1-3. ELF Aware Activities Hands On — Transcript

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1. 0:01Hello and welcome to this presentation. I'm Nicos  Sifakis. In this talk, I’m going to be discussing
2. 0:08ELF-aware activities in practice for the ESOL or  EFL classroom and we're going to be looking at
3. 0:15a handful of examples in a practical  hands-on way, so stick around.
4. 0:22We are going to be looking at real life textbooks  and activities taken from them. The reason we're
5. 0:28doing this is to show that it's possible  to raise any textbooks ELF awareness status
6. 0:37by incorporating the right kind of questions.  So textbooks typically and I stress this word,
7. 0:46textbooks typically use topics that on  the surface tend to be culturally or
8. 0:52interculturally sensitive, but really do not fully  exploit them because they're playing it safe,
9. 0:58especially international textbooks and this  might be the case in your own CLIL context.
10. 1:04Secondly, they incorporate rather traditional  tasks. They adopt a traditional approach to
11. 1:12activities and these might be negatively  impacted by high-stakes testing,
12. 1:18so you're going to be having many questions  that are comprehension checking questions.
13. 1:24And thirdly, textbooks typically do not favor  reflective or metalinguistic questions which
14. 1:31are exactly the questions we look for in ELF-aware  activities. So in the first example, we're going
15. 1:37to be looking at the notion of a large culture  versus a small culture approach and this is a
16. 1:44notion that Adrian Holliday introduced in 1999. A  large cultural approach is a way of looking at a
17. 1:53context that prioritizes communication between  people from different cultures and they are
18. 2:01typically, they would be typically understood to  mean societies, different societies for example,
19. 2:06the US versus the Mexican, or the Greek versus  the Turkish, the Taiwanese versus the Iranian and
20. 2:15so on, very simplistic reductionistic way of  looking at culture. The question is would this
21. 2:21be more EFL or ELF? This is something that  I let you wonder about. On the other hand,
22. 2:28a small culture approach is more interpersonal  and looks at communication between real life or
23. 2:35individuals with significant differences in their  cultural backgrounds, experiences and identities,
24. 2:42so for example, in this case we're looking  at specific real life people or we try to
25. 2:49make the roles or characters that appear in  textbooks take up a real-life existence. So the
26. 2:57question to ask here is would a small cultural  approach be more relevant, more appropriate
27. 3:04in an ELF context or an EFL context? Again, I’m  leaving this question open for you to discuss
28. 3:11with your tutor. What's important to remember for  an ELF-aware intercultural communication pedagogy
29. 3:18is that we want to engage learners in activities  and interactions that promote authentic
30. 3:24intercultural communication. In other words, we  try to prompt our learners to become conscious,
31. 3:31to become aware of their own personal  attitudes toward ELF -related concerns and
32. 3:39they would be made to recognize that some of  these attitudes are likely to be nativespeakerist,
33. 3:46in other words, they promote the importance of a  native speaker or the prioritization of a native
34. 3:54speaker in this particular EFL context. And the  target here would be to try and shift or transform
35. 4:03these attitudes. At the same time, we want  to prompt our learners to become conscious
36. 4:09of their own culturally acquired communication  preferences and to recognize that some of these
37. 4:16attitudes are likely to be ethnocentric and  try to transform or shift these attitudes.
38. 4:23In other words, I believe that ELF awareness  is ideal for appreciating small cultures,
39. 4:30well, there you are, I’ve just given  you the answer to the previous question.
40. 4:34And that small cultures are ideal for raising  ELF awareness. Let's see how this can be done
41. 4:40with an example. So have a look at this excerpt  that is taken from a real life, a real textbook.
42. 4:48Stop the video here and try to pay close  attention to the rubric of this activity.
43. 4:58When you finish, try to think of the large  versus small culture tendencies vis-a-vis
44. 5:05the two questions that you see in this activity.  Which of these questions would be a large culture
45. 5:13question and which would be a small cultural  question? That would be the task for you here.
46. 5:19Well, as you can see, in 1.1, there's a focus on  place as linked to the characteristics of people
47. 5:27supposedly from that place. This is part of  a large culture tendency which links a place,
48. 5:34a people, a culture and a language as a  package which links a place, a people,
49. 5:41a culture and a language as a package and this  conflicts with the way much of the world is.
50. 5:49On the other hand, in 1.2 we have the  encouragement to spot commonalities
51. 5:56across societal and other lines for example,  ethnic, and this is an encouragement that is
52. 6:03helpful for the small culture or interpersonal  approach. Let's move on, let's look at the next
53. 6:11activity from the same textbook. Stop the  video now and closely consider this activity.
54. 6:20We can see here the linkage between climatic  conditions leading to refined cultural differences
55. 6:27in a kind of large cultural perspective, but  then you can wonder about for example, Islamic
56. 6:35ways of living distributed across the globe  from Northern Sweden to South Africa and so on.
57. 6:43In other words, we look at similarities despite  climatic conditions. That would be more towards
58. 6:50a small cultural approach, but let's see  how ELF awareness can be raised here in
59. 6:56this very specific example with the right kind of  metacognitive and metalinguistic questions. Have
60. 7:04a look at these questions, you can add these  questions to supplement the existing task,
61. 7:12so we begin with what kind of English would  Nuru and Tikki use to communicate with you?
62. 7:18This is a question that helps the learners  imagining a possible ELF situation, an
63. 7:25interaction between themselves and the characters  in this activity. Another question, do you think
64. 7:30it would be British or American English? Do you  think you may have a problem understanding them?
