Integrating Corporate Social Media Communication into the English Language Curricula

The rise of social media has affected how people do business and communicate. Companies interact with potential customers, share offers and promote sales, tracking instant responses on the Internet. Exploring how they do them with language can enable meaningful changes in the vocational English language curricula. This study gives a descriptive analysis of 500 selected corporate Facebook (FB) threads collected from the 100 Best Global Brands in 2017. It delivers a sizeable collection of corporate FB posts categorized according to industry, business topics, and language functions. For contextual analysis, the three parameters ‘Field’, ‘Tenor’ and ‘Mode’ based on the Hallidayan framework (Halliday and Hasan, 1985) were used, while the Language Analysis Framework for Writing (California Department of Education, 2015) was adopted for the analysis of language characteristics. The findings revealed that a range of communication strategies, remarkably different from those in traditional business communication, were employed by corporates to boost FB traffic, achieve succinctness and innovation, and build brand images.The study is significant for vocational and professional education and training as it facilitates close reference to exemplary authentic language materials of the best global brands. The unique characteristics of social media, such as spontaneity, interactivity and openness, will also shed light on a new variety of topics, content and styles for vocational English training. The versatile nature of the social media also makes the study a good stepping stone for any further joint research on content and language integrated learning (CLIL). * The project was funded by the VTC Seed Funding Scheme.