Teresa 
This week we were joined by Gizem Genç, a fabulous educator and ELT professional with a passion for teacher development. Gizem shared her ideas on how to increase autonomy with students to help develop their writing skills.
She has a very well-written blogpost which outlines the ideas she talked about during the session. You can also find downloads of the reflection tasks and checklists she used on the page.
It was a real pleasure to sit down with Silvina Mascitti as she creates incredibly well-considered materials and came along to share her tips. She started off by asking what challenges you might face when making Business English materials. For me, it was knowing how specific to make it for a particular group of learners or whether to make it more generalised. Silvina shared some of the things she had considered, such as dealing with imposter syndrome or thinking about the time it takes to create materials and research the topic – and she pointed out that it can often be just as time-consuming to scour through the internet looking at what has already been created. She also highlighted that grammar doesn’t always need to be the starting point and that we can use our students to guide us to relevant topics, using them as the experts in the topic rather than feeling that we should know the ins and outs of the context. She also noted that as we get more experience and feel more confident, things become easier.
BE materials can quickly become outdated – for example, Silvina said that a couple of her lesson plans were based around the pandemic and the Great Resignation, which might be less relevant going forward. However, the functional language will always be relevant and necessary, for example, talking about describing graphs or giving presentations. Silvina went on to share John Hughes’ ideas from a MAWSIG webinar: representing students’ context, personalization through real-plays, 21st century skills, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), HOTS and LOTS (higher and lower order thinking skills) and an intercultural approach, considering ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), different accents and cultural aspects of communication.
Silvina recommended a webinar from Rhona Snelling, Developing Global Skills in Adult Learners and discussed some of the 21st cenury skills our learners needs: learning skills, life skills and literacy skills, and also a book from John Hughes and Paul Dummett, Critical Thinking in ELT.
Next, she shared some questions to consider when starting to plan a lesson, such as identifying whether you’ll be working mainly on skills, a langauge or phonological point, teaching functional language or preparing students for an exam. She recommended Ethan Mansur’s article, How to conduct a needs analysis.
Around the 19-minute mark, Silvina shared some ideas for how to get ideas. She suggested following business accounts on LinkedIn to look out for interesting topics; she also uses articles, images, videos, current affairs, audio from coursebooks and talking to colleagues or friends who work in other professions. She follows a fairly standard framework for her lessons.
She warns of cognitive overload – trying to include too many elements from the input and then (around 33 minutes in) shared some guidelines for creating materials:
Layout – allow some blank space so learners can make notes, ensure your materials are easy to navigate
Images – make them contextualised and representative
Consistency – numbering or lettering tasks, using effective fonts and use of bold or italics
Instructions – making them clear and concise, with simple language
Scaffolding – use a glossary or useful language box to support learners
Task balance – ensure there is variety between what Lindsay Clandfield terms as heads down (individual work), heads up (focus on the teacher or board), heads together (pair or groupwork) – here is a link to the article which is available to Modern English Teacher subscribers.
Silvina then shared examples of some of her earliest lesson plans and suggests what not to do: including unnecessary images, using images which are unclear, adding frames to the page, not using numbering, and so on. As she notes, keeping them has allowed her to see how her materials have developed.
Around the 39-minute mark, she shared one of her most recent plans and highlighted the good aspects, such as leaving blank space, separating tasks and using bold to show instructions clearly, using images which provide visual support. She talked through the material and stressed the importance of crediting your sources on your materials and the flow of the lesson, linking one stage to another.
She went on to talk about adding teachers’ notes, including the CEFR level, an outline of the aims and topic, instructions, suggestions for extension and the answer key. When writing instructions, she points out that you can either use imperatives or hedging language with modals.
