Comparing English and French for Business Coursebooks: a Cross-Cultural Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The focus of this article is to present the discipline Cross-Cultural Discourse Analysis and show how this approach was used in the analysis of business language coursebooks published in France and the United Kingdom. After presenting the foundations of this discipline, two areas of comparison will be explored. The first area concerns the representation of professional activity and examines how the work of women and men is represented differently in the coursebooks of both languages. The second area explores how the age of the characters contributes to the representation of a specific type of woman in the French coursebooks, while in the English coursebooks age serves to represent an opposition between youth and old age. These results are indicative of how a contrastive approach reveals certain aspects in the coursebooks of both languages that would otherwise go unnoticed in an analysis of a single set of coursebooks.