Plenary Speech: Linguaculture in Business English as a Lingua Franca: Textbook Adaptation and Classroom Implementation

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 presenting 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 of 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 these competencies, discovering that opportunities to develop certain linguacultural competencies were prevalent, while others were almost entirely absent. Based upon these findings, discussion can proceed to how to adjust materials to provide a more nuanced – but structured – understanding of how to teach language and culture to BELF learners. From that discussion, I propose tangible classroom implementations.