Getting down to business with the Apprentice Multiple Business GEnRes (AMBER) corpus

Business texts represent a wide variety of genres, which tend to be identified on the basis of communicative purpose(s) and situation(s) (Bhatia 1993, Koester 2010). A broad distinction (Nelson 2000) can be made between genres used to do business and communicate to get work done within the framework of companies’/organisations’ activities (e.g. business meetings, social media posts, minutes of meetings, reports) and genres not issued by companies/organisations that are used to talk or write about business (e.g. news articles about the world of business, business studies lectures). An examination of the Learner Corpora around the World webpage (https://uclouvain.be/en/research-institutes/ilc/cecl/learner-corpora-around-the-world.html) reveals that learner corpora made up of a variety of business genres are rather few and far between and tend not to be readily accessible to the research community. This poster sets out to introduce the new Apprentice Multiple Business GEnRes (AMBER) corpus project to the learner corpus community and to further develop the AMBER network of partners. The poster aims to explain the rationale behind this new multi-L1 learner corpus collection project which first concentrates on productions in English (e.g. providing a strong empirical basis to investigate genre awareness among learners / novice users of business genres) and to outline the corpus design criteria with a specific focus on the business genres included (e.g. press releases, cover letters), and on the various task and learner variables that lie at the heart of the AMBER project. Information about the core metadata recorded is also provided.