Abstract:

The study's findings are based on a corpus examination of report writing tests submitted by students at the Prague University of Economics and Business and the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. It aims to analyze the writing and communication styles of non-native English speakers with a focus on business English. The report samples were gathered from students who attend a regular course of English for specific purposes that focuses on helping them develop appropriate conversational abilities, a broader vocabulary, and topic-specific grammar with a concentration on terms linked to business and commerce. The written papers being examined include report-writing assignments where students are given a variety of charts and asked to interpret, describe the data, and recommend the next steps.

The referred texts were entered into Sketch Engine, a corpus query tool that analyzes authentic texts with many words (text corpora) to spot patterns, words, and phrases that L2 English speakers frequently employ. Relationships and linkages between two or more occurrences can be found by investigating language phenomena in corpora. The investigation's main objective was to analyze the most commonly used words and phrases by looking at the collocational and grammatical behavior of the chosen items. Comparing the analyzed texts with a reference corpus allowed the researcher to identify similarities and differences between the texts. These strategies finally focused on ways to improve the learners' and language users’ ability to produce specialized texts by raising an understanding of the typical contextual and grammatical tendencies of chosen keywords and terms.

Keywords:

Corpus linguistics, language learning, business English, sketch engine, concordance, language research, methodology, English for specific purposes.