Behind the scenes of Business English materials - with Silvina Mascitti (webinar)

Behind the scenes of Business English materials

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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.

What do you take into account when making Business English materials?

BE materials can quickly become outdated – for example, Silvina said that a couple of her lesson plans were based around the pandemic and the Great Resignation, which might be less relevant going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.

What’s the starting point when making BE materials?

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 starts with a lead-in discussion to activate prior knowledge and to allow learners to share their knowledge and experience.
  • Then in the Before (reading / listening / watching) stage she does some minimal pre-teaching of lexis as she feels it’s good for learners to infer meaning from the text. She says it’s good to do tasks early on to engage learners and to start using critical thinking skills, for example by predicting the content of the input text. Another tip here is to read Sylwia Clayton’s article, Why should you use warmers?
  • In the While stage, she moves from gist to detail and scaffolds tasks to support learners, whether because they have a low level or because the input text is long. She also works on bottom-up skills and recommends checking out the Gianfranco Conti and Steve Smith book on effective listening skills, Breaking the Sound Barrier.
  • After, she asks for students’ reaction to the input text and how it relates to their own context. They then go on to look at quotes from the input and analyse the purpose, tone, source and potential bias within it, further developing their critical thinking skills.
  • Next comes a focus on lexis or pronunciation, perhaps choosing contextualised, high-frequency, meaningful chunks. She uses an inductive approach to encourage students to work out the meaning for themselves. For anyone interested in using a lexical approach, Silvina recommends the Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley book, Teaching Lexically, as well as Harry Waters’ interview with Dellar on Teacher Talk Radio.
  • As a follow-up task, she takes ideas from TBLand suggests looking at Activities for Task-Based Learning from Neil Anderson and Neil McCutcheon. She stresses the importance of the final productive stage being linked to earlier learning in the lesson, whether through the lexis or functional language the students have been exposed to or the topic.

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)

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