A survey of communication patterns in the Brazilian business context

“Hej Seppo, Could You pls Comment on This!”—Internal Email Communication in Lingua Franca English in a Multinational Company

“…She gives an example of a report in one company sharing the same layout as a memo in another company. Furthermore, Barbara et al (1996) report that different businesses may use different names, such as bids and reports, for what appear to be texts in the same genre.…”

Business Discourse

“…email or meetings) at one division or department of a multinational corporation or exporting company (cf. Nickerson, 1999;Barbara et al, 1996); An investigation of register and/or style in email (genres) as a manifestation of the discursive reality and of power relations in an organization (cf. Kankaanranta, 2006;Gimenez, 2001Gimenez, , 2002.…”

“…Some of the other studies we discuss in Part 3 have provided specific examples of why the findings of survey research need to be interpreted carefully in business discourse research in particular. In a pioneering study of the Brazilian business context, for instance, Barbara et al (1996) comment on the problem associated with the nomenclature of business documents as texts with the same purpose that are referred to using different names across different companies (e.g. memo, report and project), and Nickerson (2000) confirms this by combining a survey of the use of written English by corporations in the Netherlands with the collection of a corpus of real data, which showed a diversity of text types within the corpus that was not apparent from the reports given by the respondents in the initial survey.…”

English for Occupational Purposes

“…For this information to be useful for teaching EOP, it is important to know which tasks are performed in English, rather than in the national language. Surveys have been carried out in a number of countries to fi nd out such information, for example Barbara, Celani, Collins, and Scott (1996) conducted a survey to discover how English was used in a variety of business organizations in Brazil; and in a more recent survey, Chew (2005) focuses specifi cally on the tasks carried out by new graduate employees in the banking sector in Hong Kong. In the European context, a widely read magazine for English learners in Germany (McMaster, 2008) conducted a survey among approximately 1,000 readers who use English in their work.…”