Becoming a member of the business community

Becoming is a useful notion for researching ESP learning as ESP is typically viewed as an instructional approach to meeting learner needs by identifying such needs, for example, in terms of language, genres and discourses and explicitly teaching to these needs. What transformation ESP learners experience through ESP learning is highly relevant to the field. Zhang (2013) illustrates this theme by reporting the learning of business genres by Business English Major students at a Chinese university and responses to these students’ business writing by experienced international business practitioners. In this commentary, I offer a critical review of my own earlier work by revisiting the key findings in the original article and their value in light of developments in the field and suggesting several issues for further research.