Personalization for Young Learners (with Matt Courtois)

How can we personalise language lessons for young learners? And how can we adapt coursebook content so it connects with students’ own lives?

Teacher trainer Matt Courtois and I discuss what personalisation means in the classroom and why it matters. We talk about localising topics such as food, festivals, weather and places, asking questions that let students express real preferences, and giving learners choices in how they complete activities.

Personalizing Language Lessons for Young Learners (with Matt Courtois)

TEFL Training Institute

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Personalization for Young Learners - Transcript

Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute podcast everyone, I'm Ross Thorburn and on this week's episode my guest Matt Courtois and I are going to be talking about personalising language lessons for young learners. You'll hear Matt and I talking about what personalisation means to us, why it's important, how to localise content from coursebooks, things like food, weather and festivals, and also how to incorporate students' preferences both for what they want to talk about in class and also how they want to learn English. Enjoy the episode! Matt Courtois, welcome back.

Always a pleasure. It is indeed. So, we're talking about personalisation today.

In a nutshell, how would you describe it? One way I've described it to teachers before was saying that, like, so many teachers look at the coursebook and the activities in it as the lesson, but in my eyes the lesson is all the human beings that are in that classroom and the interactions that they have and the experience that they have. The coursebook is a good outline or guide or something. Yeah, it's a good guide for what to do in the lesson.

So, maybe it's a bit like taking a guidebook on holiday or something and you're not going to do everything in the guidebook. You're going to do things that are in there, you're going to leave some things out, and you're going to probably do things that are not in there at all based on your own interests and preferences and stuff like that. Exactly.

I think for me it's how to get the students to relate to the language that they're learning. And obviously you brought up this idea of coursebooks, and I think the problem with coursebooks a lot of the time is that they're made for this global market. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, you can use the same materials, but of course students' lives are different in every place, in every country.

So, I guess that's sort of this idea of localizing materials, which we'll get into as well. But then there's also this idea that if we're learning about pets, then maybe one of the kids in the class has a cat and someone else has a dog and that's great and that's in the coursebook, but maybe someone else has a lizard and that's not in there. And we need to be able to take account of that.

If you look at those conversations that appear in a coursebook as your guide, right, like you want the students in your classroom to be able to have a conversation similar to that about their lives. And so that does require some additions to the target language sometimes. Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on the head there.

So, the idea is for students to be able to use English to describe their lives. And obviously their lives might differ considerably from the characters or the models in the coursebook. One that I think is really obvious is food.

It's something that obviously changes depending on what part of the world you're in. And I think just everyone has a preference on what food they like. I think this is something that's really easy to supplement what's in the coursebook.

I mean, if you're teaching hamburger, pizza, fries, I don't know why it always seems like the language in coursebook is junk food. Have you found that as well? Yeah. Maybe salad gets thrown in there.

Well, as an American as well, I think it leaves the impression that all we eat is burgers and pizza. So, I think with this, right, my sort of tip here is that you can still teach what's in the coursebook. And I think it's important to remember that for exams, probably what's in the coursebook will get tested, but there's no harm in asking students, what else do you eat? Or, you know, if it's pets, what other pets do you know or that you like that are not in the coursebook? And then you can get students to try and describe them.

If you speak the same first language as the students, you can try and translate those things. And I think for some of them, yeah, if there's no equivalent words in English, then you can maybe teach them how to describe it. But as you were saying earlier, I think it's really important that students are not coming to English class and learning to talk about a bunch of food that they've maybe never even eaten before.

And they never plan to eat, right? Right. Another example outside of food is holidays. A lot of English teachers and a lot of English coursebooks will have things about Christmas and Halloween and Valentine's Day.

Easter, Mother's Day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very western holidays.

But they aren't celebrated everywhere in the world. And I do think there's value in introducing what is Christmas or what we were saying earlier about food. What is a hamburger? And introducing these bits of Western culture into their lives and maybe spark their curiosity about the culture behind the language.

But they're not going to have to explain in English, outside of an English classroom, what a hamburger is or what Christmas is. Unless they become an English teacher using that coursebook. Exactly.

But they will probably. There will be situations where they're asked about Chinese New Year or Tunesweeping Day. Right.

