BEC常用词汇大全

BEC LEMMATISED FREQUENCY LIST (TOP 100 LEMMAS)

/BEC/poskeywords.htm

A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE RESEARCH

What is Business English?

The term ‘Business English’ has been used so often in the world of EFL that it is easy to think of it as a fixed and easily definable concept. However, a few years ago I started to feel that I couldn’t really answer the question ‘What is Business English?’ with any great certainty, nor was I sure if some of the materials I was using were actually portraying the language that my students needed. It was clear that the materials were being created via the intuition of the materials writers and that the flow of materials creation was from idea to text: certain presumptions were being made as to what Business English was, and these then formed the text of the materials. It was equally clear that in fact the flow should be in exactly the opposite direction - Business English should be examined first, an accurate picture gained of what it is like, and then materials created from the results of that analysis.

Gathering data

In order to look at both Business English and Business English materials in more detail, two corpora were created: one of Business English published materials consisting of 33 books and coming to just under 600,000 words, and a second, larger corpus of ‘real’ Business English of just over 1 million words. The Business English Corpus (BEC) contained both written and spoken texts and also distinguished between language used for talking about business, i.e. in newspapers or on TV, and the language used for actually doing business both in written form, e.g. emails, reports and faxes and in spoken form through recordings, e.g. of meetings, negotiations and phone calls. In this way it was hoped to gain an overall representative sample of Business English in all its major forms. Using a smaller version of the British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus, and Mike Scott’s WordSmith Tools 3 (Scott 1999) it was then possible to examine how Business English differed from general English and likewise how the Business English presented in published materials differed from ‘real’ Business English.

Key words

The analysis carried out used the principle of key words. That meant that rather than examine simple relative frequency of words between the corpora, WordSmith was able to statistically compare frequencies of words in all the corpora and show, for example, those words that occur significantly more in Business English than in general English - positive key words - and conversely, those words that occurred significantly less in Business English than in general English - negative key words. It was also able to show in like manner how the lexis used in published materials differed from real-life Business English.