson (1994) identified some sociolinguistic features that have particularly useful applications in the preparation of L2 learners for listening to content lectures. From an interactional sociolinguistic perspective, Dyer and Keller-Cohen (2000) found that university professors use narratives of personal experience embedded within lectures to construct both their identities as competent experts, but also as ordinary people who at times fumble with the problems of everyday life. In this way, they succeed in striking a balance between authority and egalitarianism, a desirable trait within current North American intellectual culture. Walsh’s (2004a) analysis of first and second person pronouns in university lectures showed how speakers shift footing during guest lectures, apparently as an attempt to facilitate their audience of non-native speakers. Other studies have used techniques from conversation analysis to gain a better understanding of the more dialogic types of academic speech. Guthrie (1997) observed that patterns of the acknowledgement tokens “Okay” and “Mmhmm” occurring in academic advising sessions seemed to reinforce the institutional roles of advisors as holders/dispensers of information vs. students as seekers/receivers of

Chapter 2. Background to the study: The merger of discourses 

information. Farr (2003) found that response tokens, interruptions and speaker overlaps in student-tutor interaction appear to function as signals of engaged listenership whereby both parties seek to express their interest in the ongoing discussion. In recent years, a growing number of studies have incorporated the methodologies of corpus linguistics thanks to the development of large corpora of academic talk at universities. The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) (Simpson et al. 1999) has been compiled at the English Language Institute of the University of Michigan. It consists of 1.8 million words and can be freely accessed online. Designed to represent the variety of speech that typically occurs on a university campus, it includes a range of events classified as primarily monologic (e.g., lectures, seminars, discussion sections, student presentations), dialogic (e.g., advising sessions, tutorials, study groups, meetings) as well as some mixed modes (e.g., dissertation defences, colloquia, lab sections).4 The public availability of such a significant quantity of data has begun to generate a considerable amount of research. Several studies have looked at selected features across the entire MICASE corpus. For example, Swales and Malczewski (2001: 147) analyzed “new episode flags” used by speakers to signal a shift in the discourse. So, okay and now were the most common items and often clustered together. Mauranen (2002) found high frequencies of positive evaluative and discourse-reflexive expressions (e.g., that’s a good question) which appear to play a key role in socializing learners into the academic community. A later study (Mauranen 2004) focused on hedges (e.g., just, a little bit), determining that they frequently co-occur with metadiscursive expressions as a strategy to mitigate the speakers’ controlling role in the discourse. Simpson and Mendis’ (2003) study of idioms showed that there were no clear patterns of usage linked either to the degree of interactivity of the event or to the academic discipline in question. Idioms thus appear to be most influenced by individual speaking styles. Looking instead at selected features in specific genres of academic speech, Swales (2004a) found that MICASE PhD defences showed signs of informality in the form of casual transitional phrases and frequent episodes of laughter, seeming to promote a friendly and collaborative atmosphere in what is typically perceived by candidates as a very stressful event. MICASE colloquia were also found to incorporate elements of informality, such as conversational style, asides, personal narratives and humour. However, in contrast to PhD defences which contained frequent interruptions of the candidate for questions or comments by committee members, colloquia speakers monopolized the floor until the question and answer sessions at the end. Although there is still much to be done with the wealth of opportunities provided by this corpus, some interesting general indications have already emerged. Swales and Burke (2003) note that academic speech appears to have much in com-

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mon with everyday conversation in terms of phonological reductions, dysfluencies and vague language. Moreover, when compared to the challenging nature of written academic discourse, Mauranen (2002) found the corpus to have a generalized consensus-building orientation. A similar project was undertaken at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff to compile the TOEFL 2002 Spoken and Written Academic Language (T2KSWAL) Corpus. This is a 2.7 million word corpus of the language of university life in four American universities, including both spoken (e.g., classroom teaching, study groups, office hours, service encounters) and written (e.g., textbooks, course syllabuses, brochures, catalogues) genres. A new multi-dimensional analysis performed on this corpus identified four major dimensions of variation: oral vs. literate discourse, procedural vs. content-focused discourse, narrative orientation and academic stance. In line with studies based on the MICASE corpus, Biber (2003) found that academic speaking is rather different from academic writing. Even classroom teaching, which might be expected to be much more informational and pre-planned in nature, turned out to be positioned toward the oral end of the oral/ literate cline. This was also supported by Csomay’s (2000) work concentrating on classroom discourse from this corpus, which showed an analogous picture. Research on academic discourse has also seen a dovetailing of methodological approaches. Swales (1998) draws on discourse analysis, ethnography, case studies and biographies, coining the term textography, to investigate the writing of several individuals in three separate academic units in order to identify their distinctive discursive practices: a Computing Resource Center with texts of a brief and mainly instructional nature produced for internal staff and users, a Herbarium where texts were highly descriptive and technical, reflecting the key genres of the discipline (flora and monographs), and an English Language Institute whose members generated a range of pedagogic, research and institutional genres. In a very comprehensive work on a variety of written academic genres (i.e., textbooks, research articles, book reviews, abstracts, and scientific letters) across disciplines, Hyland (2000) combines a genre-based approach, quantitative analysis and participant verification within a social-constructionist framework. He found that writers use a wide range of linguistic resources (e.g., reporting verbs, evaluation, metadiscourse, hedges and boosters) strategically in order to interact and position themselves with readers and the discourse community. Henry and Roseberry (2001) integrate traditional manual inspection with computerized text analysis to identify the generic structure of a small corpus of introductions to guest lectures. They determined a recurring pattern of moves which ranged from getting the audience’s attention to introducing the speaker and previewing the talk, to inviting the speaker to begin. The trend towards combining different methodologies in discourse analysis (Harris and Bargiela-Chiappini

