31.2883, Review: Applied Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Koeleman (2019)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2883. Wed Sep 23 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.2883, Review: Applied Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Koeleman (2019)

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Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2020 16:36:56
From: Heli Tissari [heli.tissari at english.su.se]
Subject: Professioneel taalgebruik in het economische beroepenveld

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36592437


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-3830.html

AUTHOR: Pauline  Koeleman
TITLE: Professioneel taalgebruik in het economische beroepenveld
SERIES TITLE: LOT Dissertation Series
PUBLISHER: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT)
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Heli Tissari, Stockholm University, Sweden

INTRODUCTION

The book under review concerns how to teach business students to use the Dutch
language well. More specifically, it investigates what should be taught to
future accountants and organizational development advisors. Since it concerns
the Dutch language, the book is written in Dutch. However, it is of relevance
to any university teacher who teaches language use to business students. 

Pauline Koeleman has given her PhD thesis a rather long title. The main title
summarizes the topic very well: “Professioneel taalgebruik in het economische
beroepenveld”, which could be translated as “Professional language use for the
economic profession”. The subtitle of the book specifies that the study
investigates the need for developing the language curriculum of business
universities (“Behoefteanalyse voor (taal)curriculumontwerp in het hoger
economisch onderwijs”). To put it more simply, the study explains why and in
what ways the curriculum or curricula should be developed. 

SUMMARY

The thesis consists of ten chapters, a bibliography, four appendices and
summaries in Dutch and English. The first chapter discusses what the official
aims of language teaching are at Dutch business universities, specifying, for
example, what kind of goals the Dutch government has set for it. A central
idea is that the quality of the teaching should be improved in a changing
study climate. The main aim of the study is to assist in this. Towards the end
of the chapter, the author lists her research questions and explains the
structure of the book. She systematically reminds the reader of each research
question later when it becomes relevant in a chapter. The umbrella question
that subsumes all the rest of the questions is what university teachers can
learn from actual professional practice.

The second chapter is dedicated to language(s) for specific purposes (LSP)
where English for specific purposes (ESP) plays an important role. One of its
subsections in fact discusses the difference between these two, emphasizing
that the USA and Great Britain have played a major role in the development of
ESP research and teaching, in contrast to Central European countries having
been strong in the development of LSP. The chapter begins with a historical
overview and then continues to a more detailed discussion of what kinds of
issues have characterized LSP research.  Koeleman divides them into absolute
and variable characteristics, suggesting that some issues always play a
central role, while there is variation in how the rest are understood and
approached. Her list of absolute characteristics begins with the centrality of
learners’ needs. In her own study, the notion of discourse community receives
a central role. 

In the third chapter, Koeleman focuses on explaining what a needs analysis is
and what her needs analysis is like. Again, the chapter is based on a
historical overview. Eventually, the author explains her decision to base her
own study on Huhta et al.’s book “Needs analysis for language course design”
(2013), with a couple of exceptions. She defines ‘discourse community’ in a
different way, following Beaufort (1997). Moreover, she has a somewhat
different understanding of how this concept should be coupled to a needs
analysis. She selects a group of business professionals to represent the
discourse community and studies how they speak, write, listen and converse
with people. She wants to investigate how the workplace influences these
practices, and is interested in communicative chains. 

To explain all this further, Koeleman deals with her methodology in Chapter
Four. She underlines that the method is ethnographic: she has visited
workplaces and collected data on site. She has decided to study two groups of
organizational development advisors and two groups of accountants who work in
three different organizations which she calls Bank Holland, Centrum Nederland
and Dienst Accountancy en Advies. It is important to her to study both profit
and non-profit organizations. She explains that she has collected the data in
several ways over a period stretching from 2014 to 2016. The data consists of
materials that the professionals read, semi-structured interviews, participant
observation, and further interviews. The data collection and analysis have
proceeded side by side and instructed each other. A particular feature of
Koeleman’s research is that she has accompanied some professionals during a
normal working day.

Before analyzing the linguistic behavior of each group of professionals,
Koeleman includes a short chapter that describes what she calls the two
professional contexts. To be more precise, chapter five tells us about the two
professions of organizational development advisors and accountants. It
explains what kind of rules determine their behavior, what kind of values they
share, and the different kinds of roles that they can have. It also gives a
brief overview of recent developments in each field. The focus is on the Dutch
context and on the organizations that she has chosen to participate in.

The main bulk of the book consists of the four chapters that present the
actual analysis, group by group. Chapters six to nine are about organizational
development advisors who work in Bank Holland, organizational development
advisors who work at Centrum Nederland, accountants who also work at Centrum
Nederland and accountants who work at Dienst Accountancy en Advies,
respectively. Although there is plenty of variation in their work and in the
collected data, each of these chapters has a similar structure. 

First, Koeleman explains what kind of organization the professionals work in.
Each of these sections discusses the values of the organization and how the
organization is currently being developed. These sections include information
about previous and current language training inside the organization. 

