BET on Top Hat: Towards Meaning and Memory

Abstract

English has been worldwide adopted as lingua franca and this created a group of learners with very specific needs, i.e. mainly adults who wanted to use English for business purposes. In the scope of this study, the approach used to address this target group was Teaching English for Special Purposes (TESP). Thus, an m-learning strategy to approach Business English Terminology (BET) was designed, which was labelled as ‘BET on Top Hat’, once the selected application was Top Hat (https://tophat.com/) and the idea was for students to face it as if it were a challenge. This study aims at finding evidence as to the extent to which students’ developed proficiency in identifying what business English acronyms and abbreviations stood for and using specific BET in context. The data gathered includes the students’ results in the 8 three-minute quizzes answered during the semester. Participants (n=23) were first-year students enrolled in English II, a course of the degree in Retail Management offered at Águeda School of Technology and Management – University of Aveiro (2014/15 edition). Data were treated using descriptive analysis (using Microsoft Excel®). An analysis of the results points out that, with the use of this strategy and over time, students tend to identify the words behind business English acronyms and other abbreviations more easily, but the strategy does not reveal itself as efficient in what concerns the accurate integration of BET in context.