Chapter 2. Background to the study: The merger of discourses 

1997; Biber et al. 2004) offers even more promising prospects for the future as knowledge accumulates and technology progresses. The numerous studies having a vast range of focuses and methodological approaches described in this section have greatly enhanced our understanding of how language is used in the academic world. We have seen how spoken academic discourse is characterized by marked variation according to genre, but still have not considered how content fits into the picture. In their survey of research in EAP over the past two decades, Hyland and Hamp-Lyons (2002: 6) comment, “It is important for EAP to build on this research and establish practices that challenge the widelyheld assumption that academic conventions are universal and independent of particular disciplines […].” In other words, academic discourse cannot be divorced from its content. The role of discipline will be the focus of the next section.

2.4 Disciplinary discourse: the field of economics The theoretical foundation of business studies can be identified in the discipline of economics which is in fact a core subject of the curriculum. However, before reviewing some insights from the literature on the language of economics, it is useful to first reflect on the more general notion of specialized discourse for a broader understanding of how domains of usage can influence language variation. According to Gotti, specialized discourse is: […] the specialist use of language in contexts which are typical of a specialized community stretching across the academic, the professional, the technical and the occupational areas of knowledge and practice. This perspective stresses the type of user and the domain of use, as well as the special application of language in the setting. (2003: 24)

This view highlights the multi-faceted nature of specialized discourse, which reflects not only a given epistemological framework, but also certain social and contextual features. Thus, we can find a specialist use of language in academic settings, where specificity is determined by subject matter together with communicative purpose. Specialists in a given disciplinary field communicate with peers for professional reasons, but they may also interact with non-specialists for instructional purposes. Disciplinary variation in academic discourse has become increasingly evident from comparative studies. Several have dealt with written genres. For example, Holmes (1997) observed differences in the move structure of discussion sections of research articles in history, sociology and political science. Chang and Swales (1999) found disciplinary variation in the use of informal grammatical features in journal articles, with writers of philosophy using the highest level of informality

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and writers of statistics the least. Hyland (2000) identified differences in how a range of textual and interpersonal devices are used in several academic genres across disciplines, often finding alignments in hard (pure and applied sciences) vs. soft (social sciences and humanities) fields of knowledge. He also found variation in self-mention forms in research articles, apparently linked to disciplinary conventions regulating the level of authorial presence (Hyland 2001). In a comparative study of stance in theses in politics/international relations vs. material sciences, Charles (2003) detected variation in the choice of metalinguistic nouns, seemingly related to research practices and epistemological aspects of the disciplines. Motta-Roth (1995) noted that book reviews adopt different criteria for positive evaluation of works according to consensual ideals of disciplines: recency of citations in chemistry, appeals to readership in linguistics and effective use of mathematical models in economics. However, even in the relatively close disciplines of wildlife behaviour, conservation biology and resource policy, Samraj (2004) observed noticeable differences in the move structure of research article introductions and student-produced research papers. Similarly, Swales (1998) identified differences in the rhetorical impact of new species accounts in ornithology compared to botany, even though they are both biological sciences. There has generally been less research on disciplinary variation in spoken academic genres. In an early study, Young (1990) found discipline-related differences among the three lectures she analyzed. More verbal exemplification was found in a sociology lecture compared to engineering and economics lectures, which instead made more use of numerical computations and models, respectively. This variation would seem to be determined by different ways of transmitting knowledge among discourse communities. Dudley-Evans (1994) showed that the problem-solution organizational framework of two highway engineering lectures was instead not used in two plant biology lectures, which were more theoretical and research-oriented in line with the concerns of this particular discipline. However, due to the availability of large corpora of academic speech, we are now beginning to see more studies dedicated to disciplinary variation. Using the MICASE corpus, Poos and Simpson (2002) found that two forms of hedging (sort of and kind of) were markedly more frequent in the humanities compared to the physical sciences, possibly linked to the richer vocabulary and more interpretive nature of content associated with the humanities. In the T2K-SWAL corpus, some disciplinary differences in classroom teaching have been found as well. Using multi-dimensional analysis, Biber (2003) found that the more technical disciplines of engineering and business were procedure-oriented compared to the humanities and sciences which were content-focused. In the same corpus, Csomay (2004) observed differences in linguistic features and discourse patterning between lectures in humanities and social sciences compared to natural sciences and engineering.

Chapter 2. Background to the study: The merger of discourses 

Generally speaking, all the above studies confirm the need to consider the practices of the disciplinary community in question in order to more accurately interpret variation. Therefore, to steer the discussion towards the focus of this study, I will now turn to the literature on economics discourse that has shed light on the key linguistic and discursive features of this domain of usage. The role of language in the transmission of knowledge in economics has often been a source of conflicting positions within the discipline itself (Samuels 1990; Backhouse, Dudley-Evans and Henderson 1993; Bondi 1999). Although economics is a social science involving human behaviour which cannot be predicted or measured with the degree of accuracy associated with the pure sciences, it has traditionally been presented within a positivist framework using the instruments and language of the scientific method. However, this position has been attacked by some major figures of the discipline, who give more credence to persuasive techniques than to empirical evidence to put forth their ideas. They are thus keenly aware of the special role of language in economics. In fact, Keynes (1936/1973: 470) tells us that “In economics you cannot convict your opponent of error – you can only convince him of it.” In his highly influential work The Rhetoric of Economics, McCloskey (1985: 8) completely rejects the positivist approach, or what he calls “scientism”. He maintains that economists, despite their emphasis on mathematical models and statistical techniques, actually rely on human reasoning to communicate their ideas and proposes a range of rhetorical devices (e.g., metaphor, analogy and appeals to authority) from the literary tradition used for this purpose. In the same vein, Samuels (1990) affirms that economists choose different types of language (e.g., everyday speech, technical terminology, mathematical models) which is influenced by the type of knowledge they wish to propose. He speaks of a flexible approach to knowledge claims based on alternative credentials, with meaning in economics texts being jointly constructed by the writer and the reader who interprets it. Similarly, Klamer (1990: 130) supports a “rhetorical perspective” on texts. Although the anti-positivist stance has been far from uncontroversial, Henderson and Dudley-Evans aptly comment: With the publication of McCloskey’s work the opportunity for common ground between economists and linguists was established. What is needed now is for linguists to be alerted to the potential of this common ground and the opportunities it provides for further ‘conversation’, to borrow a powerful term from McCloskey […] (1990: 3)