So I think that's a really good point. And I think one of my favorite ways to make localization happen in the classroom is if you do have this content about some festival that your students are not familiar with, you can almost treat that as input. And then when it comes to getting the students to do some talking or for higher levels, getting the students to do some writing, you can say, all right, you read about this festival.

Now I want you to write a similar profile of a festival that you're familiar with and then get students to use that template of the writing maybe for whatever they read about Christmas and then just change the topic slightly. And hopefully they can use a lot of the same language, but they're then describing a festival that they're familiar with. I've also seen not just using localizing regarding the target language, but regarding the context of the lesson.

So a lot of times, like, let's go back to food, right? Like whenever people are sitting in a restaurant and ordering food, there's a story of that in the coursebook. I've seen teachers before where they say, okay, we're in the McDonald's downstairs. I want you to close your eyes and imagine the smells of McDonald's.

And then you ask a student, does it smell good? Like, what do you want to eat there? And then what sounds do you hear? And so you're really localizing it to that restaurant that they all know because it's downstairs from your school or whatever. I love that. That reminds me of seeing a lesson a few years ago.

This was with adults, but I think you could do this with teenagers as well, where the whole class was about deciding which restaurant all the students were going to go to for lunch that day. And they compared menus from different restaurants in the shopping mall where the school was. Or in every textbook, there's a lesson about giving directions as well.

They have a map of this fictional city. And then you say, how do you get to the post office? It's well-suited for language to say, turn left, it's opposite the mall or whatever, right? But it makes it such a more interesting class whenever you can talk about this local area. Ask them, where's the closest bank to the school? And how can I get to that bank or post office or restaurant? Once I did something similar with students, but got them to do this for the school that we were in.

So our school had whatever, say 10 classrooms, and it had a bathroom and a little library and a teacher's office. And the whole class was about describing where these different rooms were. And at the end, we did a role play where half the students pretended to be parents, half of them were students.

We went to the front desk of the school and then got the students who were role playing as parents to say, oh, excuse me, can you help me? Like, I want to find this classroom or where's the bathroom? And the kids were then giving directions within the school. I think another thing that often doesn't get localised that sometimes annoys me is weather. And I've seen classes where students learn to say, my favourite season is winter.

I can play in snow and ice. And I've seen this actually in a class in a subtropical city where there is definitely no snow has ever fallen there since the last ice age. So I think for that, what teachers can do is teach things like wet season and dry season, and also do an interesting comparison, right? That could be a nice little writing task or a thinking task.

What's winter like here? What's winter like in this other place? How are they similar? How are they different? And just like with the festivals and holidays, I was saying, I guess you're in the position and I'm in the position where as teachers, you can walk in there and say, oh, in my country, this is what winter's like in my hometown. And for an online lesson as well, what a great way to spot a gap between your students. If you have one student in the subtropics and another student in the far north, right? You can have them comparing their winters.

And I think in an online lesson, you can really exploit the idea of localization to create information gaps. In terms of foods, holidays, it's a great way of creating meaningful exchanges between students as well, online especially, and in classrooms that have people of mixed cultures. So another thing I wanted to briefly mention is just the idea of changing some of the questions that we ask students to allow them to express a personal opinion.

And I think the personal opinions don't have to be very complicated, but it can just be remembering in class to ask students, what pet do you like? Or whatever the topic of the class is, instead of always doing, what is this? What is that? Asking students some questions where there's no right answer. It's just a preference. One other little point with this, the time that I actually found that students did this the most was when I've done translation surveys.

So we get students to go around in pairs. And I often tell the students that in this pair, one of you is the translator and the other one of you, you're the grandma or something, and you can't speak English. You can speak your first language.

And translator, you have to translate the question from someone else in the other pair and ask your granny. And I find when that happens, often you will get these words that come out that the students go, oh yeah, we don't know how to say this in English. And I think that's really, really good when that happens, because at the end of the activity, you'll be like, oh well, what words were there that you didn't know how to translate? Let's say we were talking about favourite foods.

Maybe some foods will come out that students actually do really like, but they don't know the word for in English. And that's when that gap in knowledge gets highlighted. And such an easy question to get your students involved in the class too, right? You're talking about school subjects.

Ask students to ask each other, what's your favourite subject? You're talking about seasons of the year. What's your favourite season? But I think there's also another way of personalising, which is not just personalising the content of the lesson, but also personalising how you do the lesson. Actually asking students about what they like and what they don't like in your classes.

