The Training of Business Professionals in ELT Materials: A Focus on Email Writing

Nowadays, business organizations are faced with the challenge to operate in a global, informational, and highly networked context. The globalization of business and the fast growth in digital technology are having a massive impact both on business structures, with a proliferation of international mergers and acquisitions, and on corporate communication, with most business transactions being carried out via digital media. In this context, corporate communication needs are rapidly changing too: not only is a common working language required (Galloway and Rose 2015), but there is also the necessity for business professionals to acquire the communicative competence that will enable them to communicate efficiently, effectively and rapidly. As for the language, although “[i]t is undeniable that English […] has now come to represent the main common contact language and lingua franca in an interconnected globalized world” (Vettorel 2014: 1), it is also true that in the field of business there has been a shift from a focus on ‘Business English as a Lingua Franca’ to ‘English as Business Lingua Franca’ (Kankaanranta & Louhiala-Salminen 2013): This means that English is the main, but not the only component of a ‘Business Lingua Franca’ that caters to the ‘super-diversity’ (Cogo 2012) of today’s business contexts. On the communicative competence side, professionals need to acquire the ability to quickly adjust to the immediacy of the communicative event and to adapt to the variable and unpredictable circumstances of business transactions worldwide. This calls to the fore the deployment of a vast array of pragmatic and interactional skills, which until recently have mainly been investigated in spoken interactions (e.g. Firth, 1996; Bjőrkman, 2011) However, in business contexts transactions are also and more often conducted via written interactions, where the lack of social context cues such as certain body messages may pose a barrier to effective communication (Murphy and Levy 2006). This diachronic study of a set of ten Business-English email writing textbooks published between 2004 and 2017 focuses on the tasks and guidelines provided for the development of email writing skills. By drawing on Louhiala-Salminen and Kankaanranta’s (2011) notion of ‘Global Communicative Competence’, the analysis tries to establish whether ELT materials for the training of business professionals make provisions for the development of pragmatic and interactional skills, and can therefore effectively assist business professionals when attending to the everyday tasks connected with their jobs. Preliminary findings highlight the need for a less prescriptive approach which moves away from single lexico-grammatical elements and incorporates communicative strategies.