The Extra Linguistic Dimension Of Business Studies Lectures

By Author: Alex Lee
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After an introductory chapter, Crawford Camiciottoli provides a selective overview of the literature relating to several broad discourse areas that come into play in business studies lectures, viz. spoken, academic, disciplinary, and professional (the latter two referring to economics and business discourse, respectively). As far as business discourse is concerned, Crawford Camiciottoli proposes a two-way link between academe and profession: typically, business studies lecturers are active members of the professional community, while learners must acquire the skills necessary to become successful businessmen and women. In Chapter 3, Crawford Camiciottoli writes about her corpus of 12 lectures, six of them L2 in an international programme at the University of Florence in Italy, another six LI from various US universities (109,499 words in all) and how she compiled it over a 4-year period (design, collection, and transcription). She also describes the two additional corpora that she compiled for comparative purposes: one with business studies (written) texts and another with lectures from non-business fields like musicology and ...
... genetics. In terms of method, the study combines a quantitative approach based on corpus techniques (concordance lines and dispersion plots) with follow-up qualitative text analysis and observational techniques.Thomas Sabo

The next three chapters present an investigation of a number of strictly linguistic aspects of the genre. In Chapter 4, Crawford Camiciottoli turns to an analysis of the 12 lectures as spoken language. Based on a study of speech rate, lecture style, informality, and density, she demonstrates that the lectures are a hybrid. They share conversational (pedagogy-oriented) as well as more formalized (content-oriented) features. Chapter 5 deals with the range of linguistic devices (discourse-structuring, evaluative, and interactive) used by the lecturers to enter into 'dialogue' with their audiences in order to facilitate understanding. The author also looks at audience responsiveness and feedback. The overall conclusion here is that the lecturers are very much pedagogically inspired, not just in the Q&A sequences at the end, but throughout the lectures. Next, the disciplinary and professional dimensions of the lectures are focused on. Some of the topics dealt with here include the tendency in economics to move between hypothetical and real worlds, argumentation, specialized lexis, and metaphor. The analysis demonstrates a distinct multiplicity (or multidisciplinarity) and a delicate intertwining of epistemological approaches at the heart of the data. Crawford Camiciottoli points to the dual nature of business studies lectures as both theory-(economics) and practice- (business) oriented. Thomas Sabo Jewellery

Chapter 7 deals with the extra-linguistic dimension of business studies lectures. Here Crawford Camiciottoli turns to a multimodal analysis of a range of visual and nonverbal features, including the use of PowerPoint slides (as products) as well as gaze and gestures (part of the lecturing process). This part of the research confirms the important role of this often ignored component of the lecture experience. More generally, it supports the book's central finding that interaction is the single most important overriding feature of business studies lectures. In the concluding 'final remarks' chapter of what is a lucid and truly comprehensive genre study, Crawford Camiciottoli looks forward to future research, pointing to the special position of L2 learners, and the need to help them consolidate multiple literacies. She also discusses how lecturers can become more effective in transforming novices into full-fledged members of the business community, a question which, no doubt, interests Bargiela-Chiappini, Nickerson, and Planken just as much.