What I've done with very, very low level students, like literally two and a half, three year olds, is made little double-sided flashcards with like happy face, sad face. And after an activity, ask students like, did you like that? Or did you not like that? Hold up the flashcard to get some immediate feedback. And with much higher level students, what I'd gotten students to do was like halfway through a course, complete these sentences.

In this class, I like dot, dot, dot. And this class would be better if dot, dot, dot. And gotten students to write some sentences around those and then share them.

And I found for me as a teacher, that was really, really useful to learn a bit more about what students like and don't like. One other nice way I heard of doing this was getting students to do a project in class, which is how do you use English outside of class? And getting students to, if they're too young to do a lot of writing, just draw a picture of how have you used English outside of class and then get students to talk about that. And I think that can be really interesting feedback for the teacher as well.

You reminded me of something else that I'd heard from another friend of the podcast, Jake Whitten. He shared something where you were saying like if they're too young to say it, have them draw it. But he had like a wheel in class where like you could draw it, act it out, say it or write it.

And basically you could come up with your task and then students could choose which method they would like to use in order to express and use the language that they've been studying. And it's such a great way of personalizing what do students want to do. And you don't necessarily have to have a formal survey of students asking like, what do you like? You can just have students who want to draw something about the target language, they can draw it.

Other ones who want to act out a play, they can do that activity. And they kind of design the activity themselves and personalize it for their own preferences as well. That's so cool.

Yeah, so it's not just that we're taking the class as like one monolithic block who have the same preferences and everything. We can actually decide for different groups of students in the one class and give them some choices, I guess, about what they want to do in the lesson. One more time, everyone, that was Matt Courtois.

For more podcasts featuring Matt, go to our website www.tefltraininginstitute.com. And if you'd like to support the show, you can click on the link in the show notes to buy us a coffee, or you could leave us a positive review wherever you listen, or you can share the episode with a friend. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you again next time.

Goodbye.

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Making Language Meaningful Using Games (with Andrew Wright)

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TEFL Training Institute

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Intercultural Communicative Language Teaching (with Jonathan Newton)

Professor Jonathan Newton joins me to discuss intercultural language teaching. What is it and what’s the best way of teaching it?

Intercultural Communicative Language Teaching (with Jonathan Newton)

TEFL Training Institute

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Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute podcast everyone. I'm Ross Thorburn and on today's episode we're going to be talking about teaching intercultural communication. I have Jonathan Newton from the University of Wellington in New Zealand.

Jonathan has worked in language teaching and teacher education for more than 30 years. He's published lots of books and articles including English teaching and intercultural learning in Asia. So in the interview you'll hear me ask Jonathan about what culture is, like what should we be teaching when we're teaching culture, how we can make culture a topic of the class, how we can get students to explore the cultural side of how we communicate, and finally how to avoid some of the pitfalls of teaching culture like stereotyping.

Enjoy the episode! Hi Jonathan, welcome to the podcast. To begin with, what is culture? Often when I see culture being taught in language classes it's things like what food people eat or what music people listen to or what festivals get celebrated in different parts of the world. But I think when you're talking about intercultural language teaching you're really talking about a different kind of culture from that.

Yeah, that's a good question. It's a tough one too because I think the word culture must be one of the most contested words in academia. You know, what is culture? It's a tough one.

It's so many things, it's so many visible things, but so much of who we are culturally, our identity is subliminal. It's not something we've consciously adopted but it's just part of the the water we've been swimming in since we were born, you know. So I think it's quite it's quite hard to stand apart and answer what it is and you know there are lots of undercurrents of beliefs that we have that come out of our cultural milieu that we haven't deliberately chosen and partly intercultural language learning is helping learners to step apart and see those undercurrents and sort of become aware of them and become aware of how they influence our behavior and how they influence the way we interpret other people's behavior, especially communicative behavior, right, because you know we have such different norms across culture for how to do communication in so many ways.

So coming back to your question and the traditional way of dealing with culture, sort of alluding to the examples you gave, was what the 4Fs approach, which is food festivals, what are the folk dances and famous people or fashion or something, it's a classic. Certainly in the foreign language classroom and in western context, you know, if learning French, you learn about the Eiffel Tower and croissant and whatever it might be, but in the context of intercultural language teaching, we're really trying to move away from learning facts about a culture or learning norms about how they do things in China or France. That's part of it, but it's only a small part.

