Balancing Local Identity and Global Audiences: Localized and Globalized Instances of EIL in Corporate Websites

As the world becomes more and more globalized and connected, transnational encounters have exponentially risen at a very rapid pace and in a multiplicity of domains: tourism, diplomacy, science, technology, politics and business. These new dynamics are posing significant challenges to global corporations and companies willing to extend their activities beyond their national borders, and have made them aware of the need for a shared language that facilitates exchanges (Louhiala-Salminen & Rogerson-Revell 2010, p. 92). Although business interactions are rarely monolingual events and most companies often mix their strategies of language choice according to the situation (Vandermeeren 1999, p. 276), in the past few decades English has been widely accepted as the principal means of communication in international business settings. This is confirmed by a poll conducted by Reuter/Ipsos in 26 countries in 2012, the results of which show that over two thirds (67 percent) of workers who deal with people beyond their national borders said that English is the language they used most often. However, it is not enough to claim that English is the most extensively used language in the globalized business world. In fact, it is necessary to determine what kind of English is going to be adopted as the chosen means for addressing international stakeholders and establishing new forms of work and collaboration on a large scale, bearing in mind that the way information is phrased is extremely important, as after all: “language matters” (Louhiala-Salminen, Rogerson-Revell, 2010: 91). Nowadays, thanks to the Internet and its unique tools, organizations are able to reach an unpredictably wide audience without being subject to time restrictions as in the case of traditional mass media (Insch 2008). Therefore web-mediated documents have come to play a fundamental role for companies. In particular, corporate websites perform the two-fold function of projecting the company’s image and promoting the company’s products. Therefore, when it comes to drafting the English version of their websites, rather than insisting on a ‘monochrome’ native-speaker standard companies should remember that, in view of the present globalisation through English and of English, they will have above all to be intelligible to other non-native speakers, rather than to native speakers only. Accordingly, they should devote particular care and attention to the features of the language employed, if they want their message to be conveyed in a clear and consistent way, so as to create an easily recognizable identity and reinforce the corporation’s vision and values. Relying mostly on a qualitative approach, the present study analyses a series of texts which should have been posted on the website of the Agency for International Business Promotion of the Modena Chamber of Commerce with a view to showing that it is possible to guide the global stakeholders to better apprehend the agency’s local identity by modifying their linguistic and structural organization

Mirror, Mirror on the wall: which strategies can suit them all?

English is nowadays the dominant language in the higher education sector in Europe. Not only is it the preferred medium of communication for scholars at international conferences or visiting professors, but it is also the medium of instruction used in a growing number of degree programmes (Gotti 2014). Universities in many non-English-speaking countries are indeed embracing the challenges of internationalization, as they believe that teaching disciplinary subjects in English will make study programmes more accessible and attractive to international students, improve the foreign language skills and employability prospects of local students and enhance the international prestige and mobility of academic staff (Coleman 2006; Dearden 2014). If, on the one hand, this can open up new opportunities, on the other hand, it also poses dilemmas as far as the accreditation and training of teaching staff is concerned. For instance, what language competences and which methodological skills should the teachers deploy in order to teach their subjects through English

Global interactions in English as a Lingua Franca. How written communication is changing under the influence of electronic media and new contexts of use

This volume investigates the changes undergone by written communication in our globalized world as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), which usually functions as a language for communication purposes, becomes a language for identification purposes. The study takes into account different web-genres: from the replication of existing genres in other media, to cybergenres whose key evolutionary force is the progressive exploitation of the new functionalities afforded by the new medium. The variety of the contexts of use has made it possible to consider different ELF-using communities of practice, whose members adopt ELF and adapt it to express individual, national and professional identities in international interactions. The analysis focuses on the lexico-grammatical innovations, which inevitably change in accordance with the different contexts of use, as well as on the communicative strategies underpinning these changes

Communication styles at work: How do members of different national cultures deal with information requests and directives when writing emails?

Ever since globalization began changing the world by removing geographical barriers, the exchange of information and knowledge has become easier thanks to the Internet and the use of English as a global lingua franca. In the business arena, one of the most common forms of communication is probably emails, which have replaced traditional communication methods such as by letter, fax, and telephone (Lightfoot 2006). Emails are so cheap, easy to store, retrieve, forward, and send to multiple recipients whenever needed (Crystal 2006; Louhiala-Salminen and Kankaanranta 2005) that even small companies can generate an enormous volume of email traffic to fulfil their daily tasks, with tremendous amounts of data being exchanged (Laclavík and Maynard 2009). Bearing in mind that different national cultures have an impact on communication styles (Gudykunst, Ting-Toomey and Chua 1988; De Mooij 2014), the present contribution focuses on three corpora of 100 emails each, written by the Japanese, Chinese and Emirati employees of a multinational freight-forwarding company with a view to comparing the communication styles adopted when interacting with colleagues from a different country within the time constraints connected with the common field of operation. In particular, the analysis aims to explore the strategies deployed to tackle potentially face-threatening speech acts like information requests and directives. The results show that cultural differences in email are present and can be explained by Hofstede’s dimensions of power-distance, individualism versus collectivism, uncertainty-avoidance and short- versus long term orientation. In particular, power-distance and short- versus long term orientation have a significant impact on the preference for promptness, task-relatedness, and relationship-relatedness in email communication

