The Corpus of Business English Textbooks: A facilitative resource for digital Business English textbook compilation

In the digital era, textbooks are increasingly required to be both adaptable to the digital environment and sensitive to genre conventions, posing new challenges for material selection. Although several corpora document authentic business communication, few are textbook-based and designed to serve as benchmarks for evaluating textbook content. To address this gap, the present study introduces the Corpus of Business English Textbooks (CBET), designed specifically to support corpus-informed compilation of digital Business English textbooks. The CBET is built from 69 widely adopted textbooks in Chinese tertiary education, comprising 7 genres and 35 sub-genres and amounting to 786,183 tokens. Beyond offering a comprehensive record of textbook discourse, the CBET enables systematic comparison between textbook and workplace texts, thereby providing empirical benchmarks for assessing the pedagogical appropriateness of instructional materials. To demonstrate its application, we employed Coh-Metrix to compare textbook letters from CBET with workplace letters, answering two questions: 1. How do business letters in the textbook scenario differ from those in the workplace? 2. What do these differences imply about CBET and its potential contribution to the selection of business letter materials for textbooks? Results reveal that textbook letters differ significantly from workplace letters in syntactic complexity, lexical concreteness, and cohesion, suggesting that they are more informationally compact and intentionally structured to develop learners’ command of abstract vocabulary and inference skills. These findings provide empirical insights for text selection in future digital Business English textbooks. Overall, this study highlights the CBET’s dual value as both a research resource and a practical tool for guiding the selection and digitalization of Business English teaching materials, thereby advancing corpus-informed pedagogy in the context of digital education.