INFLUENCE OF CONTEXTS ON DEFINING BUSINESS ENGLISH VOCABULARY

Wuttipong  Malisa; Anantachai  Aeka; Angvarrah  Lieungnapar

Wuttipong Malisa Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Bangkok, Thailand
Anantachai Aeka Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Bangkok, Thailand
Angvarrah Lieungnapar Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Bangkok, Thailand

Keywords: Business English vocabulary, Multiple meanings, Word defining

Abstract

A lot of Business English Vocabularies have multiple meanings. Each meaning can be influenced by different contexts, meaning that context plays a crucial role in defining the meanings of words. The purpose of this research was to investigate the influence of contexts on defining business English vocabulary. Six words (i.e. engagement, value, growth, capital, cost, and interest) that are normally found in business contexts and have more than meaning were selected to investigate across nine contexts, including movie, television, fiction, magazine, website, news, blog, academic, and spoken contexts. All meanings of those were identified from the sentence examples (concordance line) produced by the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which provides the concordance of the vocabulary in nine categories of contexts. It was found that some meanings were likely to be used only in only a specific context whereas some were used in several contexts. The implication of the influence of contexts on defining vocabulary in EFL teaching was discussed.