Teaching CSR Discourse : A Critical Approach to Business English

The chapter offers suggestions for pursuing the dual aim of teaching critical analysis skills in a Business English course designed for advanced learners of English as a foreign language. To illustrate the benefits of this approach, I use samples of business discourse drawn from the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports of well-known international companies. The choice of CSR-related materials is due to the rising importance of social responsibility issues in the last couple of decades. A relative novelty in the early noughties CSR discourse rapidly became mainstream worldwide in the following decade, and is now ubiquitous in the world of business and beyond. Today, mastering the language of CSR is of paramount importance for business professionals; on the other hand, as a discursive construct CSR eminently lends itself to critical investigation, thus providing an ideal ground for raising students’ awareness of the importance of learning to question text and discourse, moving beyond a purely instrumental view of language.