CHALLENGES IN TEACHING BUSINESS REPORT WRITING TO MULTILINGUAL STUDENTS
CHALLENGES IN TEACHING BUSINESS REPORT WRITING TO MULTILINGUAL STUDENTS

Summary/Abstract: The present paper looks into the main challenges language instructors face when teaching report writing to business students who are advanced or proficient in English and puts forward possible solutions for improving the educational approach in order to achieve a more adequate result. In their first academic years, students lack genre awareness, which translates into a persistent reliance upon previously acquired essay-writing conventions. This writing mindset negatively impacts the students’ ability to adapt to the factual, concise, purpose-driven style required when writing business reports. The corpus analysed includes 90 documents submitted by first and second-year students; our findings highlight the most common issues encountered: the use of long, convoluted sentences, an overly academic style, information overload, a tendency to slip towards informality or the use of abstract language choices, all of which reveal a weak audience awareness. Therefore, our study argues in favour of a pedagogical shift that includes explicit genre comparison, the use of authentic tasks, resorting to metacognitive strategies and scaffolding. The ultimate purpose of our research is to highlight the fact that mastering genre appropriacy is as crucial as language proficiency in professional communication.

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