Building a Realistic Business Vocabulary: A Challenge for Educators

University business students will need a practitioner's general business vocabulary when they leave the university and enter the business world. Declining SAT verbal scores have focused attention on the vocabulary deficiencies of students. This article reports on a study of the vocabulary performance of university business students in reading general business news publications. Participants in the study were presented with 20 sentences taken from a single issue of a business news publication, with each sentence containing a specific target word that might present a vocabulary obstacle. The students were asked to determine whether the underlined target word was a real word and if it was correctly used in the sentence. Suggestions are offered for instructors to use in challenging students to enhance vocabulary skills.