65. 7:38What would you or they do in order to be  understood? So there's a sense of raising
66. 7:45your learners’ awareness of the importance  of intelligibility, in ELF interactions
67. 7:50and perhaps the realism of non-native speakers of  English using their own ELF ways of communicating
68. 8:00with other people which are not British  or American English. You can go further,
69. 8:06in what ways would the English used by Nuru  and Tikki help them understand and appreciate
70. 8:12their cultural differences? People from different  parts of the world and different upbringings may
71. 8:18have different ways of communicating and their  English would be different. All of these instances
72. 8:23of English would be valid users of ELF. And in  what ways would it help them connect and identify
73. 8:32the cultural similarities? Again, it's the same  idea of connecting with another person who is not
74. 8:39a native speaker of English at the same level with  them through this cultural approach, intercultural
75. 8:45communication. Now let's look at the next activity  from the same textbook. Stop the video again
76. 8:52and pay particular attention to the rubric and the  text in this activity. The same activity moves on;
77. 9:00it goes on to the next page. Again, stop the video  here and see carefully the wording and the rubric.
78. 9:09What you can do here is pose the  following questions to your learners.
79. 9:14This environment the physical characteristics  represents an entrenched way of seeing the
80. 9:21world and that's absolutely true, but is it  really like that anymore? So you pose this very
81. 9:28realistic question and you make them realize  how relevant the text that they've read is
82. 9:35for their own personal understanding. Then you can  ask them to link such differences to cultural and
83. 9:42communicational differences, essentially you can  ask your learners to be ethnographers of their
84. 9:49own world and you can ask them to describe its  patterns. The introduction of an anthropologist
85. 9:57in the text opens the door to asking your learners  to be ethnographers. The idea of language learners
86. 10:04as ethnographers is a well-established one and  this seems a more useful starting point than
87. 10:11anthropology linked to physical characteristics.  What (are) other questions that you can ask?
88. 10:18When your learners become ethnographers of the  own world, very simply ask about the what they
89. 10:24do with English, what they do themselves. Start  from the general situation from their hobbies,
90. 10:32do you enjoy playing video games?  Do you chat with other players?
91. 10:36What do you chat about? Now you focus  on the subject of their interaction,
92. 10:41no reference to language yet. How often do you  talk about stuff other than the video games?
93. 10:48What is this stuff about? So you prompt  them to talk about their own interests
94. 10:53and hobbies. Now you move on to the language  used. What language do you use when you chat?
95. 11:01Why do you use that language? Could it be English  for example? What do you do in order to understand
96. 11:07and be understood by other players? Pointing  towards accommodation strategies and becoming
97. 11:13intelligible and comprehensible. And how would  you describe the English that you use when you
98. 11:20chat or Skype with your fellow players? Again,  trying to raise the self-awareness and confidence
99. 11:27as efficient users of English in their own  real-life authentic situation outside of the
100. 11:34EFL classroom. So let's take stock and see what  we've done so far with ELF-aware task design.
101. 11:43As you can see, in ELF-aware tasks, we do not  teach ELF, this is really important. The point
102. 11:49here is not to teach ELF because you cannot  teach ELF, you can only expose your learners
103. 11:55to successful examples of ELF interactions.  That's the important thing, exposure.
104. 12:03Then you should find and expand upon  your learner's own ELF speaker persona
105. 12:11what they do themselves with English. And  in this way you help them gain confidence as
106. 12:17non-native speakers and then you can open up  towards other ELF concerns, such as native
107. 12:26speakerism, the importance of standard English,  the ownership of the language and so on, and
108. 12:32the relevance of studying EFL in this particular  context even if it's a CLIL context. The
109. 12:39importance of that with their own understanding  of their own needs for English language learning
110. 12:46and this is exactly what integration of ELF means.  We are not trying to replace EFL, but we are in
111. 12:54a sense upgrading it with an ELF integration. We  leave EFL tasks to do the job of teaching English
112. 13:05and we focus on facilitating interactions  providing feedback and in this way boosting
113. 13:11confidence. So what have we done in  this presentation, we've discussed
114. 13:16the notion of ELF awareness. We referred  to the importance of small cultures.
115. 13:23We noticed the importance of cross-cultural  communication which involves a comparison of
116. 13:30interactions among people from the same culture,  to those from another culture. We discussed the
117. 13:36importance of intercultural competence which  involves interactions among people from different
118. 13:42cultures. We highlighted the importance, the  key importance of asking reflective questions
119. 13:50that are metalinguistic and metacognitive. We  also stressed the role of shifting attention to
120. 14:00learners’ attitudes and making them aware  of their attitudes towards these concerns.
121. 14:06And we also showed how realistic it would be to  help them transform these attitudes and make them
122. 14:15more ELF-aware. So now it's practice time. What  I’m asking you to do is use the same criteria
123. 14:23mentioned above and do the following for  your own teaching context. Very simply select
124. 14:30a particular unit or chapter from your  own CLIL book or any other book, then
125. 14:37evaluate the degree of ELF awareness that  is inherent in the activities of that unit,
126. 14:42see to what extent the activities themselves are  ELF-aware or not. In the third step, develop your
127. 14:48own original metalinguistic and metacognitive  questions to this particular chapter to make it,
128. 14:56to help make it more ELF-aware as we did with  the examples we saw above. And finally, discuss
129. 15:03with your tutor, your rationale of these ELF-aware  activities and exchange viewpoints with your
130. 15:10colleagues. You will see that trying to do this  will make you more confident as an ELF-aware
131. 15:18teacher. Thank you for watching this presentation.  I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. Goodbye