Conveying Trust in a Globalized Era

In present times much of a company’s success depends on the relevant stakeholders’ perception of their reputation and image. It is therefore particularly important for a company to disseminate suitable information about itself and use public-relations instruments as effectively as possible. More particularly, the belief that a company can “do well by doing good” has been gaining momentum recently, in response to rising public awareness of the social impact of a company’s performance. This has led an increasing number of enterprises to devote greater care and attention to the drafting of their Corporate Social Responsibility reports (CSR), which have thus become important communication instruments. However, the impact of globalization, which has brought along an increase in international business exchanges and the subsequent need to address a variety of audiences, has also given rise to important and controversial issues for what concerns corporate communication in general. On the one hand, companies are faced with the challenge to reach out to a multicultural audience, but on the other hand, in order to distinguish themselves from their competitors, they cannot but emphasize some traits of their national culture and identity, in an attempt to project a trustworthy and reliable image. This is in line with Hofstede’s principle: ‘Think locally, act globally’ (1998). In fact, several studies (Han and Terpstra, 1988; Ettenson, 1993; Jaffe and Nebenzahl, 2006) have demonstrated that stakeholders often refer to the ‘country-of-origin’ image as a tool to evaluate companies and their services/products. The present study focuses on the English version of the CSR reports published on the websites of two airlines with different cultural backgrounds: Delta and JAL. The analysis aims at finding out whether or not in our present globalized era the two selected airlines still refer to the typical values of their respective countries to create a positive halo (Tversky and Simonson, 1992) that may influence their stakeholders’ attitudes

CSR reports in our globalised era: balancing national culture and global trends

Nowadays more and more companies are being proactive in producing CSR reports which can enhance their reputation and image with the general public in the global marketplace. However, the need to engage in cosmopolitan communicative practices makes companies face the inevitable tension between global trends and cultural markedness. The present analysis has analysed the English version of CSR reports published between 2011 and 2013 on the corporate websites of Delta, Etihad and JAL, with a view to ascertaining how global carriers are currently engaging in global communication while at the same time trying to balance their cultural identity and global appeal. In the first place, the study has focused on the main semantic areas and key words contained in each corpus of CSR reports in order to highlight similarities and differences in terms of the values underpinning the airlines’ commitment to CSR. Secondly, the co-text and the collocations of the main keywords have been investigated with a view to shedding some light on the interplay between globalization and local culture. The preliminary findings seem to indicate that airlines still “fly the flag” when communicating globally through the English online version of their CSR reports. In fact, despite some common values underpinning CSR practices, divergences clearly outnumber similarities, particularly in the deployment of the discursive strategies contributing to the persuasiveness of a text

"Nanotechnologies: Where should they take us?" The popularization of nanosciences on the web: A discourse analytical approach

The study investigates a set of web texts dedicated to nanotechnologies with the aim to assess the strategies deployed for the transfer of specialized notions to lay audiences and to evaluate how the controversy potential of the issue on hand is managed by different stakeholders. The texts under scrutiny \u2013 EU web pages and web reports issued by the environmental organization Friends of the Earth - show a primary concern, at the lexical level, with the use of nanotechnologies: the use of is in fact, among the most frequent threeword clusters around the lemma nano. In environmentalist texts the topic is often associated with highly emotional topics, i.e. babies and food, while EU web pages underline a more informational and even beneficial view of nanotechnologies, as in the case of those used in medicine, in the workplace, or already present in nature. This is confirmed also by the analysis of the interactional resources of metadiscourse (Hyland, Tse 2004), in particular hedges, boosters, and attitude markers are often called upon to support the writers\u2019 credibility and affective appeals. Coming to the strategies adopted for the purpose of popularizing discourse \u201cto manage its means so as to enable understanding and learning\u201d (Calsamiglia, Van Dijk 2004, p. 17), the corpus of environmentalist reports shows that technical words very frequently used, such as titanium dioxyde, hydroxapatite, triclosan, or in vivo, are never defined, suggesting that a previous knowledge of the reader in the field of chemistry and biology is taken for granted. By contrast, texts in the EU section are characterized by plain language, while technical words are very few and, when present, thoroughly explained

