Raising student awareness of the use of English for specific business purposes in the European context: A staff–student project

Abstract

This Research Note reports on a large-scale staff–student project focussing on the use of English for Specific Business Purposes in a number of promotional genres (TV commercials, annual reports, corporate web-sites, print advertising) within several of the EU member states: Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Spain. The project as a whole aims to identify where and to what extent English is used and also to investigate the consequences of including English in promotional genres where corporations are presumably intending to reach and persuade audiences in non-English-speaking countries. We are therefore interested in the occurrence of English, the attitudes of consumers to the use of that English and whether or not they are able to understand it. In this paper, we report in detail on a survey of the use of English in print advertising in the July 2003 editions of glossy magazines aimed at young women in the Netherlands, Germany and Spain, together with an experimental investigation of the attitudes to and comprehension of English, based on data collected from between 43 and 50 respondents in each of the three countries. The project has been invaluable in raising student awareness of the way in which English is present in the world around them, and more specifically that English is increasingly becoming an intrinsic part of a number of highly visible and also highly accessible promotional genres.