2. BELF and IBE

In this discussion I will be arguing that it is useful to maintain a distinction in business English research between lingua franca communication, which refers to communication that takes place in business contexts between two speakers, neither of whom speak that language as their L1, and interactions that also involve L1 English speakers, in which case English is then not being used as a lingua franca, but as an international business language. While this may be somewhat at odds with current thinking in ELF research (e.g. see Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey Reference Jenkins, Cogo and Dewey2011 for an extensive overview), I believe that there are sound research reasons for doing this, at least for the time being, and that these two types of interactions represent two fruitful areas of enquiry with distinct foci. Lingua franca communication may facilitate business, but it may also be used in other social contexts such as education or healthcare. In business, for instance, BELF is used when a Chinese business person and a Japanese business person use English to communicate with each other rather than using either Chinese or Japanese. The widespread use of BELF in business and organisational contexts has been extensively reported and continues to be in evidence not only in Europe, but increasingly in Asia (Nickerson & Planken Reference Nickerson, Planken and Bargiela-Chiappini2009; Salvi & Tanaka Reference Salvi and Tanaka2011). While some researchers have suggested that a hegemony of English native speaker models still exists, since ‘many business organizations continue to expect their middle and top management to be proficient if not fluent in English and aspire towards the use of idealized norms which continue to remain abstractions’ (Nair-Venugopal, interviewed in Bargiela-Chiappini et al. Reference Bargiela-Chiappini, Nickerson and Planken2013), others have suggested that this hegemony has begun to break down (e.g. Graddol Reference Graddol2006), and that it is now gradually being replaced, particularly in business contexts, by the use of a neutral form of BELF that neither originates in native speaker models nor is owned or influenced by them. As I suggested in my introduction, the work by Louhiala-Salminen et al. (Reference Louhiala-Salminen, Charles and Kankaanranta2005) on BELF in the Scandinavian context has been extremely influential and has begun to unpack some of the ways in which BELF is produced and interpreted by the different cultures engaged in the interaction.

Alongside BELF, IBE refers to the communication that takes place in English between speakers that do not speak English as their first language, and those that do. While, in practice, numerous interactions involve a combination of BELF and IBE, it is important to retain this distinction in theory and to accommodate it in research, because the presence of native English speakers in multilingual interactions can often cause more difficulties for everyone involved. Charles & Marschan Piekkari (Reference Charles and Marschan-Piekkari2002), for instance, found evidence of this when they investigated the horizonal communication that took place at the multinational corporation Kone Elevators (Charles & Marschan-Piekkari Reference Charles and Marschan-Piekkari2002), and Chew (Reference Chew2005) reports on the difficulties faced by Cantonese speakers in the banking sector in Hong Kong when they needed to interact with their (native) English speaking senior managers in meetings. This makes sense, of course, because native speakers can access a wider range of vocabulary and colloquial expressions, and are reportedly also less likely to use accommodation strategies, which consequently makes it difficult for the other speakers around them. In contrast, it seems plausible that BELF interactions will sometimes be more successful because of the more limited lexical sets that are used. More recently, Rogerson-Revell's work at a European business organisation has looked at (1) the difference in the strategies used by the native speakers and the non-native speakers of English (Rogerson-Revell Reference Rogerson-Revell2008), and (2) the accommodation strategies that are used in the meetings (Rogerson-Revell Reference Rogerson-Revell2010). This work in particular suggests a different way of viewing the native speaker, as an equally accountable communicator in IBE interaction, and not as was traditionally the case, as the ideal communicator. Developing the skills to communicate successfully in BELF and especially in IBE, is at the heart of the first research task. Charles & Marschan-Piekkari (Reference Charles and Marschan-Piekkari2002) recommend that all business people can benefit from training in how to communicate successfully in BELF and IBE; their suggestion is that the non-native speakers can work on increasing their proficiency while at the same time the native speakers can learn how to accommodate the lingua franca speakers around them in order to make themselves more comprehensible. A similar suggestion is also made by Sweeney & Zhu (Reference Sweeney and Zhu2010), who found that native speakers experienced in business found it difficult to accommodate the communication skills of non-native business English students. This research task is designed to build on their experiences, together with Charles & Marschan-Piekkari's and Rogerson-Revell’s, to account for both BELF and IBE interactions in teaching materials and to identify the strategies that work for all the speakers involved.