And indeed since then the McCloskeyan school of thought has stimulated considerable interest in economics discourse and a great deal of work has been produced. Some studies have dealt with the linguistic and discursive aspects of the widely-

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read masterworks of economic theory: Keynes’ General Theory (Gotti 1990), Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (Bazerman 1993) and Marshall’s Elements of Economics (Del Lungo Camiciotti 2005). Other studies have instead focused on the distinctive characteristics of key written economics genres used for the transmission and dissemination of knowledge: prediction in scholarly writing (Merlini 1983) and financial news articles (Walsh 2004b), schematic structure in research articles (Dudley-Evans and Henderson 1990) and forecasts (Bloor and Pindi 1990), metaphor in research articles (Bamford 1998) and evaluation in economic/financial news stories (Del Lungo Camiciotti 1996). Economics textbooks have had an important role in shaping knowledge in the discipline and introducing novices into the community of practice. Not by chance, several of the most widely textbooks were authored by illustrious economists such as Paul Samuelson, William Nordhaus and Richard Lipsey. For this reason, textbooks have been the object of several discourse studies. Mason’s (1990) and Henderson and Hewings’ (1990) analyses found a strong presence of abstract language (e.g., nominalization, the passive, metaphors, personification), thus explaining some the difficulties encountered by learners. In his analysis of rhetorical strategies used to discuss the paradox of value across six introductory economics textbooks, Swales (1993) found that writers often exploited the topic to promote the predominance of modern microeconomic analytical methods and mainstream economic thought. Bondi (1999) provides a very comprehensive study that compares written economics discourse across genres (i.e., textbooks, research articles, abstracts), combining techniques of both genre analysis and corpus linguistics to yield both qualitative and quantitative findings. She focuses on the interactive aspects of these texts as a reflection of their fundamentally persuasive purpose. Economics textbooks were found to contain a high number of dialogic devices (e.g., metadiscursive expressions, imperatives, argumentative sequences, analogical reasoning) designed to guide the student reader, but also to persuade colleagues of the value of the textbook. These forms of reader-writer dialogue were also present in research articles and abstracts as a way to lead the reader into agreement. Because the above-cited studies have revealed so much about the language of economics, they have made a significant contribution to content-based English language teaching for L2 students of economics. Studies of spoken economics discourse that make particular reference to the disciplinary dimension are rather few. They are essentially limited to economics lectures which, like textbooks, are concerned with inducting learners into the discourse community. Using a corpus of economics lectures, Bamford (2002) observed that forms of repetition and reformulation were used not only to facilitate listeners, but also to activate an awareness of the conventional linguistic patterns used among economists. She further analyzed the interplay of oral, numerical and

Chapter 2. Background to the study: The merger of discourses 

visual literacies as different semiotic modes used to represent knowledge in the field and render it more accessible to learners (Bamford 2004a). In comparison with lectures of other disciplines, she found a particularly strong presence of visuals throughout all the lectures of her corpus. Using a variety of analytical frameworks, the above studies have given us a greater understanding of how knowledge is constructed and communicated in economics. In business studies lectures, the transmission of these discourse practices constitutes an essential component of learning for students whose interests and goals are broadly grounded in economic theory.

2.5 Professional discourse: the world of business In this section, we move out of the academic/theoretical sphere of economics and into the workplace where business studies students aspire to establish themselves as professionals. Several studies have focused on the language used in this unique communicative environment. Business discourse has been defined by BargielaChiappini and Nickerson (1999: 2) as “[…] talk and writing between individuals whose main work activities and interests are in the domain of business and who come together for the purpose of doing business.” The criteria of ‘doing business’ is further emphasized by Poncini (2004) who notes the clearly profit-oriented nature of most forms of business discourse. According to Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson (1999), although business discourse may fall within the broader category of professional discourse, it nonetheless presents its own special characteristics. In fact, business discourse typically involves participants of equal status, whereas professional discourse is often associated with interaction between experts and lay persons in institutional settings. Moreover, even if business discourse may share domain with economics discourse, it is professionally-oriented while the latter tends to be academically-oriented.5 Given the goal-oriented features of business discourse, much research has involved spoken events (e.g., negotiations and meetings), showing how a range of linguistic devices such as hedging, politeness, directness, evaluation and the use of personal pronouns are influenced by the business relationship and by both corporate and national culture (Charles 1996; Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 1997; Poncini 2002). The lexical dimension of business discourse has also been studied. Collins and Scott (1997) used quantitative keyword analysis to generate lexical landscapes (i.e., webs of lexical items with their collocations) in Brazilian vs. British business meetings, thus revealing the patterning of the main topics that were discussed. Poncini’s (2004) investigation of specialized lexis in intercultural meetings showed that some lexical items are used by participants to establish common ground and in-