Here are some useful resources which Silvina mentioned:
And for continuing professional development:
Finally, she shared some tips to help develop your materials, such as starting a blog or Facebook group and asking for feedback on your materials, or finding a writing buddy. She also shared a list of some BE trainers on LinkedIn around the 53-minute mark. A really wonderful session with lots of useful resources and tips and Silvina has made her slides available too 
Behind the scenes of Business English materials (Silvina Mascitti)
First of all, apologies if you can’t watch the video – there are some clips of a web series and other adaptations of Pride and Prejudice. This was Romina’s second webinar in the Hub and you can catch up on her first session, Stories to Transform Challenging Behaviour, which had ideas around how you could use storybooks to work with behavioural problems in the young learner classroom. In this session though, she was looking at working with older learners on a transmedia project.
To begin, Romina talked about how storytelling has evolved over the years, from oral expression, graphic storytelling, written narratives to screens and shared a wonderful idea of a museum of storytelling from Carlos A. Scolari. She then gave a definition of a transmedia story:
“one that is told across multiple media and platforms, but some of the receivers do not limit themselves to consuming cultural products, but take up the task of adding new texts to the story.”
Transmedia tells that the content of a story can be found in other media: a series, a game, a toy, a podcast, and so on. For example, in the Star Wars franchise, there are films, TV series, fan fiction and fa films, comics, books, video games, toys and tabletop games.
Romina went on to talk about the reasons for using multiple media: each different channel or format will reach our students in a different way. Many of our teenage learners spend a lot of time online and see stories through their social media so Romina wondered how we could include this digital practice in the literature classroom. As Carlos A. Scolari highlights, there is a “digital dissonance” between the ways teens use media outside school and the structured ways they use it inside classroom settings.
We then watched the introductory line of Pride and Prejudice from a YouTube series which retells the story in the 21st century, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. The character of Lizzie Bennet is making a video in her bedroom and this in itself creates a more relatable setting for our teenage learners. The series itself has evolved into other formats: as well as 100 episodes on YouTube, there are two books and various social media accounts. As Robert Pratten highlighted in 2011, “In transmedia storytelling, engagment with each successive media heightens the audience’s understanding, enjoyment and affection for the story.” Through social media, consumers can also interact with other consumers, posting comments, asking questions and sharing ideas.
Romina played an audio recording from one of her students explaining what she had gained through engaging with the content of the story in different ways and went on to talk about how the topos, mythos and ethos of the content are shared across different media. The mythos relates to the struggles the characters encounter in a story. The topos is the setting on the story – which may change without affecting the core storyline. The ethos is the code of behaviour that characters and society follow. Analysing the final episode of the web series, Romina pointed out how the mythos had been adapted by the writers to maintain the core principles of the original story (an independent woman looking to find her own place in society) in an updated setting.
Romina then suggested how we could incorporate different strategies and Bloom’s Taxonomy through using transmedia projects: learning by doing, problem-solving, simulating, evaluating, creating and more. Before watching one of the videos her students had created, Romina shared some useful questions for students to consider when creating their own content: Who is the audience? How can I organise the information? What communication strategies will I use?
She also shared some questions learners could answer when consuming content, such as:
To finish, Romina shared some examples of projects her learners had created through genially, which allows you to create interactive images, and Canva, which allows for a more structured presentation.
We ended with a clip from a video with Henry Jenkins about storytelling and how the public have more input in media. The owner of the story has changed as consumers become prosumers (combining produce and consume) and the audience add their own ideas to expand the stories they encounter.
Romina ended by saying that her students had been highly motivated through the projects and found them an appealling way of engaging with classic literature.
Daniel Becker, a lecturer at the university of Münster, joined us to talk about mental health in ELT, a topic which has been largely neglected in research in our profession so far. He started off by talking about the current romanticisation of mental illness – a trend on social media in which mental illness is a character trait and provides emotional capital. However, he highlights that for all the posts which romanticise it, there are as many posts fiercely criticising these posts. He feels we can learn a lot about the place mental health has in current discourse – it’s more destigmatised now and teenagers will much more readily discuss their mental health in public. Unfortunately, research from WHO in 2021 identified that around 14% of teenagers suffer from some form of mental disorder, such as anxiety and depression. There was also a significant increase in teenage suicides over the past decade.
