BELF, COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES AND ELT BUSINESS MATERIALS

Communication strategies (CSs henceforth) have been shown to be an essential element of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) interactions, with participants cooperatively building effective communication through a number of pragmatic moves. In English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF) settings CSs aimed at enhancing explicitness and checking comprehension are seen as an essential skill, intertwining with business know-how, clarity of message and explicitness. Together with the ability to draw on plurilingual repertoires (e.g. Cogo 2016b), CSs have been shown to be highly relevant in international business settings to the aim of clarifying, “checking, double-checking, confirming, and reconfirming business issues” (Louhiala-Salminen and Kankaanranta 2011, 256). While CSs from an ELF perspective have been examined in general ELT coursebooks (e.g. Vettorel 2017, 2018), their inclusion in business English Language Teaching (ELT) materials has been less explored (e.g. Franceschi 2018; Lario de Oñate and Vázquez 2013; Caleffi and Poppi 2018, this issue; Pullin 2015). This paper aims at contributing to this area of research through the analysis of business ELT materials, investigating whether awareness and use of CSs is accounted for, to what extent and how. Aspects related to the inclusion of the different layers of the Global Communicative Competence (GCC) model (multicultural competence, BELF competence and business-specific knowledge) in the materials will also be looked into. A series of recently published international business ELT coursebooks at elementary/pre-intermediate/intermediate level have been analyzed in their components (coursebook, teacher’s guide, audio/video/online materials). Drawing mainly on Björkman’s taxonomy of CSs in ELF (2014), the aim will be to identify the presence of activities and tasks dealing with different CSs, above all aimed at clarification and confirmation, as well as those involving translingual practices