Communication

At the ELI, we'll be working with three groups of teachers/teacher educators this summer: 20 Pakistanis, 20 Mexicans, and 6 Tunisians. The Pakistanis, Mexicans and 2 of the 6 Tunisians teach English as a foreign language. We all share many concerns, notably building enthusiasm in our students for a language course. For teachers outside an English speaking country, it's so much harder to give students the sense that it really could be useful to communicate in English. Students at the ELI are forced to negotiate in English most of the time, so they see the point of making their immediate lives easier by better communication in English.

I'm very curious to see the overlaps and the differences in English teaching assumptions among the three groups. They're working with much larger classes, much smaller budgets, and in the case of the Mexicans and Pakistanis in particular, some students who barely want to be in school, much less learning English. I hope that the connections they make with each other will also provide a way to link their students. Having real people to talk to and a real reason to use English - as their only common language - profoundly changes attitudes toward language learning.

I'm of the television language learning generation: we got a couple of hours of French a week in elementary school. It didn't do much. Later students have had a more communicative approach to language learning, but we all know how much high school Spanish is actually usable in Mexico. If students could get a couple of hours chatting with French or Spanish speakers or fellow language learners in another country, imagine how attitudes could change. It's much harder to create scary images of 'them' when you know one of 'them' personally.

--Deborah