In the context of communicative language teaching, I think there are three ways we can see culture being present in ways that allow for intercultural learning. One is in the topics we talk about, so we can choose topics that have cultural content. It might be family meal times or it might be holidays, you know, or it might be the school culture and that's fine, but I think in the communicative language classroom, we can also focus on the cultural dimensions of how we communicate.

Small talk, for example, is such a rich area to explore what kind of small talk is common in your context or in the way you communicate in your first language compared to another language. And I think the third dimension of culture we can explore, so I've talked about, you know, the topics we talk about, the cultural aspects of language, but I think we can also reflect on how we manage ourselves in communication from a cultural perspective. Eye contact, body movement, perhaps the way we interject or interrupt or don't.

So all those sort of things are culturally normified and so there's quite a bit to explore there. Great, so let's explore that idea of the topics that we talk about in class and how we can relate those to culture. You've said that it can be useful to get students to start off by thinking about their own culture from the perspective of an outsider.

Can you tell us a bit more about that? How can teachers do that and why is that maybe more effective than looking at other cultures and things like festivals and sports and foods and things like that? Michael Byram, who is one of the most, if not the most, well-known scholar in the cultural language learning and teaching, he makes the point that our job is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Now that's very different from an English teacher teaching their kids about American culture. This is how they do things in America.

All you're doing there is making the unfamiliar even stranger in a sense. You know, you've got that danger, you're kind of leading to stereotypes and I think there's a fundamental problem about the starting point being looking outwards at another culture because it implies an invisible position which you're not made aware of. So you're looking out and judging the other culture without being aware that you're judging it from a relativistic subjective position and that's the basis for prejudice and stereotyping.

And so one way to get around that is to make the learner's own cultural world the starting point. So you're learning English but in an English classroom reflecting on who am I as a Chinese learner of English? What is it about my cultural world which is interesting or might be unusual to somebody visiting from another country? There's a really nice example in my book I talk about from the Cambodian textbook put together by the Nippon Foundation where the kids have to listen to this Japanese girl Akiko talking about her experience of coming to a Cambodian home and enjoying a Cambodian meal in the home. So these are Cambodian learners and the activity begins with the question if Akiko comes to your home what would you cook her and what do you think you know she would think about your food and your eating arrangement.

So now there's a tangible example of not only are we not learning about English culture or American culture but it's a Japanese girl so you've got a third cultural reference point coming to our culture and I'm having to reflect on who I am and how other people see me culturally. So I think it's a nice example of how we can start by reflecting on self. There's a really nice quote from Irving and Gall anthropologists there's no gaze from nowhere I'll say it again there's no gaze from nowhere no gaze that is not position and it's helping learners understand their positionality which I think is a way in our globalizing world to kind of step away from moving straight to judgment.

So that was the idea of making culture a topic in the classroom. Next I wanted to ask you about the cultural side of how we communicate. So how can teachers add an intercultural dimension to tasks and activities maybe that they're already doing in the classroom.

So I wrote a book with Nikki Riddiford on communication in the workplace for professional migrants to New Zealand having to adjust to the workplace here and I'll just draw on examples from that book. So what we would do and this is for migrants who are going to move into you know positions as lawyers or doctors or accountants and so forth. So we've got a database here of authentic recordings from the workplace and many workplaces in New Zealand.

We would take these examples and we would build a lesson around them. So the lesson might start with a scenario. So you're the manager of a team and you've got to get a report ready by tonight and you're running out of time and you need your secretary to stay late to finish the report.

Work together and role play the interaction and then they do that and then they reflect on how they manage this because it's a delicate piece of interaction and then they compared it to the authentic one. Now in the authentic role play the manager said something like look I was wondering if you wouldn't mind would it be possible for you to stay a little bit later tonight because I really have to get this report in. So so much hedging and softening but for a lot of these migrants who came from sort of quite hierarchical societies their role play was I need you to stay late tonight because I've got this work that needs to be done.

Not much more than that and that for them was quite appropriate because you're the boss that's what you do. Now the process of sort of trying it out experiencing it yourself and then comparing revealed some interesting cultural differences. So what's the key there? It's getting learners to try things out to experience the language or to listen to dialogues or to read dialogues and to notice things that they think are a bit unusual.

