Categorization of business english communicative skills: a proposal

Abstract

While developing a matrix to map Audiovisual content, according to the needs of Business English (BE) teachers and learners, a problem presented itself while attempting to identify and organize the most relevant BE communicative skills (CS) into macro and meso categories (MMC). Once the literature did not provide any solid categorization proposal for these CS, the plan was then to use the table of contents of BE course manuals for identification purposes. However, these manuals also showed many distinct approaches and that made finding a categorization proposal very difficult. To achieve a conciliatory categorization proposal 7 BE manuals were selected according to year of publishing and publisher; then, the CS included in their tables of content were collected as raw data and gathered in a database. From the methodological viewpoint, data were treated resorting to content analysis technique to establish the MMC. This data was treated and analyzed qualitatively according to the methodology theorized by Miles and Huberman (1994), which is directed specifically towards the identification of categories in qualitative data analysis. The exploratory analysis of the results led to the proposal of 8 macro categories with a reliability index of 88.4%. In order to have a more thorough analysis, the qualitative analysis process was repeated and, thereof, the meso categories inside each macro category were identified, i.e. 4 to 7 meso categories were identified in each macro category. Moreover, all of these categorizations passed a reliability index of 80%. The study concludes with a proposal of MMC of CS for BE context that can be included in the mapping matrix of AVC to be developed.