Research task 1

This would ideally involve collecting authentic data in business organisations in which interactions take place in English between L1 English speakers and L1 speakers of other languages, followed by a close text analysis of that data. The creation of such a corpus, together with a detailed analysis, could lead to the identification of accommodation strategies that are used by all speakers to facilitate the success of the interaction. With larger corpora it would be useful to use a quantitative approach together with a corpus linguistics programme such as Wordsmith Tools (Scott Reference Scott2012). For smaller corpora, in addition to a quantitative approach (e.g. Koester Reference Koester2006; Handford & Matous Reference Handford and Matous2011), a qualitative approach would also be useful, focusing on particular strategies such as the use of inclusive pronouns or questions designed to check understanding.

Identifying a core set of accommodation strategies used by all professional business people, regardless of whether they speak English as an L1, will help to establish what it means to achieve professional communicative competence. I will explore this in more detail later in this discussion as it has particular relevance for the people that we have typically referred to as either high proficiency non-native speakers or as near-native speakers. Acquiring the strategies associated with successful professional communicators could underpin teaching and training materials for all those who need to get their work done in either BELF or IBE, regardless of their L1.

Research task 2

This could take the form of a written questionnaire, or interview survey, together with a period of observation, designed to map an individual's communication skills in English together with their career path. Then it would be possible to try to unpack the relationship, if any, for the employees of multinational corporations, between language proficiency in English and success in an institutional role.

Further investigation of the relationship between institutional or professional roles, and the ability to communicate well in English, would build on the existing work by Marschan, Welch & Welch (Reference Marschan, Welch and Welch1997) and more recently by Charles & Marschan-Piekkari (Reference Charles and Marschan-Piekkari2002). What these studies revealed was the existence of shadow structures, directly related to linguistic expertise, alongside the formal organisational structures. Understanding more about this relationship would help to unpack the organisational and individual consequences of opting for English as an official corporate language.

3. What is lingua franca English for business communication?

Researchers with an interest in BELF have increasingly turned their attention to two main questions: (1) the linguistic and discursive nature of lingua franca English as it is used in business organisations with particular reference to how business people use it to achieve their work-related objectives, and (2) the influence of a speaker's (national) cultural background on the discourse strategies that they select in BELF, as well as the impact that these choices then have on the interpretation of those strategies by speakers of a different cultural background in the course of a business interaction. Scholars such as Planken (Reference Planken2005), for instance, for negotiations, Nickerson (Reference Nickerson2000) for email, and de Groot (Reference de Groot2008) for annual general reports, have all investigated how lingua franca English is used to complete a particular organisational task. Each of these studies have unpacked the influence of context and have shown that professional experience (Planken Reference Planken2005), corporate culture (Nickerson Reference Nickerson2000) and the national business context (de Groot Reference de Groot2008) all play a role in shaping the discourse that occurs and the language strategies that are used to realise it. Others, including Louhiala-Salminen et al. (Reference Louhiala-Salminen, Charles and Kankaanranta2005), for Swedish-Finnish interactions, and more recently Du-Babcock & Tanaka (Reference Du-Babock and Tanaka2013), for Hong Kong Chinese and Japanese BELF interactions, have looked at the variations in how BELF is produced by different national cultures and have gone on from there to investigate how it is perceived. The findings of these studies show that while BELF is certainly a successful facilitator in intra-cultural business interactions, at the same time speakers may also speak their own brand of BELF depending on where they come from, which may then be interpreted in a particular way by a speaker with a different cultural background. In Louhiala-Salminen et al.'s (Reference Louhiala-Salminen, Charles and Kankaanranta2005) study, for instance, the Swedish participants reported that the Finns were abrupt and too direct, whereas the Finns reported that their Swedish colleagues were too wordy and unnecessarily indirect. The researchers suggest that the reason for this is that English was being used as a neutral conduit by the Swedish and Finnish speakers they investigated, and the speakers were simply transferring the discourse strategies that were characteristic of their L1. In summary, then, although scholars have begun to piece together the various factors affecting the production and interpretation of lingua franca English in business communication, our knowledge of context and culture remains fragmented and exists only on the basis of individual studies; we need more generalisable data if we are to understand these factors and incorporate this knowledge into our teaching. The next set of research tasks I am proposing will therefore seek to establish a generalisable understanding of the factors that influence lingua franca English for business communication.

