Academic writing in the business school The genre of the business case report.pdf.pdf

Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12 (2013) 57–68
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Journal of English for Academic Purposes
journal homepage: ate/jeap
Academic writing in the business school: The genre of the
business case report
Philip Nathan*
English for International Students Unit, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Park Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham B32 2BS, UK
abstract
Keywords: The writing of business case reports is mon requirement for students on academic
EAP business programmes and presents significant challenges for both native and non-native
Student writing speaker students. In order to support the development of pedagogical practice in the
Business case reports teaching of case report writing, this paper reports a genre-based study of a corpus of 53
Academic writing
marketing and marketing management case reports (BCR-1) written by NS and NNS
Genre analysis
postgraduate students at a UK university. Results from this localised study of academic
business case reports are supplemented parison with sixteen business case reports
from the British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE), originating from marketing,
project management and management accounting courses. The study identifies several
mon to these case reports including the presence of explicit structure,
impersonal style and business specialism-dependent lexis. Through the prism of Swalesian
genre analysis, three obligatory broad rhetorical moves are identified (orientation, analysis
and advisory moves), and five optional moves (methodology, options and alternatives,
summary and consolidation, supplementary supporting information and reflection). These
broad rhetorical moves are realised through diverse structural ponents. The
deployment of optional moves was found to be dependent on a range of factors, in
particular business specialism, suggesting the value of specialism based pedagogy.
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