Abstract

This article describes and compares two parallel specialised corpora in the field of organizational and managerial discourse: firstly, recordings of a three-day workshop with clients overseas held by a large American multinational consulting group, and secondly, the audio data from a series of in-house employee training sessions, held by the same company in North America in webcast, audio-conferencing mode. The focus is on the role of discourse, together with differences in linguistic patterns and pragmatic objectives, which emerge in the BELF (business English as a lingua franca) intercultural context, as opposed to the mono-cultural North American context, in the achievement of learning objectives and the conveyance of professional knowledge and competence. The article concludes with a proposal for a model to describe these inter-relational, identity construal dynamics.