Perhaps the most important task related to lingua franca English for business communication is to compile a corpus of spoken and written interactions in business that have been facilitated by the use of BELF. Important work on business English by scholars like Nelson (Reference Nelson2000, Reference Nelson2006) and Handford (Reference Handford2010) has drawn on corpora such as the Business English Corpus (BEC), the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus (CANBEC), and has therefore largely focused on what native speakers do in business. At the same time, large-scale English lingua franca corpora such as the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) project, and the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE), have focused on ELF in general rather than on BELF (GloWbE includes data from 20 countries where English is used as either an L1 or second language (L2)). We urgently need authentic data that we can draw on that goes beyond the efforts of individual scholars to understand how L1 speakers of languages other than English manage to achieve their work-related goals through BELF. Although singular studies of lingua franca English do exist, such as those focusing on meetings by Bilbow (Reference Bilbow2002), Poncini (Reference Poncini2004) and Rogerson-Revell (Reference Rogerson-Revell2008, Reference Rogerson-Revell2010) respectively, what I am proposing here is a much larger-scale project that would allow researchers to work towards generalisable conclusions.

The following research tasks are designed to facilitate the creation of a database that could then be used by many scholars to begin to generalise BELF.

Research task 3

VOICE, for example, includes ten different types of speech event, some of which are also commonly used in business contexts, for example press conferences, service encounters and meetings. Relevant speech events recorded in relevant settings could be compared with the more general corpus and then analysed in various ways, for example lexis that occurs, pronoun use and accommodation strategies. One could then establish any differences between different business genres realised through BELF, for example service encounters compared to meetings, and establish any differences between speech events in the business context and those from other social domains, meetings in business compared to meetings in academic contexts, for instance.

Research task 4

This could consist of common business genres, such as meetings, negotiations and email correspondence. As in Research task 3, this data could then be used to investigate the nature of BELF within and across different business genres and it would help to establish the shared nature of BELF around the world as well as any notable variations. As in Research task 1, a reliable corpus linguistics programme would be useful in both of these projects as a way of systematically analysing the data once it has been transcribed.

In referring to an existing general corpus, or in compiling a new BELF corpus, researchers could usefully replicate the work by scholars such as Nelson and Handford for native speaker discourse. Replicating Nelson (Reference Nelson2000), for instance, would mean comparing a corpus of such interactions with a more general corpus, like the VOICE corpus, in order to say something useful about BELF and not just about ELF. Since Nelson's work has successfully established that business English differs from general English across a number of different parameters, it would then also be useful to look at BELF compared to Nelson's findings for native speaker business English, and then to use this to underpin training materials both for L1 and lingua franca speakers who want to communicate effectively in business (see further discussion below). Likewise, in replicating studies like that by Handford (Reference Handford2010), it would mean compiling a corpus of one particular genre, e.g. business meetings or negotiations, and then using that to establish how that genre is realised through the use of ELF. It would help us to establish a set of key genres and discourse realisations that we could then use as the backbone of our teaching, while at the same time uncovering some of the complexity of global business as an environment characterised by multilingualism, inter-textuality and inter-discursivity. At present there are no published teaching materials that reflect this knowledge, despite the fact that the majority of the globe's business transactions take place in BELF, with a corresponding need for language teaching that takes BELF into account.

