Business Major Students’ Attitudes toward Business English as a Lingua Franca

Abstract

English has been used as a primary language in the field of international business for a long time. This paper is to investigate Korean business major students’ attitudes and behavioral intentions in regard to the use of business English as a lingua franca (BELF) in a South Korean university. I used a survey method to collect data from 126 university students whose major was management. The results showed that the participants expressed high extrinsic motivation and comparatively lower intrinsic motivation. It was also found that their ideologies of native English were relatively low and that they held positive attitudes and behavioral intentions to use BELF. Finally, their responses displayed a meaningful correlation between extrinsic motivation and attitudes toward the use of BELF. It implied that their open-mindedness to BELF contributed to their escape from the native speaker model as a norm of English learning.