Introducing AMBER, the Apprentice Multiple Business GEnRes corpus

Business communication involves 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 professional genres used to do business and communicate to get work done within the framework of companies’/organisations’ activities (e.g. press/news releases, business meetings, social media posts, employee newsletter articles) 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). A review of the literature involving specialised learner corpora and 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 which specifically target professional business communication by L2 learners are very much few and far between and tend to include only one or two genres (e.g. Connor et al. 2002). In addition, existing corpora are rarely readily accessible to the research community or provide no or very limited information about the learners (e.g. Allan 2018). This poster introduces the recently launched Apprentice Multiple Business GEnRes (AMBER) corpus, which aims to fill this gap in the learner corpus landscape. The focus of the poster is on the rationale behind this new apprentice computerised corpus collection project (e.g. providing a strong empirical basis to investigate genre awareness and knowledge among novice users of business genres or to examine novices’ writing process when drafting professional genres) and on its main corpus design criteria (e.g. specialised multi-genre, apprentice, multi-L1). Information about the core metadata recorded (following Paquot et al.’s 2024 Core Metadata Schema) is also provided (e.g. degree scheme, genre training, language(s) of instruction, L1(s), writing anxiety; detailed task instructions). References Allan, R. (2018). ‘Recycling the data: Building and using a learner business English writing corpus’. In Call Your Data. Proceedings of the XIXth CALL Conference, Antwerp. Available from https://miun.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1250868/FULLTEXT01.pdf Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing genre: Language use in professional settings. London: Longman. Connor, U., Precht, K. & T. Upton (2002). ‘Business English in a learner corpus’. In Granger, S., Hung, J. & S. Petch-Tyson (eds) Computer Learner Corpora, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 175-194. Koester, A. (2010). Workplace discourse. London and New York: Continuum. Nelson, M. (2000). A corpus-based study of the lexis of business English and business English teaching materials. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Manchester. Paquot, M., König, A., Stemle, E. W., & J.-C. Frey (2024). ‘The Core Metadata Schema for Learner Corpora: Collaborative efforts to advance data discoverability, metadata quality and study comparability in L2 research.’ International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 10(2), https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/ijlcr.24010.paq.