The establishment of a BELF corpus would help in identifying a set of keywords, discourse realisations and genres that are common to international business. Beyond that, however, it is also necessary for learners of English to understand how a business person's cultural background may influence their choice of discourse strategies and also, in particular, how these may be perceived by a speaker or writer from another culture. Again, although singular instances do exist that map preferred discourse strategies with some of the macro-cultural theories, e.g. Beamer & Varner (Reference Beamer and Varner2010), who look at communication styles in international negotiations as these are related to Hall's theory of high and low context (Beamer & Varner Reference Beamer and Varner2010; Hall Reference Hall1976), there have been very few studies that predict what different national cultures may do when they use BELF for business. While I realise that this is not uncontroversial, and I accept that the macro-theories on culture have obvious limitations in their tendency to emphasise problems rather than solutions, my experience in teaching senior business students would also suggest that they can provide students with a useful way of understanding some of the more obvious differences that may occur between themselves and their business partners in terms of communication styles. In proposing the following research tasks, my intention is to move towards a set of useful information that could be used as the basis for advanced lesson materials for teaching BELF within a framework of intercultural communication. Despite the clearly static nature of such macro-theories on culture, the tasks are designed to investigate whether such etic theories do in fact obtain in the case of BELF, which would then allow us either to concentrate on a set of core discourse strategies to underpin our teaching, or to focus on those strategies that are most relevant for the geographical area in which we are teaching (as is the case in the study by Louhiala-Salminen et al. (Reference Louhiala-Salminen, Charles and Kankaanranta2005) where the focus is on the discourse differences between two Scandinavian cultures). Recent studies of BELF including the study by Du-Babcock & Tanaka (Reference Du-Babock and Tanaka2013) that investigates two high context cultures, and the study by Kankaanranta & Lu (Reference Kankaanranta and Lu2013), which looks at a high context culture (Mainland China) and a low context culture (Finland), suggest that there may be both divergence between two similar cultures (Du-Babcock & Tanaka Reference Du-Babock and Tanaka2013) and convergence between two different cultures (Kankaanranta & Lu Reference Kankaanranta and Lu2013) in the discursive choices made by the participants in BELF. We need more research in order to investigate this further, in addition to the accommodation strategies that speakers can and do use in such interactions, as I will suggest in Research task 6.

Research task 5

An initial stage in the project could be to identify those areas of language use that are most likely to reflect national cultural differences according to the particular theory, therefore using a theory-driven approach. The corpus would then be compiled to consist of authentic interactions representing theoretically contrastive cultures such as, for instance, the Anglo-Saxon cultures that are viewed as relatively individualist compared to the relatively collectivist Asian cultures. A close text analysis of these interactions could then be completed with a focus on specific lexis, such as the use of pronouns, e.g. ‘I’ versus ‘we’, that should vary between individualist and collectivist national cultures if the macro-theories obtain.

Following on from this, it is also important to understand more about how different national cultures perceive each other in business contexts when the interaction takes place in BELF. Louhiala-Salminen et al.'s (Reference Louhiala-Salminen, Charles and Kankaanranta2005) publication on the perceptions of the BELF produced by Swedish and Finnish speakers respectively, and de Groot et al.'s (Reference de Groot, Korzilius, Gerritsen and Nickerson2011) work on how Dutch–English annual reports are perceived by UK-based analysts, provide a way forward for this type of investigation. De Groot et al.'s research, in particular, with its strong roots in the field of document design is a good example of how to investigate business people's perceptions of written discourse if they originate in two different national cultures, or equally, if they are most familiar with working in one national business culture but must also operate successfully across other business cultures. In contrast to the endeavour represented in Research task 5, this task focuses on an investigation of accommodation strategies in that it not only has the potential to identify problematic strategies, but also the potential to identify different strategies that do not cause a breakdown in the communication. Individual studies by Goby (Reference Goby2009), by Jameson (Reference Jameson2007) and by Poncini (Reference Poncini2004; see below) emphasise how important it is to build up a set of these strategies that cut across cultural and contextual boundaries. Poncini (Reference Poncini2004), for instance, on multicultural business meetings held largely in BELF, identifies a number of important accommodation strategies, such as pronoun use and evaluation strategies that the participants used to maintain the interests of the group participating in the meeting and to facilitate the success of the interaction. Extending the identification of such strategies empirically could be of use in developing appropriate teaching materials that would include a focus on those strategies that are likely to be more successful than others.

Research task 6

This could be in the form of an ethnographic survey, particularly in the case of spoken genres, where a group of respondents representing different cultures are asked to view the recording of an authentic business interaction, e.g. a meeting, and then answer a set of questions designed to uncover their attitudes to different characteristics in the event. Alternatively, the perceptions of different business people to written texts originating in one or more given business cultures, could also be investigated in the form of an experiment where manipulated versions of the same text content are prepared in a form that may be considered typical of those business cultures. This task seeks to establish those characteristics that are problematic and those that are not, and use this information to put forward a set of accommodation strategies that are likely to be successful in facilitating BELF communication.

