Corpus-based Linguistic Analysis of Business English Report Writing Papers by L2 English Language Speakers

The author compiled a machine analyzable corpus from the Business English tests of writing from the academic years 2020/2021 and 2021/2022. The referred texts were uploaded into Sketch Engine, an online tool used for the analysis of authentic texts with large amounts of words (text corpora) to identify patterns, keywords, and terms in language often used by L2 speakers of the English language. This text-processing tool can demonstrate how a particular language works by presenting typical combinations, synonyms, phrases, examples of use, and context, it can extract keywords and terms, and it can look up translations, among other of its features.

The investigation focused on analyzing the most frequently used words and phrases by students in the first to the second years of business and economics studies by examining the selected words’ collocational and grammatical behavior. The investigated texts were written by students who were all non-native English speakers. The results of this analysis compared their output with similar examples found in a larger reference corpus, thus seeking similarities and differences, ultimately leading to ways of improving the students’ production and writing style of business English texts.