CREATING A BUSINESS WORD LIST FOR TEACHING BUSINESS ENGLISH

Foreign language students planning to study business at English-speaking universities have little or no previous training in English for Academic Purposes in general, or in Business English in particular. Nonetheless, these students rely heavily on their ability to read and fully comprehend a variety of business course books and other materials in the field. Reading comprehension, however, depends to a great extent on an individual's vocabulary level. Vocabulary may be acquired by learning word lists. One very useful list of this kind is the General Service List (West, 1953) which includes the 2,000 most common words for teaching and learning English. Another potentially useful list, which is more specialised, is the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000), which provides the most common words in academic texts. These two lists, however, fail to provide the prospective students of business with the technical vocabulary that is particular to their area of study. A third list, therefore, more specialised and business-oriented is required in order to cover this gap. The present paper describes the attempt to create a Business Word List.