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group membership, while other items may be re-negotiated to take on a local meaning within the context of the meeting. Nelson (2000) found that both spoken and written business discourse showed some significant lexical differences when compared to general English and published business English teaching materials. With particular reference to metaphorical expressions, David (1999) found that in epideictic speeches, female CEOs used the typically feminine metaphors of nurturing, growth and psychological connectedness alongside the sports and warfare metaphors that are often found in the discourse of male CEOs. Following the current interest in large quantities of authentic data, the CANBEC (Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus) has been developed through collaboration between the University of Nottingham and Cambridge University Press. It consists of over 1 million words of spoken business discourse produced by both native and non-native speakers of English and includes meetings, presentations and informal discussions. Findings from comparative lexicogrammatical analyses showed that spoken business English has much in common with casual conversation and forms of institutional talk, but also has distinctive features that reflect its community of practice. Moreover, some initial work focusing on pronouns and modality highlighted an orientation towards collaborative and non-threatening relationships despite the hierarchical imprint traditionally associated with business settings (McCarthy and Handford 2004). Business discourse analysts have also investigated a variety of written genres, including letters (van Nus 1999; Jung 2005), CEOs’ statements (Hyland 1998; Nickerson and De Groot 2005), mission statements (Swales and Rogers 1995), faxes (Akar and Louhiala-Salminen 1999) and e-mails (Gimenez 2000; Poncini 2005). This work has often underlined the intertextual nature these genres, which not only draw on other genres in terms of form and structural features, but may also reflect a chain of interwoven spoken and written texts, incorporating both traditional and computer-mediated modes. This has important implications when teaching business communication skills to both L1 and L2 learners who need to come into contact with authentic communicative processes undergoing constant technological evolution. Although Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998: 65) suggest that a “core” grammar and lexis of English business discourse has not yet been established, the findings from the research reviewed above indicate business vocabulary, metaphors/stylistic devices, hedging, interpersonal strategies and ways of expressing stance as promising prospects for further investigation. At this point, it seems appropriate to relate business discourse as described above to the language of business studies lectures. Towards this end, I would like to propose a two-way link between academe and profession as illustrated in Figure 2.1 below.

Chapter 2. Background to the study: The merger of discourses  The professional world

The business studies classroom

Lecturers’ incoming language

Lecturerstudent interaction Students’ acquired language

Figure 2.1 The two-way discursive link between the professional world and the business studies classroom

First of all, there is an incoming link from the professional world to the classroom. According to a survey carried out by Macfarlane (1997), a number of business studies lecturers, particularly those specializing in Accounting and Marketing, have had recent experience in business or industry. Moreover, business studies lecturers are typically active members of the professional community. In addition to producing scholarly writing, they often participate in publicly and privately funded projects, serve on government policy advisory boards and direct research institutes; activities of this type can be easily verified by browsing through the web sites of business studies faculty members. As noted by Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson (1999: 7), there is often “hybrid membership” in academic and professional discourse communities. They cite the example of management consultants who combine academic activities with private practice. As a consequence, the language that business studies lecturers bring to the classroom for interaction with students is likely to be tinged with their professional experiences. The outgoing link is from the classroom to the professional world. In discussing the nexus between EAP and ESP, Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998: 40) point out that learners have immediate needs due to institutional academic requirements, but must also acquire the skills necessary to become successful members of the professional community, representing their delayed needs. From this perspective, the features of business discourse that learners are exposed to during lectures can play a key role in preparing them for their future communicative activities in the corporate world.

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2.6 A conceptual framework for analyzing business studies lectures In the preceding sections of this chapter, I have reviewed the literature on spoken, academic, disciplinary and professional discourse that is pertinent to the study of business studies lectures. Working from this, it is now possible to formulate a conceptual framework to serve as a foundation for the forthcoming analysis. A good way to start is to take a closer look at just what business studies lectures are. First of all, they are speech events (Hymes 1972) or, more specifically, activities where speech is governed by rules and norms determined by contextual factors such as situation, participants, norms, mode and goals. Similarly, they coincide with the Bakhtinian notion of secondary speech genres (Bakhtin 1986: 61– 62) which take place in a sphere of communication that is relatively formal and culturally-organized, in this case institutional education. Focusing more on their purpose, their participants and their relationships (Swales 1990; Lave and Wenger 1991), business studies lectures are academic genres where novices and experts interact in a meaningful way in order to construct knowledge within a community of practice. Thus, the spoken, academic, disciplinary and professional dimensions of business studies lectures will be investigated and interpreted through the interrelated and overlapping theoretical constructs of speech event and genre. It is also useful to conceptualize business studies lectures in terms of Fairclough’s (2003: 220) notion of order of discourse as “a particular combination of genres, discourses and styles which constitutes the discoursal aspect of a network of social practices”. However, as we have seen, academic, disciplinary and professional discourse communities may coincide, and consequently so may their orders of discourse. This is what Candlin and Maley (1997: 212) describe as a form of interdiscursivity, i.e., “the use of elements in one discourse and social practice that carry the institutional and social meanings from other discourse and social practices”. Therefore, I will also consider how different discourses are mixed and ‘worked into’ business studies lectures. Figure 2.2 below posits the interdiscursive nature of business studies lectures that will be explored in the study. To conclude, this chapter has shown how studies in each of the above-illustrated discourses have significantly enhanced our understanding of the language used within them. What it has not shown is how these discourses may interact synergistically to characterize a particular variety of language. The analyses in the upcoming chapters showing how the language of business studies lectures draws on and reflects off this pool of discourses aim to do just that. And, I would add, with reference to a spoken genre that represents an increasingly important conduit between the academic and professional worlds.