4. Beyond proficiency: The reincarnation of the non-native speaker

Graddol (Reference Graddol2006) believes that a knowledge of English, particularly for social contexts like business, will soon become only one of a necessary battery of skills that professional people will need in order to function at work alongside computer literacy and quantitative skills. As I discussed in Nickerson (Reference Nickerson2012), this is an important extension of Kachru's work in sociolinguistics and the concept of world Englishes, and it calls for a re-evaluation of the usefulness of the traditional constructs of what it means to be a native-, a second- or a foreign-language speaker. I will argue here that, although there may be differences between a native speaker of English and everyone else, as evidenced in the extent of vocabulary and other expressions they have at their disposal, their success as a business communicator in multicultural interactions can only be measured in terms of whether they can communicate in a professional, appropriate way; for native speakers this includes whether they can adjust their use of the language to accommodate those around them and therefore communicate effectively. Likewise, the distinction between an L2 speaker and a foreign language speaker has little relevance for BELF and IBE business interactions; it is the professional appropriateness of the communication that counts since that will contribute to, and perhaps even determine, whether or not they achieve their organisational goals. To summarise, for both native speakers of English and for speakers of other languages, their success in BELF or IBE can best be assessed in terms of their professional communicative competence, and it is gaining an understanding of what the development of such competence means that forms the basis of the next research task.

Planken's study of the discourse strategies used by professional negotiators compared to those used by student negotiators in completing a negotiation simulation through BELF, provides an indication of what we can mean when we talk about professional communicative competence (Planken Reference Planken2005). If we understand professional communicative competence, then we can usefully create teaching materials that can be used to help business practitioners achieve their goals through BELF or IBE. Planken found, for instance, that the experienced negotiators used ‘safetalk’ more frequently than the students did, that is to say talk that was non-threatening because it was not directly related to the negotiation, they used safetalk throughout the negotiation, whereas the students generally did so at the beginning and the end, and they also used far fewer non-inclusive first and second pronouns (e.g. ‘I’ and ‘you’) than the students, and they therefore constructed a much more inclusive negotiation. Other studies that have also identified different characteristics of professional business communication, include Crawford-Camiciottoli's work on earnings calls, which reports on the frequent use of indirect questions in such calls (Crawford-Camiciottoli Reference Crawford-Camiciottoli2009), Handford & Koester's research on the use of metaphors and idioms in business meetings where they were used by speakers to signal divergence and therefore an underlying conflict (Handford & Koester Reference Handford and Koester2010), and Zhang's most recent exploration, which demonstrates considerable diversity between how writing is perceived by business English students and international business practitioners (Zhang Reference Zhang2013).

Research task 7

The task could build on those areas of language that have already been investigated, for example, safetalk, pronouns, evaluative language, idioms and indirect questions, and include a close text analysis of the corpus to show how experienced business people incorporate such aspects of language use into their business strategy. From there it could identify other strategies that professional business people employ. Collecting information of this type would help us to define what constitutes professional communicative competence as a set of skills within which having good communication skills in English is necessary but not sufficient. It will build on recent work by researchers such as Louhiala-Salminen & Kankaanranta (2011) and Kankaanranta & Planken (Reference Kankaanranta and Planken2010), who have deconstructed global communicative competence in business into a set of three components: multicultural competence, competence in BELF and the communicator's business know-how (Louhiala-Salminen & Kankanraanta 2011: 244).

Re-evaluating our understanding of native and non-native speakers will bring us closer to the realities of the business work, where multilingual, multicultural encounters have become a daily occurrence for many people. It shifts the emphasis away from language proficiency towards being a good communicator and in doing so it suggests that in the same way we can describe an individual as being computer literate, we may be able to define an individual as being a skilled communicator in BELF or IBE. In 2006 Graddol predicted that there would be an increase in the number of learners of English across the globe to around two billion by 2014, followed by a corresponding shift upwards in the levels of general English language proficiency, and then a gradual decline once more in the number of learners (Graddol Reference Graddol2006).

In my own teaching context, in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), I see ample evidence of this shift upwards in English language proficiency in Emirati society and an additional shift within one generation from a local population consisting of some learners of English as a foreign language towards a local population almost all of whom speak and write English alongside Arabic. The use of English rather than Arabic (and vice versa) is determined by the social context, such that English is used, for instance, for the majority of service encounters in retail and the health sector, as well as in increasing numbers of educational institutions, whereas Arabic is used in the home, for anything related to religion and in advertising traditional products. In addition, increasing numbers of Emiratis now attend private rather than government schools, so their primary and secondary education will have taken place predominantly in English, followed by higher education which again is predominantly in English. This means that by the time they enter the workforce from the time they enter full-time education, most of their interactions outside of the home will have taken place in English, and with the exception of those working in the public sector where Arabic may still be dominant, most young Emiratis working in business will find themselves working in English rather than in Arabic.

