Business Meetings as a Genre—Pedagogical Implications for Teaching Business English

Abstract

Business people spend a considerable amount of their working lives participating in different types of meetings, talking and listening. What makes business meetings difficult to grasp for both researchers and learners is the vast number of factors contributing to them, such as the size of a company, the purpose of the meeting and the relationships among the people involved. This article will try to examine how people in business communicate in meetings to get their work done and will also analyze some of the most recurrent features of the business meeting genre. I will draw on a particular corpus (CANBEC)—a unique resource which brings together descriptions of meetings of different types, both within and among companies, involving speakers, whose roles and responsibilities vary, and who represent a range of nationalities and differing first languages—and on the research carried out by Handford (2010). The analysis of keywords, concordance lines, and discourse provided him with thorough insights into certain aspects of business meetings, such as the structural stages of meetings, participants’ discursive practices useful in meetings, interpersonal language, creativity, power and constraint, and many other factors. In conclusion, I will make practical suggestions for implementing the knowledge of the business meeting, as a genre into the Business English classroom, as well as for the design of educational materials, which will help prepare students to participate efficiently in business meetings of various kinds.