Chapter 2. Background to the study: The merger of discourses 

Spoken Discourse Professional Discourse

Academic Discourse

Business Discourse

Disciplinary Discourse

Economics Discourse

Business Studies Lectures

Figure 2.2 The interdiscursive nature of business studies lectures

Notes 1. Mauranen (2005) makes the interesting point that this term is perhaps inappropriate since ‘dysfluencies’ are characteristic of all ‘fluent’ speakers. However, since the term is widely used in the literature and a better one is apparently still lacking, I will continue to use it. 2. See Sinclair (1991) for a general introduction to corpora and Sinclair (2001) for an overview of their development and applications in linguistics and language teaching. 3.

See Askehave and Swales (2001) for more on multi-purpose genres.

4. A parallel corpus has been developed at the Universities of Warwick and Reading: the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus. Although it covers only lectures and seminars, it will nonetheless provide interesting opportunities for cross-cultural comparisons between British and American spoken academic English. Moreover, most events have been digitally videorecorded, thus allowing for much-needed attention to visual aspects. 5. Some overlapping in terminology can be found in the literature, attesting to fuzziness among discourse types. As pointed out by Poncini (2004) professional discourse has been used for a variety of institutional settings which may encompass clinical, bureaucratic and business events. It is also used by Swales (1990b) with reference to academic discourse that has a professional slant (e.g., research articles and presentations).

chapter 3

The business studies lecture corpus Design, collection and analysis It is one of the paradoxes of spoken data that the more interesting and valuable the data, the more difficult they are to obtain. (Carter and McCarthy 1997: 7)

3.1 Introduction My aim in this chapter is to provide a close-up look at the corpus on which the study is based, as well as an inside account of the experience of compiling it. As the above epigraph suggests, compared to written texts, live speech is notoriously more complicated and costly to access and transform into analyzable form (Leech et al. 1995; Stubbs 1996; McCarthy 1998; Sinclair 2001). Therefore, in the next few sections, I will discuss at length some key issues involved in the design, collection and transcription of the corpus. Then, I will turn to the analytical approach of the study, which can be best described as multi-disciplinary, including both textual and non-textual methodologies in an attempt to offer a full-circle profile of business studies lectures.

3.2 Corpus design There are many criteria that need to be considered when designing a corpus, such as size, variety of language, mode of transmission and period of time covered (Pearson 1998). However, these decisions ultimately depend on the type of corpus envisaged and its foreseen use. If a corpus is being designed for general purposes, then it will be as large as possible and incorporate many different types of language. Following Sinclair (1991: 17), a general corpus is “broadly homogeneous, but gathered from a variety of sources so that the individuality of a source is obscured […].” Such corpora (e.g., the British National Corpus, the Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus) have been developed to be representative of language in general for the benefit of the scientific community at large. They are especially suitable for the production of grammars and dictionaries, but also serve

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as key reference sources for innumerable other studies. If instead a corpus is being designed with a specific research goal in mind, then it will likely be more restricted in scope, perhaps targeting only written or spoken language, or a particular historical period, or even specific varieties of language that occur only in certain contexts. In this way, the corpus will be “specialized” in terms of both purpose and the type of language it contains (Partington 2004: 13). The dual dimension of content and purpose is also seen in the terminology found in the literature. A specialized corpus may be described as “monogeneric” as opposed to “heterogeneric” (Partington 2003: 4), i.e., the type of large reference corpora described above. Pearson (1998: 48) uses the term “special purpose corpora” to distinguish specialized corpora from “special corpora” which, according to her, contain language that in some way deviates from the norm (e.g., the language of very small children). Although specialized corpora tend to be smaller in size with fewer language variables, they still need to be carefully designed. With reference to corpora in general, Pearson (1998: 52–53) distinguishes “external” criteria, referring to mode, genre, origins, participants and aims, from “internal” criteria, which instead involve topic and style. With specialized corpora, all these criteria are particularly important if the corpus is to achieve the purpose for which it was constructed. Unfortunately, in the case of spoken language, the difficulties of assembling such corpora can lead to what McCarthy (1998: 8) describes as an “opportunistic” design, whereby compilers tend to throw in whatever data they have been able to collect. To avoid shortcomings of this type, it is important to accurately plan the spoken events and rigorously select the data to be included in the corpus. As the next few paragraphs will hopefully show, this was attempted in compiling the corpus for the present study. The Business Studies Lecture Corpus (hereinafter BSLC) is a small specialized spoken corpus designed for a specific research objective: to gain more understanding of the linguistic and discursive features of business studies lectures from the perspective of L2 listening comprehension. Working with my colleague Polly Walsh at the University of Florence Faculty of Economics within the framework of an Italian national research project, I embarked on the creation of a corpus whose content would match this purpose.1 This meant that the corpus should represent the types of lectures to which international business students are likely to be exposed, including lectures on a variety of business studies topics delivered by both male/female and native/non-native speakers of English, at undergraduate and postgraduate academic levels, as well as large (>40) and small (,

