Interculturalizing English for Palestine 3 (Grade 8, Unit 6 - Friends)

English for Palestine, grade 8, unit 6: Friends, pages 64 & 65

The theme of this unit (friendship and talking about feelings) has the potential of course to be highly personalized, with students taking part in speaking and writing activities related to their own lives. However, there are actually very few suggested activities in the coursebook which do so, and even those that are personalized seem rather unnatural and contrived to practice particular areas of language, rather than aiming to foster genuine communication.

I wonder whether 13–14-year-old boys or girls would be interested in the task below, or feel entirely comfortable doing it? It’s also questionable whether they would be challenged to produce natural, generalizable, and replicable utterances by taking part in such a pairwork activity, especially in a class of fifty learners where it would be impossible for the teacher to monitor every conversation.

In our weekly planning meeting, we decided to make our link-up sessions for this unit much less focussed on specific areas of language than for the previous two units, and much more about encouraging personalized, longer speaker turns. This was partly because the theme of the unit leant itself to this, but also because we were running out of time before the end of semester exams and wanted to give the students an opportunity to produce as much language as they could (and end on a high note!).

So, as a kind of lead-in to the unit, we asked everyone to bring in a picture of somebody who they felt very close to and to be prepared to talk to me about this person in the session. I modelled the activity briefly by showing pictures and talking about my own mother. Some of the learners did a piece of writing before the class about their person too, which helped them prepare to speak.

In the video below, Bader, a student who is perhaps less confident about his speaking skills than most students in the class, was speaking about his grandfather.

Before Bader spoke, lots of the boys in the class had come up and talked about famous Palestinians and people who were not personally known to them. This was interesting and was certainly a way of sharing cultural knowledge but, on the other hand, I felt it would be more engaging for everyone if the boys talked about someone in their families or a friend instead. Bader was the first person in the class to do this and I was therefore more interested in hearing what he said.

Many of the previous speakers in the class had simply read out their prepared notes about their chosen person. This also made what they were saying less interesting and harder to follow since they were using words that they didn’t necessarily feel totally comfortable with or even fully understand. It was so great that Hussam, the classroom teacher strongly encouraged Bader to speak without referring to his notes. He certainly wasn’t expecting to have to do this, but he rose to the challenge really well, and by the end was smiling about his achievement. It was interesting too that everyone gave him a round of applause as he finished speaking.

I felt that using the strategy of reporting back to Bader the things I could remember about his grandfather was a useful one. Not only did this put the onus on me to be the one who had to remember (usually it’s the students who have to do this of course), but it also provided Bader with upgraded versions of his own utterances.

Unfortunately, we could only do the following week’s session with the girls because on the boys’ day the school was closed due to bad weather. We adapted and expanded the task from the coursebook above by asking everyone in each of the four classes to prepare to talk about a time when they felt happy, proud, excited, sad, worried or scared (activity suggested by Haneen Jadalla)

I began the 40-minute session with each class by showing pictures and talking about a time when I felt scared myself – as an 11-year-old boy moving up to secondary school in the UK. I think this helped to open the door for the students to be candid about their own experiences. We then spent the rest of the session with the students taking it in turns to come up to the webcam telling lots of stories and expressing lots of emotions. We had stories of pride over managing to memorize the Quran, doing well in a test, or a family member doing well in an exam; stories of anxiety about traffic accidents, fights with siblings, missing family members who had gone to live abroad; and tragic stories about losing a loved one to cancer, and the bombing of the next-door neighbour’s house.

In the video below, Farah talks about how happy she felt when her father returned from going on the Hajj to Mecca.

 As with Bader in the previous video, I like the fact that Farah becomes an authority on something about which I don’t know very much – in this case the Hajj. In keeping with the ideas of Charles Curran, the inventor of Community Language Learning (CLL), the teacher’s and my role as more advanced speakers of English (the ‘knowers’, as Curran termed it) is simply to provide language models for the things the learner chooses to express (Curran 1973)

I was conscious during this whole conversation that the teacher in the room with the learners was next to Farah and was often translating what I was saying and, at some points, feeding her language that she could say to me. Of course, this is useful sometimes, since feedback and input ‘at the point of need’ is often more accessible and memorable than post performance support and feedback. However, when I watch the recording, I’m also wondering if sometimes more time could be given to Farah to process what I’m saying and to formulate her own responses. Without this challenge, maybe things are a little too easy for any kind of long-lasting learning to take place. What do you think?

It interests me that in this short extract (less than three minutes) such a range of structures which are presented in ‘English for Palestine’ are used naturally and in a personalized context, where they are interdependent on each other. These structures include past simple wh- and yes/no questions, past simple statements with time expressions, ‘have to’ for obligation, ‘must’ for deduction, and ‘will’ for future plans. Of course, Farah doesn’t use them all herself but she is at least exposed to them and the fact that they relate to her own story may make them more readily memorable. I wonder how much of the curriculum could come up from learners simply being engaged in talking with people?

Would love to have your comments below about this, and about any other points you’d like to make about this work.

Reference:

Curran, C; Counselling Learning: A Whole Person model for education; Grune & Stratton,Australia (1973)