Linguaculture in Business English as a Lingua Franca: Levels and Orientations – Analysis and Evaluation of Business English Textbooks

Internationally operating professionals communicate with partners from multiple linguistic and cultural (linguacultural) backgrounds using Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF). Interlocutors may be colleagues, suppliers, or clients located overseas or domestically. For Business English teachers, an ongoing challenge is how to present the “cultural” part of “linguacultural” without being overly simplistic, reductionist, or stereotypical. On the other hand, the intersection of language and culture is complex, so addressing the infinite permutations of how cultures interact could overwhelm students. As a solution, I examine the above issue using the combination three theoretical lenses: BELF, linguaculture, and genre. With linguacultural competencies extracted from the above research literature and surveys of business professionals, I examined five popular business English textbooks for the presence or absence of the aforementioned competencies, discovering that, while some competencies were prevalent, others were almost completely absent. Based upon these findings, discussion can proceed to how to adjust materials to provide a more nuanced – but structured – understanding of how language and culture can be taught to BELF learners. From that discussion, I propose tangible classroom implementation.