Chapter 3. The business studies lecture corpus: Design, collection and analysis 

This mark-up was applied to all of the lectures collected from the EBM lecture series, the two Internet lectures sent to me in audio CD format and the two lectures kindly provided by a colleague. With reference to the latter, I had also access to the full transcripts, but they had been extensively marked up in an undecipherable way. The original researcher could no longer be contacted. Fortunately, the corresponding audio tapes were also available so that I was able to revise the markup of these two lectures according to my own conventions. However, a problem of this sort lends support to calls for transcription conventions to be selective, economical and accessible to others (Cook 1995; Roberts 2003). The two MICASE lectures had instead been transcribed by other persons according to the criteria established within the framework of that project. Their mark-up also draws from the TEI Guidelines, but is more extensive with greater articulation of pauses and punctuation, includes overlapping speech and the layout is in block rather than line form. However, because this analysis does not focus on any of these features, the presence of additional or differing mark-up of this type in the MICASE transcripts does not create difficulties. Moreover, the availability of the audio files of the two lectures enabled me to verify the transcripts and also clarify any possible doubts relating to mark-up. The preceding description of the transcription of the BSLC illustrates how the choices made regarding what to transcribe and how to transcribe it are reflected in the aim of this research. To be able to analyze features that can have an impact on L2 listening comprehension, it was necessary to take the ‘lecture listener’s perspective’, transcribing both words and selected dysfluencies in order to render the transcripts as authentic and natural as possible, but at the same time, as readable and analyzable as possible, while also keeping in mind future research interests.

3.5 Methodology: an integrated approach 3.5.1 Quantitative and qualitative analysis In his discussion of methodological issues relating to small corpora, Sinclair writes: A small corpus is seen as a body of relevant and reliable evidence, and is either small enough to be analysed manually, or is processed by a computer in a preliminary fashion […]; thereafter the evidence is interpreted by the scholar directly. (2001: xi)

He continues noting that small corpora are designed for “early human intervention”, as the researcher constructs the corpus according to a pre-established research purpose.

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The methodology used in this study reflects this approach. The BSLC was originally envisaged as an instrument to be used for both language description and pedagogical insights. It draws on techniques from both corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, thus combining electronic text elaboration with manual inspection of the transcripts. As observed by Henry and Roseberry (2001), small corpus analysis relies not only on computerized processing to generate frequencies and identify patterning, but also on insights that can only come from reading and studying the corpus from a more global perspective. Once the lectures of the BSLC were digitized into computerized form, they were printed out for preliminary overviewing to get a general impression of the data (feasible of course only with relatively small corpora) and to identify particularly salient linguistic and discursive features for further study. Beyond this initial overview, the printouts also proved useful for other studies of a more limited scope, dealing with discursive or episodic variables that could only be identified by manual inspection (Walsh and Crawford Camiciottoli 2001; Crawford Camiciottoli 2005). The individual lecture files were then compiled into a corpus and analysed in various stages with the text analysis software suite Wordsmith Tools (Scott 1998). This generated data on items that had been previously selected for analysis, but also brought to light other interesting features that had not been foreseen (e.g., different usages of items or additional items beyond those originally hypothesized). From this perspective, the study can be seen as both corpus-based and corpus-driven (Tognini-Bonelli 2001), since at times the data itself served as the initial source of evidence to describe the language under investigation. Finally, the emerging quantitative data served as a springboard for follow-up qualitative analysis back in the transcripts to better interpret the findings. An integration of the empirical and hermeneutic approaches is important to shed light on the reasons underlying the speakers’ linguistic choices, particularly when the outcome of the research is finalized towards specific practical applications. As a small corpus representing the speech of only twelve individuals, the findings clearly cannot be considered either exhaustive or generalizable to all business studies lecture settings, even if they can alert us to features that may characterize other comparable events. On the other hand, it is a readable corpus (Walsh 2004b) that lends itself well to more in-depth qualitative analysis, in addition to electronic quantitative analysis. In this way, the important characteristics and potentially recurring patterns of this particular genre can be uncovered and subsequently used for specific aims. As suggested by Sinclair (2001), this is one of the strengths of small specialized corpora.

Chapter 3. The business studies lecture corpus: Design, collection and analysis 

3.5.2 Comparative analysis One of the primary reasons for collecting and analysing corpora in the first place is to be able to make comparisons among different varieties of language (Sinclair 2001; Haarman et al. 2002). The distinguishing characteristics of a particular type of text become evident and meaningful when contrasted to another type of text, according to the objectives of the research. As pointed out by Partington (1998: 146). “By and large, we are not methodologically justified in interpreting the significance of a particular linguistic event unless we can compare it with other similar events.” For this reason, it seemed important to understand how business studies lectures may differ from two related varieties of academic discourse: business studies text materials (their written counterpart) and lectures in academic subjects other than business studies. Two additional electronic corpora were compiled strictly for comparative purposes: a. The Business Studies Text Materials Corpus (hereinafter BSTM) was derived from both widely read published textbooks and the relatively new phenomenon of online business studies materials, in roughly equal proportions.6 It was designed to cover topics that were similar to those found in the BSLC, including macroeconomics, microeconomics, industrial organization, economic policy, ethics, and business organization and strategies. In this way, the potentially confounding effect of significantly different lexis linked to new topics could be reduced to the minimum, thus allowing variation to be more likely attributable to the spoken vs. written modes. b. The Multi-Disciplinary Lecture Corpus (hereinafter MDLC) was derived from MICASE (Simpson et al. 1999). It contains ten lectures from the following disciplines: political science, historical linguistics, musicology, women’s studies, art history, computer programming, microbial genetics, hydrology, physics, biology. These lectures were selected to include both guest and classroom settings, large and small class sizes, undergraduate and post-graduate levels, native speakers of American and British English and one non-native speaker. In this way, variation could be more easily explained by disciplinary differences. In order to facilitate straightforward comparisons without the need to perform proportional calculations, these two corpora were designed to have the same word count as the BSLC (approximately 110,000). To have a more complete picture of the linguistic dimension of a corpus, it is useful to be able to retrieve specific grammatical information which allows for a wider range of analytical options. By annotating or tagging a corpus according to parts-of-speech, it is possible to perform searches on entire word classes (e.g., nouns, modal verbs, attributive adjectives), rather than on only single or lemma-