Another one of my Vietnamese students Thao did a really great PhD in which learners they had a listening textbook and it's basically a listening class and she would look at the scenario for the dialogue and in a similar way she would get the learners to role play the scenario first in Vietnamese or in English it didn't matter and then to do the listening activities and now compare what was different and you see that point of comparison gives learners a reference point culturally for reflecting on what preconceptions did they have which were not realised in the dialogue. I've got to say I really like that idea of getting students to compare what they said in that little role play to what was in the original materials. I think that's very similar to what we get students to do in task-based learning and I love there that you can take that process of do the task, think about the language you used and then compare that to this example from the materials and just change it slightly so that instead of the focus only being on the language used the focus is on the culture and the language at the same time.

The key there is you're giving learners the opportunity to make decisions that are culturally embedded even if they don't realise it you know that is making decisions about how to navigate this encounter, how to do small talk, how to greet, how to negotiate a difficult situation, whatever it might be and then you've got another point of reference where you've got albeit a made-up dialogue you know from a so-called Western context. So I think a lot of these examples that we've been talking about so far have been for higher level students. I wanted to ask you what can teachers do for lower level students or for younger children? What can teachers do with beginners or children to introduce culture? I think this is a kind of an example that you might consider role-playing if you like your classroom in Japan or China being a classroom in a Western context.

How would we interact differently? Well let's say you're in a particularly sort of progressive school in New Zealand and all the kids call the teacher by the first name. Let's try that out today. Now that's going to feel outrageously awkward but you know that is experiencing firsthand a different cultural way of using language and I think the interesting thing there is that everything we do every time we speak we are constructing a way of being which is either sort of challenging the cultural norms or reaffirming them and strengthening them.

If you're a teacher in Malaysia and as you typically do you walk into your class and the class will stand up and you say good morning class and the whole class in unison says good morning teacher and then you walk up and down the aisles and you say is the classroom tidy today? Everybody says yes teacher, thank you, sit down. Now you know you've just strengthened some cultural norms but you could come in there and you could do something really interesting. You could come in and you could say hey class how you doing today? You've done something cultural there haven't you because you've actually sort of challenged hierarchy and formality in just the way you greet the class.

Finally Jonathan I wanted to ask you about the potential dangers of talking about culture in the classroom. I found that sometimes talking about culture can go badly wrong and can end up leading to more stereotyping rather than less. So what are some of your principles or suggestions for getting students to engage with culture to make sure that that doesn't happen? Yeah Jo Orange did a PhD at the University of Otago where she looked at this in German foreign language classes and she got the kids to come up with three stereotypes about Germans.

So here we're saying hey you do it you know if you've got stereotypes let's get them out there. Okay and so by recollection it was things like German or you can guess you know Germans are very direct. One of them was Germans like being naked.

Well there you go. Okay so now she said these are your hypotheses about what it is to be German. Now we're going to get you to interview a German person and you're going to talk to that person about these stereotypes you know if this person agreed or disagreed.

The other thing she did is said now that you've got your three stereotypes now I want you to imagine somebody telling you that those are their stereotypes of you and your culture. In other words huh as a New Zealander you are very direct and you like being naked and how does that feel you know and how would you react to that. So you kind of reverse the process you experience those stereotypes being labeled on you.

The point is and Fred Durbin said that one doesn't meet cultures one meets individuals and so a principle of intercultural language teaching is you work at the individual level. Joanne Arange's work kind of dealing with generalizations to start with but nevertheless it did come down to focusing on an individual as well and the principle there is that you experience culture and you explore the experience someone else's experience of culture as well. Now every learner in China doesn't have a partner in America or New Zealand or Australia wherever to talk to right but you can do that through little case studies and textbooks or things you can find online little recordings.

So I think getting down to the level of the individual is really important and moving away from grossly just normalizing a whole culture. One more time everyone that was Jonathan Newton. For more from Jonathan click on the link in the show notes.

For more from us go to our website www.TafelTrainingInstitute.com. If you'd like to support the show remember you can click on the link in the show notes to buy us a coffee or you can write us a positive review wherever you listen or you can just share this episode with a friend. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you again next time.

Goodbye.