Incorporating project work into regular EFL classes

Instead of doing international projects just for the sake of doing projects, I am always looking for good and productive ways of incorporating projects into regular curriculum work. As I have mentioned countless times before, it is not a simple task in our present, rather unique and unusual, senior high school (or senior secondary school - i.e. the school preparing 16-19-year-olds for further studies at polytechnics or universities, for example) system.

This year I am making a conscious effort to this end - firstly, to look into creating a working online platform for true exchange between young people around the world, and secondly, to bring some authentic language use into the EFL classroom. Our WHAZZUP? project Ning has been active for over two months now, with quite pleasing results. According to google statistics, the overall visit rate was up over 70 % from January to February.

Today being St. Patrick's Day in the Irish communities around the world, and with our new EFL course book actually having a unit on Ireland, I had already taken this into account in my initial course planning, and saved the Ireland part for this week. As an introduction we had already done a quiz on some basic, general knowledge about Ireland and looked at the pictures our textbook offered.

It so happens that one of our partner schools in the WHAZZUP? project is St. Michael's Holy Faith Secondary school in Dublin. Some girls from my English class, who also take part in our optional 'international project course', had sent the Irish girls (it's an all-girls school, another interesting discussion point for us Finns where all schools are mixed these days!) some questions concerning St. Patrick's Day in the project discussion forum, and fortunately some of the Irish girls had already had time to reply. We then read the replies together, and also looked at photos of the Irish girls in their green kilt uniforms at school on the Ning (school uniforms being another oddity for Finnish students).

After this students discussed the St. Patrick's Day tradition in small groups and wrote some additional questions to the Irish girls, so hopefully we will learn a bit more from them soon.

I thought this was quite a good way of bringing some real life into the language classroom today. The only reservation I have here, is what I'm always a bit weary of when it comes to international school projects - using your partners as informants to liven up your national curricular requirements. What mights the Irish students get our of all this?? Well, to my consolation, I hope that they will, in turn, have something in mind one day that we can help them with!

Finally ventured into Twitter

My interesting Saturday is continuing. After considering and reconsidering, finding out and fearing lack of time, I have, at long last, joined Twitter.



I really don't know what I'm going to do there yet, but at least the account now exists - with a photo of my dearest childhood summer place in the background. My only problem at the moment is how to solve the language issue. I joined a Finnish network's group, who, naturally tweet in Finnish. Yet, most of my online activity is in English... It must be OK to write my tweets in both languages, I would imagine?


My first tweet is still waiting to be written, though. What to say, and most importantly, who will see it, and what will result from it?? I feel apprehensive right now, so maybe I'll take that first step tomorrow. In the meantime, I want to reread Jenny's Onramp posts on Twitter again in her injenuity blog to get inspired.

Ciao Italia - Skype interview with webcam

What an interesting Saturday morning I had! A good colleague friend from Italy, Daniela, had approached me some time ago whether I would be willing to take part in her students' project where they wanted to interview people from different countries about male and female roles in working life, or something along those lines. Naturally, I jumped at the chance!

It involved setting up a webcam and doing the interview on Skype with Daniela's students videoing it all. I had to ask the help of my more net and tech-savvy daughter to set up the webcam on my computer - I'd never used it before! Managed to get my face on the screen with a couple of clicks, no problem.

Even learned to take these fuzzy webcam shots.

We had set up the interview time through email in advance, so at the pre-arranged time I was ready at my desk at home. While we lucky Finnish teachers were enjoying a free Saturday, our colleagues in Italy were busy at school. Unfortunately, something didn't quite work with our Skype connections, so even though Daniela and her students could hear me clearly, all I got was a constantly cutting buzz from their end, hardly one whole word could be heard at a time! Pity! The way we solved it in the end was for them to type the questions on the Skype chat, while I answered through the microphone.

The set-up looked like this (although my webcam seems to be blank here, but it did work during the interview). They had some quite tough questions about equality between men and women, and whether I had had any episodes during my career where I felt being a woman had worked to my advantage, or what benefit to society as a whole the inherent differences between men and women could have. I now feel that maybe I should have had the questions in advance to think of better answers, but oh well... Especially with their last questions I seemed miss the point they were getting at.