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tised items. Towards this end, I compiled three comparable subcorpora of 20,000 words randomly selected from each of the original files comprising the BSLC, the BSTM and the MDLC. According to Pearson (1998: 45), the term “subcorpora” means a part of a corpus having all the same properties as the larger corpus and thus being representative of it. In contrast, a “component” is a part of a corpus having some distinctive feature and is therefore not intended to be representative of the whole corpus. The subcorpora were tagged with the CLAWS (Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System) tagger, developed by UCREL (University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language) at Lancaster University. It has been used extensively with the British National Corpus and is compatible with Wordsmith Tools.7 The three subcorpora will be referred to as follows: BSLCtag, BSTMtag, MDLCtag. Again, the word counts were standardized for the sake of uncomplicated comparisons. The BSLC was designed to reflect the authentic lecture experiences of international business students and thus incorporates variation in both setting (L1 classroom lecture vs. L2 guest lecture) and participants (NSs vs. NNSs). This was exploited at times for additional comparative analyses between corpus components as a way to further interpret initial findings. 3.5.3 Behavioural observation Because this study aims to provide a comprehensive description of business studies lectures, forms of extra-linguistic communication have also been taken into account. Thanks to the availability of video recordings of five of the lectures comprising the BSLC, which could be further integrated with field notes taken during the live lecture events, it was possible to analyze selected features of nonverbal communication. Of course, in comparison with textual analysis, this requires a completely different methodology. In nonverbal studies, a key issue is how to observe behaviours in a systematic way so that they can be meaningfully analyzed (Galloway 1972; Scherer and Ekman 1982). In fact, observation is a two-fold process: behaviours must first be described and then interpreted according to a given theoretical framework. In this study, two different methodological approaches were used to observe nonverbal behaviours. On a quantitative level, frequency counts were taken of pre-defined categories of behaviours. On a qualitative level, open-ended narrative was used to describe and record significant nonverbal events. In addition, using digital technology, a short video segment was studied in minute detail from a multimodal perspective. Although this component of the study is clearly limited in scope, it nonetheless provides some interesting insights

Chapter 3. The business studies lecture corpus: Design, collection and analysis 

into this much neglected aspect of academic lectures (von Raffler-Engel 1980; Khuwaileh 1999). 3.5.4 Participant feedback Because my approach to this study is fundamentally that of a discourse analyst, the methodologies described in the previous sections are aimed at describing and understanding the key features of the language in its context of usage and the communicative strategies of the lecturers. Yet business studies lectures are more than just an instance of academic speech to be analyzed from different perspectives; they represent a community of practice that is characterized by the social relations of its participants who interact to construct knowledge (Lave and Wenger 1991). For this reason, it is useful to incorporate their views for a more complete interpretation of the findings. Typical ways of soliciting participants’ views are questionnaires and interviews. In this study, such direct access to participants was unfortunately quite limited. Six of the twelve lectures that comprise the corpus were procured from secondary sources. The participants were anonymous, with the exception of two lecturers with whom I was able to have some contact via e-mail. I was instead present during the collection of the other six lectures from the EBM guest lecture series. However, for reasons mentioned previously, I was not able to administer a written questionnaire either to the lecturers or to the audiences in order to systemically gather data on their views. Yet I was able to conduct brief semi-structured interviews with some lecturers (live and via e-mail) and have informal conversations with some students of the audiences. Although this feedback is limited in scope, it can nonetheless offer some additional insights into the business studies lectures. To sum up, this chapter has outlined the integrated methodological approach used in this study, highlighting several theoretical and practical issues along the way. The next four chapters will be dedicated to its application and to the ensuing outcomes.

Notes 1. The inter-university project Small Corpora and Genre Analysis: Academic Discourse in the Humanities and Social Sciences was co-financed by the Italian Ministry of Universities, Scientific and Technological Research (MURST) and the participating universities. National Project Coordinator: Marina Bondi. Florence Unit Co-ordinator: Gabriella Del Lungo. 2. Technically speaking, the EBM lectures take place in an EFL setting since the students are foreign language learners and not second language learners as in ESL settings. However, I do not

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures deal with this distinction and therefore throughout the book use the term L2 to refer to the EBM guest lectures in particular and to teaching contexts involving NNSs in general. 3.

I thank Inmaculada Fortanet for pointing out this difference.

4. Many thanks to Laura Gavioli. 5. In two cases, permission was denied. One academic that granted permission also happened to mention that he had decided to give his lecture in Italian rather than in English as originally planned. We were fortunate to discover this change before arranging for recording! 6. The print materials were extracted from Microeconomics (Parkin and King 1995) and International Business (Czinkota et al. 1996) and Marketing and Entrepreneurship in SMEs (Carson et al. 1995). The online materials were downloaded from two sites: the Bized business education website (http://www.bized.ac.uk), an online service for students and educators of business and economics, containing texts that range from secondary school to MBA levels, and an online textbook Essential Principles of Economics: A Hypermedia Text, produced by Dr. Roger McCain, Professor of Economics, Drexel University (Philadelphia, USA). Retrieved 22/06/2004 from http://william-king.www.drexel.edu. 7. I am very grateful to Paul Rayson, director of UCREL, for allowing me free limited access to the CLAWS tagger.

