ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the research that has been done on written forms of Business English. It discusses the main approaches that have been taken in the investigation of common business documents such as letters and emails, where the emphasis has been on how such texts are produced. The chapter also discusses how these approaches have also impacted the ways in which people are taught to produce such documents. It also discusses the work of scholars like Ulla Connor and Almut Koester, who have re-applied Vijay Bhatia's genre approach to business writing in English with specific reference to teaching. The Indianapolis Business Learner Corpus (IBLC) research initiative overseen by Ulla Connor was a collaborative research project which took place in the 1990s. The project focused on the application letter as a business genre that was used across different national cultures, and it referred to Bhatia's work on the structure of application letters as an example of a promotional genre.