Improving Mental Health Education (or mental health literacy) is one step that experts are taking in order to raise public awareness around prevention, early intervention and treatment and say that schools need to fulfil an educational mission to support teenagers and their vulnerability to life stress.
Daniel suggests there are four levels at which we can find potential to include MHE:
Linguistic level – the fact that interactions take place in a foreign language may help us to feel more comfortable discussing more difficult topics in an L2. We have a fundamentally different relationship to our L1 and have a much more emotional connection to it. The EFL classroom also tends to be a safe space for learners to speak.
Textual level – learning doesn’t happen in a cultural vacuum and we can introduce a variety of different texts, including young adult fiction which deal specifically with mental health. Daniel highlights texts such as 13 Reasons Why as a slice of teenage life which enables our learners to build empathy. Literature has the power to bring complex topics to the stage and provides access to them.
Cultural level – language teaching also involves the teaching of cultural competence and it’s important to recognise that in different cultural contexts, the topic of mental health may be addressed differently. Daniel talked about how our view of the world is a social construct and that how we approach mental health very much depends on our cultural background.
Discursive level – all the skills that we learn enable us to participate in discourse, both understanding and creating it. Daniel highlighted that this discursive level is quite an abstract concept but as an overall goal of the EFL classroom we should be discourse-able.
Daniel continued with an overview of three potential barriers:
Teacher level – if teachers feel uncomfortable with the topic, it’s likely that it won’t make it into the classroom. Teachers in a 2015 Canadian study identified that they felt ill-equipped to deal with mental health issues. This lack of knowledge and methodologies means that teachers are more likely to leave it out of the classroom rather than include it, feeling a lack of mental health literacy themselves. With the topic still be fairly stygmatised, many teachers might feel a risk of offending their students or evoking emotional conflict in students. You may not know who in the classroom has been affected by issues and it can be dangerous to trigger students, or the teacher themself – student and teacher wellbeing are important.
Material level – even if teachers want to include the topic in their classes, there may not be appropriate materials to do so. Most textbooks from established publishers don’t include mental health in any capacity. Some textbooks do make (explicit) reference to mental health. For example, Daniel shared an image from a book called Lighthouse 2 (2013) in which a character is dealing with her parents’ divorce and showing symptoms on the spectrum of depression, and a text from Camden Market 6 around bullying and feelings of anxiety stemming from it. An issue that he highlighted is that we don’t have experience of tasks which can accompany difficult topics to deal with them effectively.
Curricular level – mental health as a topic is there, yet not there, in German curricula guidelines. For example, they should be taught language of ‘expressing feelings, including happiness, sadness and mourning’; however, there is also the idea of the language teacher following principles of a global market framework and how the focus shifted from input to output in terms of meeting certain competency levels. Daniel asked whether the concept of an ideal intercultural communicator leaves any room to deal with particular topics.
Daniel is optimistic that mental health will continue to grow in importance in EFL as there is already research being down in non-ELT contexts. He shared a blog which deal with tough topics and provide tasks and structure for potential lessons. He also mentioned research carried out by Hannah L. Weisman in which experts were invited to come to a school for a week-long programme to share their experience and expertise with a group of students. The students learnt about stigma and taboos and created posters to raise awareness. Although there are fewer EFL materials, there are other materials which could be adapted, such as Psych 2 Go which has short videos to improve mental health literacy. Daniel also shared the news that a group of adolescent students contacted one of their politicians highlighting the importance of the topic after witnessing friends and classmates dealing with mental health issues.
To finish, Daniel suggested that the EFL classroom is quite liminal – there is potential, but there are also a number of barriers. We can follow in the footsteps of Hannah L. Weisman and cooperate with mental health experts, or take courses to increase our own understanding of mental health.
Please feel free to share any links in the comments!
