Interculturalizing English for Palestine 2 (Grade 8 - People and Games)
English for Palestine, grade 8, unit 5: People and Games, pages 52 & 53
As with the previous unit, the theme is potentially interesting and engaging for young people, and you would expect the opportunities for intercultural dialogue in our online link-ups to be very good. This potential was made even greater by the fact that the three weeks that we worked with this material were exactly when the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was happening and many of the young people in Palestine, as well as the teachers and me, were watching it avidly. Throughout the whole period there was lots of unplanned chat around who was doing well in the World Cup and which teams students wanted to win.
The reading activity below lies midway through the unit and is included in the book to provide learners with an opportunity to process a theme-related reading passage and to engage in discussion in the follow-up speaking task.
The text is useful and interesting. However, it is doubtful whether many teachers will be able to do this task in class in the way it was intended, for the following reasons. Firstly, many students in Palestine will have translated the entire text and probably also the questions into Arabic before the class (whole books are commercially available in Palestine to enable students to do this), making the process of reading to try to understand completely redundant. Secondly, if everything has already been translated there can be no debate about what the correct answers to the questions are. This makes the follow-up pairwork discussion task redundant too.
So, for this unit we wanted to include some online activities for our link-ups that could make up for the fact that the activities in the coursebook could almost certainly not be done in the way they had been designed. We wanted to give the learners some opportunities to use English to communicate, to understand other people’s sport and game culture, and to share their own and, most importantly perhaps, to make some mistakes and not feel inhibited or threatened by this. This is what we came up with.
Week 1: We began the session by linking to a similar-aged boy in Bosnia, Germany and Spain and a girl in Romania. They had a discussion about their favourite sports and video games.
Talking with young people in Bosnia/Germany/Romania/Spain about favourite sports and games.
In order to set up the ‘Students versus Teacher’ activity, which was going to take place the following week, I modelled it by showing a few questions myself and running it as a kind of quiz. The class scored a point if they got a question right and I scored a point if they got a question wrong. Some example questions were:
How many different pieces are there in a chess game?
a) 6 b) 7 c) 8
Which country has a professional football team called ‘Palestino’?
a) Chile b) Italy c) Algeria
Mohamed was the only student in the class who knew the answer to this question.
In the last part of each class, a few students came up to the webcam and chatted with me about their favourite sports and video games.
Week 2: I did a short presentation about one of the remaining countries in the 2022 World Cup. (I chose Australia.) The main focus of this was on typical sports and games in that country and matches they’d played so far in the competition, but I also focused briefly on food, landscape, and religion. Rather than using PowerPoint slides, I held pictures up to the webcam. I also showed the class the notes I’d made on big pieces of paper. The aim of this was to serve as a model for the short presentations they were going to do themselves. I made it really clear that I didn’t want them to just read out their presentations but rather to show pictures and talk about them.
Modelling a presentation about Australia (sport)
Modelling a presentation about Australia (wildlife and landscape)
One representative from each group of five students (10 groups in total) then came up and asked the questions they had prepared for the ‘Students versus Teacher’ activity. As they did this, they picked a country randomly from the remaining countries to prepare to present about in the following week’s session.
Everyone was supporting Morocco and Sara was really pleased to pick it as her group’s country.
In the video below you can see Asma and Roaa from one of the girls classes asking me some very challenging and interesting questions for the ‘Students versus Teacher’ activity.
Week 3: Each of the 10 groups came up to the webcam and did their presentations about the country they had picked.
Malak telling me about food in Japan
Roaa showing me the Senegalese flag she made out of lollipop sticks.
So that’s what we did. I felt that the students were quite well motivated during this unit’s sessions. Can you think of other ways of interculturalizing the content of this unit of English for Palestine. Please write a comment below.