The Training of Business Professionals in ELT Materials: a Focus on Email Writing

Nowadays, business organizations are faced with the challenge of operating in a global, informational, and highly networked context. The globalization of business and the fast growth in digital technology are having a massive impact both on business structures, with a proliferation of international mergers and acquisitions, and on corporate communication, as most business transactions are being carried out via digital media. In this context, professional communication needs are rapidly changing too: not only is a common working language required, but there is also the necessity for business professionals to acquire the communicative competence that will enable them to communicate efficiently, effectively, and rapidly. As for the language, although “[i]t is undeniable that English […] has now come to represent the main common contact language and lingua franca in an interconnected globalized world” (Vettorel 2014, 1), a more encompassing conceptualization of the language of business is necessary in order to cater to the ‘super-diversity’ (Cogo 2012) of today’s business contexts. On the communicative competence side, professionals need to acquire the ability to adjust quickly to the immediacy of the communicative event and to the dynamic nature of intercultural negotiations. This requires a vast array of pragmatic and interactional skills which have mainly been investigated in spoken interactions (e.g. Firth 1996; Björkman 2011, 2014). In business contexts, however, transactions are often conducted via non-face-to-face media, where the lack of contextual cues may pose a barrier to effective communication (Soucek and Moser 2010). This diachronic study of a set of ten Business-English (email)-writing texts published between 2000 and 2016 focuses on the tasks and guidelines provided for the development of email writing skills. Drawing on Louhiala-Salminen and Kankaanranta’s (2011) notion of “Global Communicative Competence,” the analysis tries to establish whether there has been a change in the way the English language is presented in business ELT materials and whether provisions are made for the development of those pragmatic and interactional skills which can be of use to business professionals in the workplace

“A Terrible Beauty Is Born”: Opportunities and New Perspectives for Online Teaching and Assessment

Even though the use of digital tools as an alternative to or in support of more traditional methods is no longer considered a novelty in the context of language learning, as a consequence of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, what used to be an opportunity was transformed into a pressing and inevitable necessity that led all the actors involved in the training and evaluation process to radically change their way of teaching and assessing. Within a matter of days, educators around the world scrambled to shift their practice from in-person to remote teaching. The need to maintain social distancing prompted the transition to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). Even though globally the emergency posed by Covid-19 popularized ERT as a temporary intervention to complete a higher education academic year, ERT has undoubtedly proved to be a feasible alternative for “students unconventionally dispersed, either locally or abroad, when only limited contact to educational facilities and instructional materials for their learning needs is available” (Nokukhanya et al. 2021, 9). Indeed, since in remote teaching the participants in the communicative act mainly interact via a screen, and sometimes even without full access to video facilities, at times there may be the tendency to de-emphasize person-to-person contact. Therefore, if we want remote teaching to provide new opportunities and stimuli in the future, it is essential to draw on the examples of good practice emerged during the pandemic, bearing in mind that teachers and educators should first and foremost promote interactive activities at the most efficient and realizable rate, with a view to encouraging the attendees’ notivation and participation

“Nanotechnologies: where should they take us?” The popularization of nanosciences on the web: a discourse analytical approach

The study investigates a set of web texts dedicated to nanotechnologies with the aim to assess the strategies deployed for the transfer of specialized notions to lay audiences and to evaluate how the controversy potential of the issue on hand is managed by different stakeholders. The texts under scrutiny – EU web pages and web reports issued by the environmental organization Friends of the Earth - show a primary concern, at the lexical level, with the use of nanotechnologies: the use of is in fact, among the most frequent three-word clusters around the lemma nano. In environmentalist texts the topic is often associated with highly emotional topics, i.e. babies and food, while EU web pages underline a more informational and even beneficial view of nanotechnologies, as in the case of those used in medicine, in the workplace, or already present in nature. This is confirmed also by the analysis of the interactional resources of metadiscourse (Hyland, Tse 2004), in particular hedges, boosters, and attitude markers are often called upon to support the writers’ credibility and affective appeals. Coming to the strategies adopted for the purpose of popularizing discourse “to manage its means so as to enable understanding and learning” (Calsamiglia, Van Dijk 2004, p. 17), the corpus of environmentalist reports shows that technical words very frequently used, such as titanium dioxyde, hydroxapatite, triclosan, or in vivo, are never defined, suggesting that a previous knowledge of the reader in the field of chemistry and biology is taken for granted. By contrast, texts in the EU section are characterized by plain language, while technical words are very few and, when present, thoroughly explained