Multi-communication and the business English class: Research meets pedagogy

•Multi-communication (MC) is now a frequent communication practice in many workplaces.•MC requires communicator’s skills like ‘thematic threading’ and ‘presence allocation’.•MC also requires organizational structural design, including ‘media packaging’ and ‘audience profiling’.•Technology-enhanced pedagogical tasks for developing MC skills are presented.•Tasks show how research can inform pedagogy for the business English class.

This article discusses the findings of an ethnographically oriented study that examined the multi-communication (MC) practices in four multinationals in the telecommunications, management consultancy, marketing and banking industries based in London, UK. The study followed a multi-data approach (MDA) that combined a survey, a series of interviews, three shadowing sessions and a number of documents and artefacts (e.g., computer screenshots) as its data sets. The main findings reveal that MC, defined as holding multiple conversations at the same time, requires people to make strategic decisions about (a) thematic threading (bringing together communication tasks on the same topic) and (b) presence allocation (spreading communicator’s presence over a number of communication instances), and corporations to provide the media and training for (c) media packaging (deciding what media work well together) and (d) audience profiling (grouping diverse audiences by similar needs/requests). Based on these findings, the article examines implications for the business English (BE) class and features a number of technology-enhanced pedagogical tasks to help students to be better prepared for the communication demands of today’s workplace. The design of the tasks, which is informed by the results of the present research, aspires to show research-informed pedagogical interventions for the communication class in BE.