Writing for specific purposes: Developing business students¿ ability to `technicalize¿

This article examines business students ability to technicalize in their L2 English writing task. Building up technicality in discourse is a key component of writing competence. Despite the importance of technicality for discipline-specific writing, so far little attention has been paid to identifying the usage patterns characteristic of specialist writing. The aim of this study is to investigate how undergraduate writers technicalize in elaborating on technical terms by means of defining, exemplifying and explaining. Drawing on a self-compiled specialized corpus, the study adopts a mixed-methods approach of computation and interpretation. It was found that technicalizing is a two-stage process, which consists of naming a term and subsequently embedding it in taxonomic relationships. These chains of reference are taken to be indicative of field-specific uses in writing. The findings have important implications for developing business students writing skills in view of the conceptual challenges they meet in contemporary specific-purpose instruction.