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One of the aspects of language proficiency that characterizes proficient speakers of English is collocational competence. On the other hand, those who have not developed or have emerging collocational competence avoid using collocations or resort to literal translation from their first or stronger language when they need to produce collocations in L2 English. The use of collocations facilitates communication with other English speakers, especially when it comes to English for specific purposes. In business English, collocations may have a terminological status, such as “bull market” and “hostile takeover”. Clearly, it is important for students who use and will use business English to develop collocational competence to a high level. With this in mind, we set out to compile a corpus of contemporary business and financial English that would be used in teaching collocations and terms to students of International Business at an American university in Croatia for whom in most cases English is an L2. Thus, the aim of this presentation is to describe the compilation of a 783, 230-word corpus in SketchEngine and its application in teaching and research. The corpus, called Business and Financial English, is based on business- and finance-related articles from The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg, and Forbes, leading journals in the business world. It was compiled in January 2022, with the publication date of the articles ranging from January 2021 to August 2021, thus reflecting contemporary language in economically vibrant times of the pandemic. Following compilation, we used SketchEngine’s automatic keyword and terms extraction tool to obtain a list of the most frequent collocations. The list was cleaned to retain only business and financial terms and thus narrowed down. We then asked faculty teaching core courses within the International Business program to examine the list, noting which terms are indeed relevant for students of business (or English learners in general who aim to understand contemporary business English). This was a way to test the relevance of the corpus by experts in the field. After the instructors’ intervention, we finalized the list. We used a number of items from the final list to test International Business students’ knowledge of keywords and terms. The results indicate that a more targeted approach to teaching collocations of business English is needed, and we hope that the corpus-based approach to teaching will help in that regard in the future. At the end of the presentation, we outline prospective avenues of research and teaching based on our Corpus of Business and Financial English. |