While the UAE may be an extreme, or perhaps more advanced, example of the shift towards ELF within a society, because of the large numbers of expatriates in the country that work alongside the local population, I believe that many business people now complete at least some of their education in English and then find themselves using both BELF and IBE in order to facilitate their work. In Mainland China, for instance, business English is now viewed as an integral part of the teaching of business, such that the boundaries between language teaching and content teaching for business have become increasingly blurred (Zhang Reference Zhang2007; Bargiela-Chiappini & Zhang Reference Bargiela-Chiappini, Zhang, Paltridge and Starfield2012). Large numbers of our students are now likely to have achieved near-native proficiency by the time they leave full-time education. Developments like this mean that it no longer makes sense to talk about business English and language proficiency for many of the people that we teach; we need instead to provide students with ways of learning how to communicate effectively in multicultural, multilingual settings through the neutral conduit of either BELF or IBE. This means moving away from the descriptive, towards a greater understanding of the strategic (in Rogerson-Revell's terms) and how people facilitate successful communication. In addition, as Nair-Venugopal (Reference Nair-Venugopal2000) has observed in relation to her own context of Malaysia, there is a serious lack of appropriate teaching materials for the sorts of business communication learners that she and I are describing.

Most published textbooks either focus on business English for learners at low or intermediate levels of proficiency, with perhaps an emphasis on grammar and vocabulary, or they are business communication textbooks produced by US scholars with an understandable bias towards the North American way of conducting business. While the textbooks by authors such as Shwom & Gueldenzoph Snyder (Reference Shwom and Gueldenzoph Snyder2013) and Beamer & Varner (Reference Beamer and Varner2010), for example, do provide learners with information on dealing with different cultures, these also are from the perspective of Western interactants dealing with non-Western interactants rather than the other way around. The Cambridge University Press (CUP) Business Advantage series, including Koester et al. (Reference Koester, Pitt, Handford and Lisboa2012), is one of the few sets of published materials that have begun to address the needs of more advanced learners. The series combines knowledge of business theory along with appropriate communication tasks. For example, the advanced level (Lisboa & Handford Reference Lisboa and Handford2012) includes language practice in intercultural communication such as how to facilitate collaborative turn-taking in meetings, and it also asks learners to complete tasks such as the development of an English language policy for an international company. The content and tasks at this level mean that it could be used with groups of students whose aim is to improve their communication skills for business regardless of whether they are L1 speakers of English or of another language. And while the series is to be commended for taking what I believe is a pioneering approach that meets the needs of many of the world's BELF users, I also believe that we can do more to understand the local needs of the people that we teach.

The following research task is intended to investigate the shift in language proficiency towards near native levels and to establish what that means for different parts of the world. At the same time they are also intended to establish what the needs of such learners are and how this can best be accommodated in teaching and training materials. Emirati business people, for instance, need to be able to communicate effectively within the UAE with a large expatriate population made up of both L1 English speakers and English speakers from other parts of the world, and they have a large exposure to English from an early age; Japanese speakers, on the other hand, may be dealing predominantly with other Asians in business through BELF, but much more rarely with L1 English speakers or with business people from outside of Asia and they have a much smaller exposure to English (Tanaka Reference Tanaka and Bargiela-Chiappini2009). We need more information on how our BELF and IBE users converge and diverge if we are to provide them with teaching materials with an appropriate focus. In Nickerson (Reference Nickerson2012), I described a set of project-based tasks that I have designed and adapted over the past few years to improve my students’ knowledge of the communication that takes place in the specific business context that they will be operating in. At the same time, each task also requires them to practise their communication skills. Similar in spirit to the input and output tasks in the CUP Business Advantage series, in that they are designed to develop both business knowledge and communication skills, they are also tailor-made for the local context in which I and my students find ourselves. In agreement with Nair-Venugopal (Reference Nair-Venugopal2000), I believe that we need to take the local context into account if we are to provide adequate preparation for BELF and IBE users. Research task 8 therefore builds on this idea and extends it beyond the borders of the UAE.

Research task 8

This could involve a series of longitudinal surveys over a period of time, for example, on entering the workforce and then five years later, or a similar survey conducted simultaneously but at different levels of seniority or in different sectors of business and industry. One could then use this local knowledge to identify employees’ needs and design a set of teaching materials appropriate for that particular location.