Secondly, Koeleman explains what kind of roles the professionals have, which
groups they belong to, and how independent they are in their work. She is
interested in how free they are to make decisions of their own both in general
and as regards language use. She also tells us what kind of values the
professionals have in their particular group and what kind of media they use
to communicate. The values of the organization as a whole and of the
particular group can indeed vary, for example, as regards independence of
action and formality of language use. 

Next, Koeleman zooms in at particular ways of using language and particular
instances of language use. For example, she introduces examples of emails,
letters and extracts of recorded conversations. She considers the different
roles of the professionals in different situations. A major dividing line is
whether the professionals communicate with each other or with laypeople, but
she also considers hierarchical relationships between people at a workplace.
Both in this and the previous section of each of the four analyses, she
reflects on the professionals’ linguistic behavior in the light of what they
have told her in the interviews. Lastly, she summarizes each analysis in a
concluding section.

Lastly, chapter ten contains an extensive summary and discussion of the entire
analysis. There, Koeleman returns to all her research questions and summarizes
her findings in a number of tables which bring together and compare all the
four groups of professionals. She shows once again that there are both
similarities and differences between both professions and each of the
organizations that the organizational development advisors and accountants
work in. She stresses that the organizations are not stable but in a state of
change. Furthermore, she specifies the contributions of her study to the
development of research methods, to language science, and to society, the last
meaning, above all, how her study contributes to the development of language
teaching at business universities. She shows that she is aware of the
limitations of her study, but is not afraid of making recommendations. Lastly,
she suggests further relevant study topics.

Koeleman’s recommendations can be summarized as follows: To begin with, she
recommends that business students first be introduced to characteristics of
language use that are common across different specializations. Later, they can
be divided into smaller groups where they learn things that concern them as,
for example, future accountants or organizational development advisors. In
addition, she recommends that university teachers constantly follow and
research developments in professional language use to identify current needs.
This will add to the value of the teaching for the job market. In her view,
students should practice and learn to understand authentic language use from
the professional world. They should begin to discern why professionals behave
differently in different situations and why they make certain kinds of
choices, so that they will be able to ask the right kind of questions when
they move on to an actual working life environment and begin to learn from
their seniors. Koeleman also makes recommendations as concerns further use of
the ethnographic method to analyze the use of the Dutch language in different
professional contexts. 

EVALUATION

This book discusses many topics that are relevant not only to teaching Dutch
at business universities but also to LSP teaching across languages. These
include ways to research professional language use and develop its teaching at
the university level, ways in which professionals communicate with each other
and with laypeople, various media of communication, and characteristics of
different organizational contexts. Therefore, it is a pity that the book is
not accessible to people who cannot read Dutch. At the same time, it is fully
understandable that the thesis is written in Dutch since it concerns the use
and teaching of the Dutch language.  

To give a more specific example of a topic that is relevant across many if not
most languages is whether and when the professionals are expected to
communicate in a formal manner and what this entails. For example, the fact
that the accountants deal with legal matters means that the use of legal
language is more relevant to their linguistic practices than to the
organizational development advisors’ language use. All the organizations
strive at communicating with laypeople in a more understandable way, but this
aim is not realized in exactly the same way. An accountant may need to use a
legal term and then explain its meaning to the layperson. To contrast, one of
the organizational development advisors explains that when they meet people
with little power in the organization, they usually need to focus on
responding to their emotions, while they can use professional terminology with
middle and top managers. One of the major findings of the study in fact is
that even a single professional needs to vary their language use to quite an
extent across contexts. They also need to be able to choose the right medium
for the communication. 

A central strength and even a potential weakness of the study is that it has
been reported so systematically. Koeleman returns time and again to each
research question and subtopic; sometimes it can even be discerned that
copy-pasting has occurred and that she has forgotten to change a word. This
means, on the other hand, that a reader interested in a particular
organization, work context or professional group can simply read one or two
relevant chapters. Likewise, it is possible to acquire a good general
understanding of the findings and the relevance of the research by reading the
final chapter. Reading the entire book is rewarding in the sense that it gives
an interested person glimpses of language use and users’ self-reflection
across many different contexts. 

I have taught a course designed by my previous colleagues at Stockholm
University, called Effective Communication, where business students
participated, among others. Although it was about effective communication in
English, this book would have been helpful in explaining facets of
professional communication to them and even students representing other fields
such as architecture or medicine. It confirmed some of my suspicions; one of
these has been that informal language use can occur even in surprising
contexts in highly paid professions. However, Koeleman’s thesis also suggests
that an employer can still focus on grammar and punctuation alongside such
communicative skills as beginning an email message with the most important
point. Having read the book, I would now emphasize the variety of workplace
contexts even more than before, including talk about different house styles
and different tasks which require different approaches. 

REFERENCES

Beaufort, Anne. 1997. Operationalizing the concept of discourse community: A
case study of one institutional site of composing. Research in the Teaching of
English 31(4), 486-529.

Huhta, Marjatta, Karin Vogt, Esko Johnson & Heikki Tulkki. 2013. Needs
analysis for language course design: A holistic approach to ESP. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Heli Tissari is a docent of English philology at the Department of Modern
Languages at the University of Helsinki. She has previously worked at
Stockholm University where she taught several courses attended by business
students, among others.





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