Expressing the home culture in English as a Business Lingua Franca : a glocalized pedagogy

Abstract

Internationally functioning professionals communicate via English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF). An essential aspect of BELF communication is developing relationships with those of different cultural backgrounds, and an important competency of relationship-building communication is expressing aspects of the home culture such as food, festivals, and viewpoints; however, Chinese learners of English often struggle to express their home culture in English. This phenomenon is likely because their English language study has focused on gaining a globalized understanding of Anglo-American culture at the expense of learning how to communicate the home culture. To explore the above problem from a pedagogical perspective, this inquiry employs a qualitative grounded theory research design. Following initial interviews, a 3-h long teaching activity was conducted with 31 university students in mainland China. The goal of the qualitative data collection and analysis was to ascertain how and why university students, as future business professionals, chose to communicate distinctly Chinese cultural concepts the way they do. Findings were that students displayed an overall lack of autonomy and limited use of their multilingual repertoires, trying to focus on English-only communication. From these findings a glocalized pedagogical model was developed to improve expression of the home culture in BELF communication.