Flipping the L2 business writing classroom : how business students experience being in an investment consultant role in a collaborative research and writing task

Using corpus and student survey (n=71) data, this contribution analyses a complex writing task, and dis-cusses how it is experienced by Business English students. Starting from the assumption that language use in the current business environment is often highly contextual and goal-oriented, we designed a writing task requiring collaborative content research and writing in an investment consultancy ‘frame’, aiming for realism, language use adequacy, traditional and transversal learning outcomes, and student involvement and empowerment. The instructor equally played a realistic role of both language coach and potential lay client. From the sampled students’ perspective, this assignment turns out to be highly involving and diffi-cult as well as effective and mind-broadening. However, student comments also add a few critical notes to the claim that clarity and accuracy of content matter more than linguistic correctness, and that knowledge of business-specific vocabulary and genre conventions take precedence over general language mastery