A genre-specific approach to the terminology of the investor pitch
Abstract
The paper proposes a set of criteria for describing terminology specific to a particular text genre in a way that is relevant for the purposes of language teaching. The design of the criteria is based on the genre of the investor pitch, but it can also be applied to other genres. The corpus of the study consists of 45 investor pitches from which 352 individual terms were extracted. This amounts to a total of 1,173 occurrences under investigation including repeated terms. This was followed by the identification of the criteria for classifying the terms into relatively homogeneous groups from the perspective of specialized language teaching.
The analysis shows that the terminology of the investor pitch can be described in terms of the following four aspects: sources of terms, types of terms, frequency of occurrence and transparency of terms. The relatively large dataset also provides an opportunity to determine the proportion of terms represented in the groups according to the aforementioned criteria. This provides essential information on the background knowledge and the related terms that students need to acquire for genre proficiency. The results of the research can be used as a guideline for the development of materials to teach genre-specific terminology virtually in any field of specialized language.
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