New lines of intercultural business communication in the ESP domain. Entrepreneurs' oratorical skills across the borders

Adopting English as a common language in business communication is becoming a rule, as it has been demonstrated in many real situations. From a linguistic point of view, global English needs new ways of studying the language, and renewed theoretical and methodological approaches to the classification of spoken and written varieties. This contribution proposes a sociolinguistic approach to the study of global English in public speaking (Blommaert 2010), in an extremely movable and non-localized context, that is, the international business context (Fairclough 1995, 2006; Pennycook 2007). Great mobility and the absence of fixed locality are among the most striking characteristics of the varieties of English used in international business communication. My approach to the interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity of public speaking in business communication here presented is characterized by a specific focus on the role of intercultural interaction and exchange, and an insight into the implications of using English across borders and sectors is also provided. Entrepreneurs’ public speaking is considered here for the first time, as an emblematic context of ESP oral production: empirical data support the thesis of a strict relationship between entrepreneurs’ effectiveness in speaking and the social construction of their meanings. Despite acknowledging the importance of studies underlining the role of public speaking in the management community, the figure of the entrepreneur is described here as quite peculiar, compared to that of the manager (Brockhaus 1980, Brockhaus 1982, Gartner 1988, Hornaday/Aboud 197, McClelland 1965, Ward 2004, Zanola 2009). Drawing on those considerations, a more focused reflection on the impact of ESP on entrepreneurs’ oratorical skills is explored. The research is aimed at exploring the meaning entrepreneurs attribute to speaking in public within their ‘globalized’ role, and with what implications for the ESP researcher on the linguistic and discursive axis. The contribution is supported by the data collected in seventeen semi-structured interviews within a sample of fifteen European and ten Chinese SMEs, for a total amount of about fourty hours of recorded data.