Lang. Teach. (2015), 48.

3, 390–404 
c Cambridge University Press 2015
doi:10.1017/S0261444815000129

Thinking Allowed

The death of the non-native speaker? English as a lingua franca

in business communication: A research agenda

Catherine Nickerson Zayed University, UAE

[email protected]

The impact of globalisation in the last 20 years has led to an overwhelming increase in the
use of English as the medium through which many business people get their work done. As a
result, the linguistic landscape within which we now operate as researchers and teachers has
changed both rapidly and beyond all recognition. In the discussion below, I will outline a
research agenda for English as a lingua franca (ELF) in business communication of relevance
for scholars and practitioners with an interest in teaching language. I will discuss three main
areas of enquiry, which are: (1) the further development of the existing theory concerning the
use of English in business and how this impacts language teaching, including the role played
by native speakers of English, (2) the influence of culture and context on the production and
interpretation of English in business contexts, and (3) the extension of our existing
understanding of the use of English in business contexts in order to take increasingly advanced
levels of proficiency into account, as well as developing an understanding of what constitutes
professional communicative competence in business. For each of these key areas I will
suggest a number of tasks which could help to give substance to our research in the future.

1. Introduction

In Nickerson (2012), I outlined the changes that have taken place in the teaching of English
for Business during the course of my career over the past two decades. In this discussion I
will revisit a number of the themes that I pinpointed there and discuss what these may mean
for a research agenda in the future.
In 1993, when I first taught English for business communication at tertiary level, much
of what we did was to work with our students to replicate, or at least emulate, the discourse
characteristics of common business genres (at that time) such as business letters and memos
that were produced by native speakers. Students typically studied grammar and vocabulary,
and the emphasis was still largely on linguistic rather than communicative competence.
Although our scholarly work had begun to reflect an interest in both discourse and genre,
due to the enormous influence of Swales’s work in academic writing (Swales 1990) and
the adaptation of this work by Bhatia for professional contexts (Bhatia 1993), textbook
 CATHERINE NICKERSON: ELF IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 391

materials for business English remained ethnocentrically Anglo-Saxon with a focus on English
language rather than on communication. Over the course of the next decade our research
became more contrastive and more contextual, we looked at how other languages used in
business compared to English within the same business genre (see Bhatia & Bremner 2012
for an extensive overview), and we also became more interested in how professional people
managed to communicate effectively in business within a given context with much less focus on
whether or not they were a native or non-native speaker (e.g. Nickerson 2000; Planken 2005);
the emphasis shifted towards discourse and context and how these were realised through
language, with genre as an important construct at the intersection between the two, and
we started to move towards a concern with professional competence (e.g. Kankaanranta &
Planken 2010). This discursive and contextual turn, which was shared across the humanities,
meant that we became much more interested in how business people used language in order
‘to get their work done’ (Bargiela-Chiappini, Nickerson & Planken 2013: 3) and we stopped
looking at language in isolation from a given context. As a result, business language, and
business English in particular, was increasingly viewed as business communication and we
tried to establish how it shaped and was shaped by the organisational contexts in which
it was used. From 2005 onwards, with the landmark publication by Louhiala-Salminen,
Charles & Kankaanranta (2005) on business English as a lingua franca (BELF), our scholarly
work on business English has increasingly focused on how it is used as either a lingua franca
in business (in interactions only involving speakers who do not use it as a first language
(L1)) or as an international language (in interactions that also include L1 English speakers)
(see also Kankaanranta & Louhiala-Salminen 2010). As I will discuss below, however, while
BELF and International Business English (IBE) have now become common features of the
academic literature on business communication and English for specific business purposes,
these developments have still been slow to influence our teaching materials.
I will outline three main areas of enquiry: two are theoretical, one is more practical,
namely, (1) the further development of the existing theory surrounding BELF and IBE and
how this is relevant for language teaching, including in particular the role played by native
speakers in IBE, (2) the influence of culture and context on English lingua franca production
and interpretation in business contexts, and (3) the extension of our existing understanding
of ELF in business communication to account for increasingly advanced levels of proficiency,
including our understanding of what constitutes professional communicative competence in
business. For each of these key areas I will suggest a number of tasks which could help to shape
the research agenda surrounding our understanding of ELF in business communication in
the future.

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.
392 THINKING ALLOWED

While this may be somewhat at odds with current thinking in ELF research (e.g. see Jenkins,
Cogo & Dewey 2011 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 2009; Salvi & Tanaka 2011). 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. 2013), others have
suggested that this hegemony has begun to break down (e.g. Graddol 2006), 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. (2005) 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 (2002), for instance, found evidence of this
when they investigated the horizonal communication that took place at the multinational
corporation Kone Elevators (Charles & Marschan-Piekkari 2002), and Chew (2005) 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 2008), and
(2) the accommodation strategies that are used in the meetings (Rogerson-Revell 2010).
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
(2002) 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
 CATHERINE NICKERSON: ELF IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 393

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 (2010), 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

Build a corpus of business meetings and other spoken business genres,

e.g. interviews, negotiations, in BELF and IBE, to identify the similarities
and differences between the strategies used by native speakers and by
non-native speakers.

