The Language of Business Studies Lectures

“Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli’s book on the language of business lectures will be of use not only to experts in the fields of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics but has also much to offer to the increasing number of people working in the academic world of Business Studies and indeed to those operating in the marketplace.”

“Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli presents a well-written, engaging analysis of a keystone genre of the MBA discourse community - the business studies lecture. Of interest to language researchers, discourse analysts, as well as the members of the business community itself, this volume takes the reader from the conception of this multi-year project through its successful conclusion, carefully detailing all the methodological and analytical steps along the way. [...] On the whole, I feel Crawford Camiciottoli presents an interesting and accessible analysis of the business studies lecture genre. Using an approach that neatly illustrates the utility and advantages of micro corpora analysis, the merits of this volume are many. [...] Insightfully and carefully, Crawford Camiciottoli details her methodological approach and addresses some of the limitations and common pitfalls corpus researchers are likely to encounter in their analyses. Importantly, this volume demonstrates how standard corpus linguistic approaches to discourse can be extended by more ethnographically oriented methodologies that shed light on nonverbal modalities.
This book will undoubtedly be of interest to corpus researchers, novice and expert alike, who wish to complement their research with alternative methodologies.”

“An excellent example of how different research traditions can be brought together to offer a thorough, coherent and well grounded exploration of a genre. Drawing on corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and ethnographic observation, this book explores the spoken features of lectures, their specific role in academic discourse and their disciplinary / professional strategies.”

“This is an important and timely contribution to the scholarly literature as business studies courses continue to increase in popularity and as more and more business studies lectures are being given in English. ”

“Given the growing popularity of business studies, this is a most timely work. The organization of the volume and the writing style are very clear and the discussions of the literature relating to the various academic spheres of interest are impressive. Useful considerations are included on using corpora for the comparison of discourse types, something which is often – inexplicably – missing from genre studies.”

“This book presents a thorough and rigorous set of studies of a corpus of Business Studies lectures in English which focus primarily on features of the language used by lecturers, an, secondly, on a number of multimodal aspects of the lectures. It is the first major study of lectures in this particular subject area and it also consitutes an important contribution to the study of English language academic lectures in general.[...] This book presents a useful model for how crpus analysis tools can be used in the study of academic discourse, making use of the concordancing, wordlist and keyword tools in the WordSmith tools suite of programmes, and it is an interesting source of insights into the language of Business Studies lectures that will help the reader to formulate hypotheses to test and further data.”