So far, I have really had any experience with voice communications in student projects, but this small experiment certainly got me interested. Maybe I will start looking into it more. From an EFL point of view this would definitely add a totally new dimension and much sort-after authenticity to lessons, otherwise carried out as mere simulations inside the vacuum of your classroom.

Student chat on Ning - observations on intercultural communication

As mentioned in my previous post, one difference that struck me in our international chat over a

week ago was the communication styles of European and Malaysian students. Before the chat, I expected all students to be well familiar with this style of communication and thus swim like fish in water in the chat environment. Maybe they are, but inside their own cultural comfort zones, where everybody shares more or less the same communication strategies.

It was easily noticeable that the European students, even though most of them were users of EFL, seemed to behave in quite similar ways. Apart from the limited vocabulary of some, they mostly appeared a rather homogenous group during the chat. But as soon as the Malaysian students managed to get online there was a clear change in the conversation. While European students started typing their 'hi's' the moment they logged in, the Malaysian ones waited for quite some time, possibly trying to follow what was going on among the others first. It is possible though that this wait was due to their technical connection problems, too. We Europeans could see that they were online and started greeting them and encouraging them to join:

We soon realized the considerably more polite and formal tone in their replies. Many of them kept repeatedly asking whether they could join in the discussion, while European students simply dashed in to introduce themselves in the middle of other people chatting. Actually this shouldn't be a surprise for me, as I have seen the difference in the general attitudes and behaviour of Asian and European students during our face2face student exchanges. Even the simple fact of them calling me, the teacher, 'madam' was quite exotic, since here in Finland most students simply use my first name.

Being 'madam' for a while was quite sweet, though. Just as being called 'auntie Sinikka' by Malaysian students during our student exchange a couple of years ago!

Another difference between Europeans and Malaysians was that the latter seemed to prefer private one-to-one chats to the chaos of the main chat room. Our students found it strange that the Malaysians kept asking for 'privacy'.

Further, in the previous example the Malaysian boy asks: 'Can I know bout you more'. This baffled our students, too, as though he was asking for permission to ask questions. They expected others to be more straight-forward and ask more specifically what they wanted to know, just as they themselves were doing. In this sense the Malaysian students came across as far more reserved, which made the European students feel ill at ease at times. A good learning experience about intercultural communication, though. Students soon realized that using English doesn't make us all the same, but cultural norms still play a huge role in communication. These incidents are also very fruitful to help students reflect on the importance of empathy and remembering that difference isn't strange in a negative way, but actually our diversity is a constant source of wonder and fascination. The real challenge is, of course, how we can work together and understand each other despite our diverse backgrounds and communication cultures.

I need to point out here that these were just simple observations during one particular chat session between a limited number of students in a limited number of European and Asian schools. I am not trying to formulate any theories about intercultural communication, and much of what I wrote probably is rather oversimplified and stereotypical. Nevertheless, this is how it often works in practice - small and insignifant case studies and observations over the years lead to revelations that consequently guide the ongoing process of improving intercultural school projects. What's more, reflecting on the experiences in this blog helps me focus my thoughts and has become a way of keeping an active project log at the same time.

Testing student chat on Ning

Last week we organised an intercontinental chat session on our WHAZZUP? project Ning. This was initiated by our members in Cyprus, who had a special theme day in their school and wanted to give hands-on demonstrations of their international projects.

PREPARATIONS

Adding the chat feature on Ning was a piece of cake really, and we teachers test-drove it beforehand to see how it worked. The more complicated task was to synchronize all the different time zones of the participating schools. In the end, we came up with the following time frame for start of a one-hour chat session.

Cyprus/Finland 11.00 am

Ireland 9.00 am

Italy/Spain/France 10.00 am

New Delhi 2.30 pm

Malaysia 5.00 pm

Korea/Philippines 6.00 pm

The time zone issue actually turned into a whole lesson with the geography teacher in Ireland:

On the foot of preparation for Thursday, I took out a large wall map of the world and circled each of the countries participating. Using the notice on whazzup, we identified what countries were in what time zone, and looked at the difference between Ireland and Korea. I think it began to dawn that as we were in class at 10 am today, other students had their days work done and were probably at home relaxing. It certainly gave pause for thought.

