Developing Students‘Intercultural and Collocational Competence Through Analysing the Business Press. A Corpus-based Pedagogic Experiment among Romanian MA Students

Abstract

EFL students, especially those who have reached an upper-intermediate to advanced level, have the tendency of learning a foreign language as a system per se, often without paying heed to the intercultural and socio-linguistic issues that may arise when comparing the mother tongue with the target language, or when trying to find the right equivalent between the two systems. This study aims at identifying the ways in which students may infer intercultural connections between the mother tongue and the English language, in terms of business collocations occurring in business press. An experiment was conducted in which 19 MA students in Language and Communication for Business Administration were assigned the task of collecting mini corpora of business press texts in both English and Romanian, they had to identify and analyze business collocations and their analysis revealed their varying ability to gain deeper insights into the similarities and differences arising from both languages‘collocational patterning, assignable to cultural peculiarities.