Teaching Business English: Metaphorically Speaking

This paper's aim is to provide an outline of metaphorical and idiomatic language teaching activities used in L2 Business English. The range of strategies comprising intentional as well as incidental vocabulary teaching is examined in terms of students' both receptive and productive knowledge. In order to understand the potential benefits of their usage, the term phrasal language and its impacts in a language acquisition process should be clearly defined. Therefore, the former umbrella term encompassing a variety of multi-word items is given the appropriate syntactical, semantic, sociolinguistic definitions. Metaphors, being a conceptual base of idiomatic expressions, and idioms, respectively are being analyzed from the “cognitive linguistic view of metaphor” introduced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Accordingly, metaphors are linguistic reflections of our own conceptions of the world surrounding us. Given the abundance of abstract notions, we try to comprehend them by means of concrete concepts, i.e. we think metaphorically. Despite a variety of benefits of teaching metaphorical language ranging from expanding students' vocabulary to paving the way for genuine communication taking place in a specific sociocultural context, idiomaticity has proven to be one of the most difficult language feature to acquire, mostly due to its syntactical and semantic peculiarity. The latter is generally encountered at advanced stages of L2 learning, where fluency development and contextual word knowledge is highly stressed. This employs the use of incidental teaching strategies including a great number of exposures to reading authentic texts. However, some studies on vocabulary acquisition (Schmitt, 2008, Waring and Takaki, 2003) have indicated that incidental vocabulary learning from reading is more likely to push words to a partial rather than full level mastery. Consequently, gains from incidental learning are mainly recognized within the receptive rather than the productive knowledge spectrum. In order to enhance the latter, an explicit approach heightening students’ idiomatic language awareness should be frequently employed. In light of the abovementioned findings, our small-scale research involves a number of first-year undergraduate Business Trade students who are all pre-intermediate English learners. They are first presented a selection of incidental teaching activities and afterwards exposed to a combined incidental-intentional teaching process designed to result in their both productive and receptive knowledge improvement. Tests on their both incidental and incidental-intentional vocabulary uptake are carried out. We expect that the comparative analysis figures of the test results are in favour of the complementary explicit and incidental approach.