Speaking tasks in English for Palestine - Do they work?

English for Palestine, like most localised coursebooks all over the world, facilitates learning with familiar and easily accessible content. It’s also organised using broadly communicative principles and includes speaking tasks which are designed not only to activate specific areas of language but also to link these areas of language to the learners’ own lives through personalisation.

See below for a few examples of such activities that I found by flicking through the grade 8 coursebook.

If the students did these activities in pairs it would provide some personalised speaking practise for everyone in the class, and may help to give the learners more of a sense of ownership of the English they’re learning.

But from what I can gather most teachers of large classes in Gaza don’t use such coursebook activities in the way they were designed, and many don’t use them at all! I think there are four main reasons for this.

1) The sheer number of students. With up to 50 students in a class, and very limited space for the teacher to move around, it’s almost impossible for any monitoring to happen and therefore almost impossible to ensure that all 25 pairs are doing the speaking task in the intended way, or even using English when they’re speaking to each other.

2) With such a range of levels within the same class (see last week’s post) it’s really hard to make sure that students doing closed pairwork speaking tasks are operating at the right level of challenge. Some students may not even be able to communicate simple ideas like those required by the above tasks; others may find them too easy and boring. When two such students are working together as a pair it can be very frustrating for both parties.

3) There is no focus on the speaking skill in the exams, therefore many teachers may feel there is little point in using up limited class time on practising it, or on trying to support the students in getting better at speaking.

4) In a context like Gaza where most students have never experienced anything different, do teenagers feel motivated to talk in English about their culture, their daily routines and what their hobbies are etc with people they’ve known all their lives and who probably know all these things already anyway?

 It was with these points in mind - and particularly the last one - that we decided to try doing weekly online link ups based around the coursebook with four large classes of grade 8 students in 2 different Governmental schools in Gaza.

In the next post we’ll start sharing some of the activities we did to try to bring an intercultural element to their English classes.