The details of the chat were discussed in our Ning Teachers' group, where teachers also indicated whose students would most probably manage to be online at that given time. The idea of planning a joint discussion topic came up as well, and it was decided that students should be prepared to talk about some special national holidays, as it was the time for the beginning of Lent in Europe with different traditions and also the Chinese New Year celebrations in Asia were not far behind.

THE CHAT ITSELF

On the day, the Cypriot students stayed online from 8 am till around 1 pm to see who they could catch for a chat. Eventually, students from Cyprus, Finland, Ireland and Malaysia got together in the chat room, which was very positive, as, despite the time differences, we managed to involve people from both continents in a real-time activity.

As for the topics discussed, quite expectedly it mostly revolved around young people's leisure activities - shared music, film and reading experiences.

Some more serious topics came up, too though, such as differences in school systems, politics or environmental problems, which pleased us teachers. School uniforms were compared, for example.

It has got to be remembered, however, that apart from the Irish, the rest of the students are learners of EFL, and for some this was the very first time to use English in an authentic situation with people who don't share the same native language. From that point of view, of course, we can't necessarily expect very profound discussions about complicated issues. Even saying 'hi' and talking about the weather is an achievement and a positive language learning experience for some. Students' uncertainty about their English skills recurringly came up in their discussions.

While students were active in the main chat room, teachers opened up private chat rooms to share ideas about the progress. This proved a useful feature.

Some students started private one-to-one chats, too. However, something we began to miss on Ning was a feature that would allow small groups of students to open their own separate chat room. The most students online at any one time was 31, and it soon became apparent that even that was too many. The discussion simply got too fast-paced, not only for us teachers with far less online multitasking experience, but also for the students, as this example shows:

Some technical hitches were encountered, too, which seems unavoidable whenever trying to work syncronously over space and time. At one point it looked threateningly that we wouldn't manage to get anybody from Asia to join us Europeans. Although the students were ready and keen in their ICT room in Sabah, Malaysia in the evening the chat just wouldn't work for them. The teacher shared their frustration on wall posts:

Luckily, their ICT staff managed to work wonders and they entered the chat room bringing with them a fascinating , and even partly exotic, feel to the discussion. I will write a separate blog post on the the clear difference in the communication culture between them and European students later.

REFLECTION

All in all, I would say this first chat experiment was well worth it. Our students in Finland were surprisingly excited about it all day. Some even revealed that they had never chatted online in a foreign language before!

Other participants have given quite positive feedback, too.

Just to say that the chat on Thursday went really well. As I said to Sinikka, I overheard a student say it was better than Bebo and that is a very big compliment. It created a great buzz with the students wanting to stay on-line for longer than originally intended.

I think that during the chatting the students have exchange many interesting information. They have spoken about their school, about the uniform in school, about the different time zone. Someone asked where is Cyprus, our students try to know about the political problem in Ireland and they try to tell the others about our political problem but this was without success. They have spoken with success about the weather.

And certainly it created momentum for the project in Malaysia, where suddenly more and more students wanted to join the Ning and become part of the network. In actual fact, all through the chat one of my main jobs was approving new members from there. I was quite touched by some of their reactions, which was a good reminder that not all teenagers all over the world are as blase about participating in online social networks as we might expect.

As a final remark, another feature missing on Ning is having access to past chat logs. Once the chat is over, and even during it whenever a limited number of visible lines on the screen is exceeded, the comments are simply wiped off into the void of virtual space. That is why I was busy taking screenshots all through the chat to have at least some record of what was going on. It might be useful to be able to go back to the whole chat session, especially as I enjoy doing small case studies on young people's communication patterns in international projects.

FUTURE PLANS

We are definitely going to try the chat again during this spring term, but in new and improved ways. Firstly, we will seriously have to limit the number of participants per chat to make it more manageable and productive. This will involve a lot of joint coordination and planning between teachers in advance. We will also need to find out about options for grouping students during the chat, as one colleague pointed out:

if we do it again (which I hope we will) it might be an idea to form groups with a student from each country in a group. With so many exchanges as on last Thursday, the speed makes it difficult to keep up, even for our tech savvy students!

