| The purpose of the research was to contribute to the effectiveness of teaching Business English at the tertiary level. By developing foreign language communicative competence using business meeting simulations in English the aims were to ensure further autonomous and lifelong learning of foreign languages and to facilitate students' integration into the international business environment. Corpus analysis of the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana students' simulations of business meetings showed how the range, structure and control of linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic elements of foreign language communicative competence were developed with or without the presence of a teacher. The role of the teacher was established as crucial, particularly, for the development of sociolinguistic and pragmatic elements of foreign language communicative competence. The comparison of students and business people's meetings corpora showed that in addition to the similarities and differences in: tokens; types; n-grams; positive and negative keywords the corpora differ primarily in sociolinguistic and pragmatic elements of foreign language communicative competence. This, together with a qualitative analysis of teachers and students' interviews has provided an insight into the specifics of the role of the teacher in developing and raising awareness of foreign language communicative competence development using business meeting simulations in order to ensure that these findings can become an integral part of the educational and business community resulting in better efficiency. |
