The Business Service List
Business Service List 1.2
Although TOEIC is said to be a test of business English, anecdotal evidence such as the failure of the TOEIC initiative at Rakuten, as well as independent research that has been critical and unsupportive of ETS’s claims that it is good measure of business English ability (Childs, 1995; Hirai, 2002). This led us to feel that we should release a business English vocabulary list separate from our TSL wordlist which was designed help students improve their scores on a high stakes exam. Our Business Service List, also known as the BSL (Browne & Culligan, 2015) is based on a corpus that is more representative of the business English that EFL and ESL learners were likely to encounter in the real world.
When combined with the NGSL, learning the 1700-word BSL 1.2 provides up to 97% coverage for most general business texts and is based on a carefully constructed 64 million-word corpus of business English texts as follows:
BSL 1.2 Teaching, Learning & Content Development Tools:
BSL 1.2 on OGTE for text editing and content analysis (1.2 update soon)
BSL 1.2 on VocabProfile for content analysis (1.2 update soon)
BSL 1.2 Word-Learner app with gamification & LMS (1.2 update soon)
Business Service List 1.01
The BSL 1.01 is the archive version of the BSL, which was widely used from 2015 through 2023. Many tools, apps and textbooks still use the BSL 1.01 so these resources will continue to be made available via the links below.
CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE
Business Service List by Browne, C. and Culligan, B., is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.charlie-browne.com