Bringing intercultural awareness into the classroom
Daniel Tse | 7 December 2024
Although I have taught English in Milan for almost six years, it was not until very recently that I heard of TESOL Italy. The theme of their convention this year, ‘connecting languages and people’, gave me the perfect opportunity to speak about the topic of intercultural awareness in language teaching and learning. I believe this is something that would immensely benefit teachers and learners of all ages in Italy. As this is TESOL Italy’s first in-person conference after the global pandemic, there was not a very high turnout in many talks, including mine on intercultural awareness. Despite this, I gave my talk to an audience mostly made up of English teachers at universities with gusto.
The longer format of talks at TESOL Italy convention enabled me to explore the ideas in my same talk at IATEFL (April 2024) in greater depth. I was, above all, able to critically evaluate the brainstorming activity, A to Z of countries, or ‘thought showering’ as it is now referred to in the United Kingdom. In this activity, learners make a list of countries beginning with every alphabetical letter. While the learners will be able to gain basic knowledge about the world, the activity risks reinforcing in them the false notion that countries fully equate with cultures. Nevertheless, there are different levels of intercultural awareness that teachers can target in various practice activities, depending on their students’ age and amount of knowledge. As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day after all.
Mini-project: learning aims
A major addition to my talk at this conference was the idea of a classroom mini-project. I reflected on my experience of using it in twenty-strong classes to raise intercultural awareness among Intermediate and Upper-Intermediate teenage learners. In the mini-project, learners research a different cultural community of their choice. Akin to my earlier suggestion about different levels of intercultural awareness, teachers can choose from one of the four graded learning aims of the mini-project.
At the basic level, learners discover the basic facts of the target cultural community, such as its languages, important holidays, and staple food, among other things. Learners can go further by comparing their own culture to another cultural community; they identify any similarities or differences in customs and social norms between the two cultures. To raise the level of challenge, teachers can ask learners to explore the historical or cultural references embedded in certain language expressions, such as idioms. Intercultural awareness, however, cannot be fully developed without looking into how the target culture is perceived by other communities.
Mini-project: procedure and materials
In terms of the lesson procedure, each group of learners should first choose a target culture for their mini-project. The learners subsequently set questions about certain aspects of the target culture they would like to learn more about; this helps them to narrow down the focus of their research or inquiry process.
Although there are copious amounts of materials available on the Internet, teachers should curate them and direct their students only to reliable sources of information. Some examples of these materials are travel guides, opinion columns, and survey reports by trustworthy writers and organisations. As learners collate the information that they have discovered, the teacher provides them with any necessary language support as well as guidance on the content of their mini-projects. To maximise learning in the classroom, teachers should focus the entire class on any useful emergent language of the lesson; this can be done at one or more suitable moments amid the learners’ research or inquiry activities.
Prior to the group presentations, learners are given the opportunity to practise in their own groups so that they can fine-tune their mini-projects with further feedback on language and content. When learners are listening to their classmates’ presentations, they can complete a self-evaluation form designed by the teacher. Depending on the teacher’s assessment criteria, this evaluation form may contain questions about language use, communication skills, quality of materials, and achievement of the target learning aims of the mini-project.
The final stage of the mini-project involves further language- and content-oriented feedback. Furthermore, learners from different groups give peer-to-peer feedback with the aid of the above evaluation form; they discuss and share their learning points about each other’s chosen cultural community.
Learning opportunity
The benefits of speaking at this year’s TESOL Italy convention for me went beyond the sharing of teaching ideas with the wider ELT community. It was simultaneously an occasion for my professional learning as I was able to attend several other talks, one of which was related to my recent role as an independent CLIL teacher trainer.
Overall, it was a satisfactory experience. I enjoyed reconnecting with some familiar faces as much as making new connections from Italy and abroad. None of these would have been viable without the generous support of the Speak for IH grant award. Thank you!
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