chapter 4

Speaking to the audience Those who present themselves before an audience are said to be “performers” and to provide a “performance” – in the peculiar, theatrical sense of the term. (Goffman 1981: 165)

4.1 Introduction Perhaps the most logical starting point to begin an analysis of business studies lectures is what can be considered their most basic distinctive characteristic: the fact that they are spoken and thus perceived aurally. According to Flowerdew (1994), understanding spoken language hinges on a number of variables that encompass the real-time and phonological dimension of speech, as well as its lexico-grammatical features. During a lecture, listeners must process incoming messages as they are uttered. Unlike readers, they have no control over the flow of the input and cannot backtrack or pause to reflect on various parts whenever necessary. In L2 settings where language proficiency is already limited, this can easily contribute to a lack of comprehension, which is exacerbated by a fast speech rate or unfamiliar accent. Also on the phonological level, listeners must be able to distinguish boundaries between words, recognize phonological reductions and filter out the hesitation fillers and false starts typical of speech. While this kind of processing is usually automatic for native speakers, it may not be so for non-native speakers, especially if they have not had much exposure to authentic natural-sounding speech. On the lexico-grammatical level, lectures can present other difficulties for non-native learners. On the one hand, we may find features of conversation such as vagueness, casual expressions, idioms and ellipsis. On the other, given their instructional purpose, we may find a concentration of both technical and semi-technical terminology used to introduce concepts. Coping with a significant amount of potentially unknown vocabulary together with features of informal language is not an easy task for many L2 listeners, as indicated by lecture participants themselves. In a survey of US faculty members to identify what they considered to be key lecture listening skills for L2 learners, Powers (1986) found that being able to follow the spoken delivery mode, comprehend key vocabulary and distinguish the




main points from supporting information were ranked among the most important. Flowerdew and Miller’s (1992) survey of Chinese ESL students revealed that they perceived lack of understanding to be caused primarily by fast speech rates and large amounts of new vocabulary and concepts. The following sections of this chapter will be dedicated to the analysis of selected features of the BSLC linked to the spoken mode and recognized as having a strong impact on comprehension in L2 lecture settings.

4.2 Speech rate Speech rate has been a topic of considerable interest in the literature. Early experimental studies found that, in general, listening comprehension improved when texts were delivered at a slower rate (Conrad 1989; Anderson-Hsieh and Koehler 1989). However, other research found that while L2 listeners may have difficulties with fast speech rates, they do not seem to benefit from either relatively slow or artificially reduced speech rates (Griffiths 1990; Derwing and Munro 2001). On the other hand, Zhao (1997) determined that comprehension improved when L2 listeners were allowed to artificially reduce lecture speech rate by means of computer technology. Thus, the role of speech rate on comprehension is not yet altogether clear. More specifically, while excessively fast rates are likely to create problems, we do not know just how much they would need to be reduced, or even what might be considered an optimal rate. With particular reference to academic lectures in L2 settings, Tauroza and Allison (1990) surveyed 22 native speakers of British English lecturing to NNS audiences and found a rather wide variation in speech rates. These ranged from 102 to 199 words per minute (wpm), classified as moderately slow and faster than normal, respectively. The mean speech rate was 140 wpm. This falls within the average range of 125–160 wpm indicated for the lecture category, but well below the mean speech rate of 210 wpm for conversation. This prompted the authors to speculate that there had been a reduction in speech rate in response to the speakers’ perception of the listeners’ needs. And perhaps this is actually the most important question here: whether or not lecturers are willing and able to reduce their speech rates for NNS audiences. Speech rates in the BSLC were analyzed by performing a series of calculations based on the word counts and the durations of the lectures. By dividing the total number of words in each file by the total number of minutes recorded, the number of words per minute can be determined, thus allowing for meaningful comparisons to be made among the twelve lectures. The results are shown in Table 4.1.

Chapter 4. Speaking to the audience 

Table 4.1 Speech rate distribution in the BSLC Lecture

Source/Type

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest MICASE/L1 class MICASE/L1 class NYU/L1 class NYU/L1 class Iowa/L1 class Ohio/L1 class

Word Count

Minutes

wpm

5,566 11,460 9,444 14,667 3,665 12,905 12,005 8,046 6,138 7,410 7,006 11,137

46 93 76 108 28 98 74 73 37 52 44 62

121 123 124 136 131 132 162 110 166 143 159 179

As can be seen, there was quite a lot of variation in the word counts and durations of the lectures, so some preliminary explanation is in order. Lectures 1 and 5 present lower word counts and total minutes compared to the other lectures because they did not follow a teacher-dominated lecture format. In Lecture 1, the speaker interspersed his lecture with tasks for the students to do in pairs, followed by short student presentations. Similarly, Lecture 5 was essentially an introductory mini-lecture, followed by group work and presentations.1 The remaining EBM lectures and the six L1 classroom lectures were instead more traditional in format, but their durations ranged from approximately forty minutes to an hour and half, in which case there was a short break in the middle. Given these differences, it was necessary to take into account only the primarily monologic parts of the lectures and subtract from the durations any stretches in the recordings that did not contain the lecturers’ speech. It is also important to recognize that the data do not represent absolute values. All twelve of the lectures included sporadic questions by students to a greater or lesser extent. In the EBM L2 guest lectures, there were some planned question and answer sessions at the end, although most of the talking was still done by the lecturers who provided rather lengthy answers to brief questions. At any rate, the very minimal part of the total word count produced by students is not likely to change the broad picture. From the wpm calculations in the far right column, we see that none of the lectures can be classified as either faster than normal (>185 wpm) or slower than normal (40) and small (n

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