The Place of Linguacultural Competence in a Business English Textbook

Internationally facing professionals in China must communicate via Business English as a Lingua Franca while simultaneously cultivating relationships and negotiating the differing interactional patterns of regional cultures, company cultures, team cultures, and individual conceptions of culture. As a result, many working professionals study Business English to develop their English proficiency and transcultural communicative competence, which carries benefits such as job promotions and increased pay. While a variety of Business English textbooks are on the market and are used widely in China, they are often created in western Anglophone countries and skew toward Anglophone culture, ideology, and language. Where they do address the broader cultural landscape, the conceptualization tends to be nation-based, static, and predictable – characterizations of culture that have been problematized. This investigation combines the findings of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires completed by active business professionals with criteria gleaned from a research-based transdisciplinary framework, combining Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) theory, Linguaculture Theory, and Genre Theory. Using mixed methods, this study examines to what extent and in what ways one such textbook, Market Leader, provides a global perspective of Business English communication in terms of developing linguacultural competence. Aimed at researchers and Business English trainers alike, the results of this study will help inform tangible classroom adaptations to materials and add a linguacultural perspective to the GELT framework. The limitations of this study relate to its next steps: These adaptations must be tested in the classroom to evaluate their efficacy.