Business English

Abstract

"Without research Business English foreign and second language learners will be hampered. With the growth of conferences and the increasing numbers of students studying Business English within MA courses, there will undoubtedly be much more research carried out and published" (St John 1996: 15). In the same year that Maggie Jo St John published the article from which this opening quotation is taken, Dudley-Evans and St John (1996) also compiled a report on Business English (BE) which again noted the limited research on the subject and the fact that such research had tended to concentrate on written communication while teaching focussed mostly on the spoken language. Moreover, they also identified two components of Business English, which they labeled "English for general business purposes" and "English for specific business purposes," respectively the contents of which depend on the linguistic competence of the learners and their business experience. They also noted how the "underlying business culture is that of Western Europe and the United States of America" (Dudley-Evans and St John 1998: v) which they considered inappropriate. This is arguably one of the consequences of the international acceptance of "management," an ideology that took shape in the United States and the United Kingdom, and which is effectively propagated through the capillary network of management schools, and training managerial elites worldwide according to standardized MBA programs (Mintzberg 2004). In this chapter, we hope to show how the notion of "Business English" has been adopted in local contexts to reflect often very different local circumstances, and we will take the cases of Japan and China to illustrate this point.