Interculturalizing English for Palestine 1 (Grade 8 - How to get Healthy)
English for Palestine, grade 8, unit 4: How to get healthy, pages 40 & 41
We were fortunate having this unit as a starting point for our weekly online zoom link-ups. It seemed very universal in its theme but also to have the potential for some interesting cross-cultural dialogue, since what is considered healthy isn’t entirely the same amongst different communities around the world. The unit aims to teach vocabulary related to healthy or unhealthy diet and activities, as well as structures for giving advice (You’d better, Why don’t you, etc.) plus the present perfect continuous tense for repeated recent actions.
In discussion and agreement with the teachers in Gaza (Wafa and Hussam) we conducted the following activities in our online weekly 40-minute sessions with each of the four classes that we were researching. As mentioned in previous posts ,these classes (2 girls classes and 2 boys classes) each consisted of around 50 students, and took place in Ministry of Education schools.
Week 1: I showed ten personal pictures relating to my healthy/unhealthy lifestyle in the U.K. and talked about them. I then asked students, in groups, to remember what they could of what I’d said. Different students then took turns to come up to the webcam and say what they could remember about my lifestyle.
Me telling one of the groups about my love for fish and chips!
Through the screen, as many students as possible then showed me their own personal pictures, which they had brought from home, and we had a discussion about how healthy their own lifestyles were.
Farah telling me about her daily exercise routine.
Week 2: For 5–10 minutes at the beginning of each class we linked to a similar-aged girl or boy in Bosnia, Germany, and/or Romania and they asked each other questions about their lifestyles. Some students performed or read out stories that they had prepared, relating to an unhealthy/healthy day and, whilst reading, mimed actions to go with their stories. In some cases, the students read out the story whilst I simultaneously mimed actions to represent what was being said.
The class ended by me showing them three sentences about myself in the present perfect continuous tense. Two were true and one was a lie. A few students came up to the webcam and asked me questions to try to work out which sentence wasn’t true.
Week 3: The students had created and memorized paired dialogues on the theme of giving advice. In the session, they took it in turns to perform them to me. I awarded a prize of books for what I judged to be the best acted performance.
We then played the ‘two truths and a lie’ game the other way around, where students took it in turns to come to the webcam and read the three present perfect continuous sentences that they had prepared. By asking questions, I had to try to work out where the lie was. We did this as a competition, with me getting a point for each time I guessed the lie correctly and the class team getting a point every time I failed.
The video below is from the final iteration in one of the boys’ groups of the last-mentioned activity above.
How useful do you think this activity is for the student who is interacting with me? How useful do you think it is for the rest of the class who are listening to what is happening?
We’d love to have some comments from teachers below about this - especially from those who work in such contexts or similar ones. It would also be great to hear about other ideas you have for interculturalising this unit from English for Palestine.