Building Linguacultural Competence into a Business English Textbook

Internationally facing professionals in China are tasked with using English to communicate business topics while simultaneously cultivating relationships and negotiating the differing interactional patterns of regional cultures, company cultures, team cultures and individual perceptions of cultural practices. As a result, many business professionals have identified the need to develop cultural competence at the same time as developing their language skills. An important aspect of Business English teaching and learning, textbooks are used worldwide; however, they are often created in western, Anglophone countries and skew toward Anglophone culture, ideology, and language. This presentation will critically examine how well one such textbook, Market Leader, provides a global outlook of Business English communication in terms of linguacultural competence and Global Englishes (GE) used in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) interactions.