Secondly, I feel that, despite the obvious advantage of everyday chit chat for lower level learners of English, as mentioned before, more attention will have to be paid to defining a purpose for the chat to enhance the overall learning experience.

Other forms of syncronous exchanges have also been suggested by colleagues:

with the Polish and Russian students we've had two skype sessions.. we could do that with yours.. so the students, instead of just chatting on the net, could talk.

As inviting as adding voice to the chat sounds, unfortunately we don't access to Skype at school, so that is out. There must be other tools available for this, but for now they will have to wait till a later time.

Guidelines for students' blog writing

The next phase in our Asia-Europe project starting up. We have devised two more sets of guidelines - BLOG GUIDELINES and COPYRIGHT - and sent them off to all the teachers for consultation. Hopefully we will receive good constructive feedback from at least some of them, to then adapt the guidelines for everyone to happily commit to In our closed membership group/community we made the conscious decision to control the features to an extent. This involves reserving each member's blog to longer, more in-depth writing on a specific theme. So far, we have had to ask quite a few students to cut and paste their self-introductions or short 'hi there' messages either to the discussion forum or in the 'text box' that everybody has on their own page. I must say I feel bad every time I have to point this out to students, who have eagerly just joined the project and taken ownership of their own page and the features provided for them, and keen to meet others have written their 'hellos' in their blog. We have now learned that next time, with a similar project, the basic structure of the Ning should be made clearer to all members at the outset to avoid having to ask people to change something they have already uploaded. Or am I trying to control things too much again? I have thought a lot about this, but I keep coming to the same conclusion that for students to really differentiate between chit-chat between friends, forums and blog posts, guidance and modelling is needed.

Both the sets of guidelines are rather long, and we have advised each teacher to consider whether their students might need help and explanations in their own language to get the idea. We feel this would provide for useful material for a whole lesson or sets of lessons that could be used in any subject that students might write about in their blog.

Our experience so far points strongly to students not bothering / daring / knowing how to write much more than very short chatty lines on other students' walls. Statistics today show that with 143 members in the project, only 5 blog posts have been written (2 of them by teachers!), while there are close to 2,000 messages on members' walls.



Yet, all sorts of essays are required as part of credit work in schools, so our premise is: wouldn't it be more motivating for students to actually do this writing for a real audience rather than just to their teacher for a grade? Other forms of expression (slide presentations, videos etc.) are also encouraged instead of the more common writing, if schools have the facilities and teachers the time and interest to guide their students in such endeavours. Commenting on other people's writing to get a conversation going also seems rather rare. That's why, we wrote a special set of guidelines to remind students of the importance of feedback and learning through conversations.
We hope that once students get the hang of it, they will soon realise the benefits of blog writing and comment discussions to their own learning. Or then not... My pessimistic side fears that this will just turn into another forced homework-type assignment that most students will only do half-heartedly if their teacher sets sanctions for neglecting it. Is it any wonder, though, if this happens? Isn't this what most school systems condition students to do anyway from the moment they first enter inside the four walls of an educational establishment?

'Friends' feature on Ning

Doing our online school project has made me wonder about the usefulness of the 'friends' feature on the site. For some time all I could see was classmates befriending classmates, which in my opinion hardly contributed anything to anyone's learning process. Because of my mission or attempt of actually enhancing students' learning through involving them in this project using social media tools I thought that this feature was nothing but an irritating distraction, tantamount to leading to unwelcome competition between students over who seems to be the most popular.

The other day, however, checking through student messages, as I routinely do to keep a watchful eye on what is going on, I found proof that the feature might serve a purpose after all. I had assumed that most young people swim in these social networks just like fish in water. Yet, I found this message written to a classmate:

Surprisingly to me, some of them find it hard to approach unknown students in the network. Maybe this is also reflected in the fact that the majority of messages so far have been exchanged between classmates from the same schools.

The benefit of the 'friends' feature is apparent in the following message. This student is using it as the icebreaker to get to know others from different countries.

I am now trying to find out from the students themselves how they feel about 'friends' in this project and some other aspects of the network through this discussion. I look forward to seeing if anyone is brave enough to give us any insights into this! It seems that all the students are still rather apprehensive about any initiatives set by teachers on the site. The playground mentality still largely pervades.