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 2012). For smaller corpora, in addition to a quantitative
approach (e.g. Koester 2006; Handford & Matous 2011), 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

Investigate the employees within a number of multinational corporations

to establish the roles played by native and non-native speakers of English
in terms of power.

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.
394 THINKING ALLOWED

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 (1997) and more recently by Charles & Marschan-Piekkari (2002). 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 (2005), for instance, for
negotiations, Nickerson (2000) for email, and de Groot (2008) 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 2005), corporate culture (Nickerson 2000) and the national
business context (de Groot 2008) 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.
(2005), for Swedish-Finnish interactions, and more recently Du-Babcock & Tanaka (2013),
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 (2005) 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.
 CATHERINE NICKERSON: ELF IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 395

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 (2000, 2006) and Handford (2010) 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 (2002), Poncini
(2004) and Rogerson-Revell (2008, 2010) 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

Refer to an existing general corpus like VOICE or GloWbE, extract the

interactions that are pertinent to business contexts, and then use this data
to investigate the nature of BELF.

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

Compile a new corpus of BELF interactions involving spoken and written

business genres from different contexts and different national cultures, in
collaboration with different researchers located in parts of the world with
similar national cultures and languages, e.g. Scandinavia, southern
Europe, South East Asia.

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
396 THINKING ALLOWED

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 (2000), 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 (2010), 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 (2010), who look at communication styles in international
negotiations as these are related to Hall’s theory of high and low context (Beamer & Varner
2010; Hall 1976), 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
 CATHERINE NICKERSON: ELF IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 397

which we are teaching (as is the case in the study by Louhiala-Salminen et al. (2005) where
the focus is on the discourse differences between two Scandinavian cultures). Recent studies
of BELF including the study by Du-Babcock & Tanaka (2013) that investigates two high
context cultures, and the study by Kankaanranta & Lu (2013), 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 2013) and convergence
between two different cultures (Kankaanranta & Lu 2013) 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

Select a macro-theory related to intercultural communication and compile

a corpus of written or spoken interactions between business people from
two opposing cultures according to that theory, e.g. a Western culture in
interaction with an Eastern culture as predicted by Hall’s theory of high
and low context (Hall 1976) or a collectivist culture in interaction with an
individualist culture, as predicted by Hofstede’s work on cultural
dimensions (Hofstede 2001). Analyse the corpus to establish what the
similarities and differences are between the two cultures concerned in
their use of BELF.

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 (2005) publication on the perceptions of the BELF produced by
Swedish and Finnish speakers respectively, and de Groot et al.’s (2011) 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 (2009), by
398 THINKING ALLOWED

Jameson (2007) and by Poncini (2004; see below) emphasise how important it is to build up
a set of these strategies that cut across cultural and contextual boundaries. Poncini (2004),
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

Compile a corpus of spoken and written business genres that represent

different national business cultures, and investigate how the
characteristics of these cultures are perceived by the members of a
different culture.

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 (2006) 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 (2012), 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
 CATHERINE NICKERSON: ELF IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 399

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 2005). 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 2009),
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 2010), and Zhang’s most recent exploration, which demonstrates
considerable diversity between how writing is perceived by business English students and
international business practitioners (Zhang 2013).

Research task 7

Build a corpus of authentic business transactions involving experienced

professionals. Use this to identify what professional business people do
that non-experienced people do not, to facilitate successful
communication and achieve their goals regardless of whether they speak
English as an L1 or not.

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 Kankaan-
ranta & Planken (2010), who have deconstructed global communicative competence in
400 THINKING ALLOWED

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 2006).
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 2007;
Bargiela-Chiappini & Zhang 2012). 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 (2000) has
observed in relation to her own context of Malaysia, there is a serious lack of appropriate
 CATHERINE NICKERSON: ELF IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 401

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 (2013) and Beamer & Varner (2010), 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. (2012), 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 2012) 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 2009). 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 (2012), 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 (2000), 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.
402 THINKING ALLOWED

Research task 8

Survey a number of BELF users in a given location and establish the levels
of language proficiency in that location, the exposure to English prior to
entering the workforce, who business people need to interact with, and
what genres they need to be able to use.

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.

Conclusion

In this short piece, I have outlined a research agenda for ELF in business communication of
relevance to scholars and practitioners with an interest in teaching language. In the past two
decades, the impact of globalisation on the business world that has led to an overwhelming
increase in the use of English has altered the linguistic landscape within which we operate
beyond all recognition, and this seems unlikely to change for the foreseeable future. An
understanding of both the production and reception of BELF, as it is used around the globe,
will be instrumental in determining the teaching materials we select and the ways in which
we chose to deliver them. Similarly, a re-evaluation of what we mean by the terms ‘native
speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’, and the roles that they play in the co-construction of
business, will shape our scholarly thinking in years to come.

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DR CATHERINE NICKERSON is a professor in the College of Business at Zayed University, Dubai,

19282, in the United Arab Emirates. She has taught business communication in the Netherlands, in
India and in the Emirates, and her work on business English and business discourse has been widely
published. She has been the recipient of both the Outstanding Researcher’s Award and the Outstanding
Publication Award from the Association for Business Communication.