The fabulous Paulina Klaudia Woźniak joined us to share what she’s been doing with her teen classes. You can catch more of Paulina’s ideas on her YouTube channel, blog and on social media. After a very enthusiastic welcome, she kicked off with a definition of what the flipped classroom approach is:
Flipped learning is a methodology that helps teachers to prioritize active learning during class time by assigning students lecture materials and presentations to be viewed at home or outside of class.
People have been talking about a flipped approach recently, but it isn’t a particularly new concept – for example, in the past we might have had a biology lesson and the teacher would ask us to read the following chapter before the next class.
To start with, Paulina talked about three of the fears she had before incorporating the approach into her teaching.
With experience, Paulina says she can now create videos in five minutes. She uses presentations and narration, some of which she can borrow from coursebooks, and has a great tip that you can save PowerPoint presentations as video, which you can immediately upload to YouTube. Canva is also a great site for creating visually-appealling presentations.
Paulina tends to use a screencasting programme, such as Screencast-O-Matic – you can record up to 20 minutes and add background music. Adobe Spark (now Adobe Express) is another option and offers a special deal for educators, though you need to have an email address from an official institution.
Another option is to set up a camera or ask someone to record you whilst you do the presentation at the board.
You can of course always look for precreated content as YouTube is filled with videos of other teachers explaining grammar points. Through YouTube as well you can check the analytics to see how many people have viewed a video and from where.
Paulina shared three tricks such as mentioning students’ names, something that happened in a lesson or including statements about the students so they have to listen and tell you whether what you said is true or false. Another trick is to purposefully make a mistake and tell students to keep an eye/ear out for it – this also helps as it’s good for students to see that we make mistakes as well. You can also give students a task, for example ‘How many times did you see … during the video?’ Adding a sound they have to listen for is a sneaky way of getting them to listen to the content as if they’re looking for something visual, they may not concentrate so much on the presentation. It’s also worth highlighting to the students that this is homework instead of doing activities from the workbook – hopefully if students can access the content on their phones, there’s less of an excuse for not doing the work!
What happens if they don’t watch the video?
You can put students into pairs of who did and didn’t watch the video so they can teach each other.
You can watch the video again in class (though Paulina says she’s not keen on this as a solution as it takes up classtime). She tends to set extra work if they have to watch the video in class so students see the benefit of doing the preparation work.
You can link to other videos on YouTube at the end of your content. This can be other content that you’ve prepared, for example a higher level video to encourage students to do more or it can be further examples of the same point from other creators.
When creating the video, consider whether you’ll want to reuse the video in the future (and how much you want to personalise it to that group).
The flipped approach doesn’t only work for grammar. You can also use it for your exam preparation classes, looking at the different parts of each paper and sharing exam techniques.
You can also use a URL shortener, such as bitly, to make it easier for students to access the content. Check with your centre what the policy is for contacting students (e.g. with a WhatsApp group or following them on Instagram).
It’s been a busy month and my apologies as I’m a little behind with writing up the notes from the webinars. We had a couple of great sessions in March, with Daniel Becker joining us to talk about mental health in ELT materials and Romina Muse coming back for a second webinar, this time on transmedia.
There have also been some great Wednesday Questions. Ahead of Daniel’s talk, we asked what signs tell you you’re overworked; we also asked about ELT buzzwords, volunteering in ELT and the aspects of our profession which are often over-simplified on pre-service qualifications.
Some other interesting questions from Hubsters came in as well: is your pron work proactive or reactive? How learner-centred is your teaching approach?
And Hubsters shared some great resources too. There were lesson plans from Silvina Mascitti on identity (with Peter J Fullagar) and business meetings as well as one from Bhavna Gupta on Earth Hour. Charlie’s lessons shared great guides to using Baamboozle in class and top tips for teaching young learners and Kelly Aslanidou shared a link to a webinar on using tech to teach pron. Silvina popped up again in one of SpongeELT chats about writing materials and Robert Stroud shared a link to his ELT newsletter The University Grapevine.