Intercultural Activities

Intercultural competence (ICC) & Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT)

Background

When I received my first adjunct position to teach Spanish at a local community college nine years ago, I really had no idea what I was doing. I had just finished a Master’s degree in Spanish language; therefore, I felt that I knew the language really well, but I did not know effective ways of transferring that knowledge to others. One of my biggest issues was that I did not know how to assess students’ comprehension of texts or videos without having them summarize what they understood in English.

As time went on and I received training from The New Teacher Project (tntpteachingfellows.org), the art of teaching started to make more sense to me. I found new ways of assessing student comprehension, and I found success in the way I was designing my lessons. Lesson design started to become a ‘game of logic’ to me: presenting and organizing materials in a compelling and reasonable manner in order for students to discover meaning and use Spanish in contextualized scenarios. Designing lessons became the most challenging and fun part of my job as a language instructor.

Although I felt as though I was growing as a teacher, in a sense, I still felt as though I was “winging it” from day to day. In an attempt to make sure that my teaching was actually grounded in new research-based strategies related to language learning and pedagogy, I decided to enroll in the Master of Arts in Foreign Language Teaching (MAFLT) program at Michigan State University. The courses were all engaging and offered a lot to learn from, but because I was so interested in lesson design, the concept that particularly interested me was that of task-based language teaching (TBLT). This approach to language teaching most correlated to what I was doing in the classroom already, and the theory behind the teaching method made sense to me.

Task-based language teaching was incorporated into many different courses of the MAFLT program, for example, courses on second language (L2) teaching methodology, L2 literacy, L2 assessment, and teaching L2 with technology. However, the most interesting discussion of task-based language teaching in my opinion was in the course on incorporating culture in the L2 classroom. In general, the course was appealing to me because I had to adjust my understanding of culture and intercultural competence. Long into my language studies, and well into my teaching career, my perception of culture was that it referred to certain items, such as food, music, literature, art, and clothing, as well as certain habits, such as celebrations, holidays, and school practices, that were shared among members of a country or a group of countries. In the MAFLT culture course, I learned about intercultural competence, that is, a set of skills that allow for effective communication and understanding among those of varying cultures. When discussing task-based language teaching in this course, I found myself captivated by the combination of a familiar topic (TBLT) with a new concept (intercultural competence).

As a student in the MAFLT culture course, I created three intercultural activities that followed a task-based framework. I used one of the activities in my real classroom and found great success with the outcome. This motivated me to consider expanding upon the idea of the activities that I created and develop a series of lessons that would align specifically to my curriculum and could really be used in my classroom. A new opportunity in my department to develop an intensive beginning Spanish course was going to allow me to have some limited freedom in creating my own materials for the class, so I decided to take advantage and dedicate my Experiential Module to developing these materials.

When I was in sixth grade, I remember that my science teacher did a lesson on hydroplanes, as we were going to be attending a hydroplane race the following week. As a class, we discussed the various restrictions that builders of the hydroplanes encountered: they had to use specific materials, they had to meet certain weight restrictions, etc. However, my teacher made the argument that such restrictions had led to some creative models and innovative designs. She helped make the point that constraints can spur creativity – a view that stuck with me for life.

While my job situation put many constraints on what I could do in the classroom, possibly making the creation of intercultural tasks an impractical and pointless endeavor, I wanted to continue forth and find ways that I could insert such activities into the curriculum without disturbing the mandated materials. The following describe the main points that limited or defined the structure of my activities:

• I was given a specific curriculum that I had to follow. This curriculum was based around the content (mostly vocabulary lists, grammar points, as well as some readings and videos). While I did have to cover certain material on certain days, I did have the freedom to choose what activities I used in the classroom to get the points across.
• I only met with students three times a week for fifty-minute sessions. Over 60% of the instruction time was to cover grammar points, with the other 40% covering vocabulary and input materials.
• My students are all adult learners at the college level; however, the majority of my classes were for beginning Spanish, limiting the type of language and output that I could expect from students.
• My students are all native English speakers living in the United States with limited access to real-time communicative events with native Spanish speakers.
• I was not in a position to make changes to the curriculum or the schedule.

These constraints helped mold the outcome of my activities. In order to address the curriculum issue, I decided to focus my activities on cultural products and practices that were related to themes that were covered by the current curriculum: university, pastimes, birthdays, daily routine, and restaurants and food. By working with present themes, I was able to incorporate the activities in my classroom in a more seamless way.

Because I only met with students for fifty-minute sessions, and because the course syllabus defined the day-to-day content, I needed to make my lessons “modular”, that is, stand-alone and able to fit in to unit plans independent of students’ vocabulary or grammar knowledge. I created the activities with the idea that students were at the Novice level (ACTFL, 2012), providing students with comprehensible input and graphic organizers to help them summarize their ideas. By adhering to the guidelines of TBLT and ACTFL, I constantly took into consideration the idea of scaffolding and having students produce highly-familiar and highly-practiced language in non-demanding tasks.

A particular setback, especially regarding the interculturality aspect of the tasks I created, was the fact that my students were all native English speakers with limited access to native Spanish speakers. One factor of intercultural competence, Skills of discovery and interaction, calls for learners to acquire new knowledge of a culture through real-time communication and interaction. Since having students regularly communicate with those of a different culture in the classroom was a nearly impossible activity, I had the “real-time communication” aspect take place in the form of communication with each other. Not only this, but I created the activities to have students regularly interact with authentic texts, both written and audiovisual, to make sure that students were exposed to the spontaneous and realistic language that they might find in interpersonal communication events with native speakers.

Although the restrictions that helped steer the outcome of my project were unique to my situation, I believe that many instructors find themselves in similar positions. In many cases that I have seen, a textbook determines the content of the first four semesters of college Spanish. Many, if not all, textbooks that I have seen are basically all the same: organizing the same grammar points in the same order, using very similar vocabulary and covering very similar themes. If instructors use these types of textbooks as a main resource for guiding their in-class content, they miss out on the opportunity to help their students develop their intercultural competence. Activities such as the ones I created serve as a practical and valuable complement to the content that most beginning-level Spanish textbooks offer.

From a more personal perspective, the creation of these activities has influenced the direction of my teaching career in different ways. By further investigating TBLT and intercultural competence, I have been able to fine-tune tasks that I have already created to include more comparisons and reflections on part of the students. Outside the classroom, I have already presented these activities to Spanish instructors at a different university and have submitted a proposal to share my ideas at a state conference. I am completely satisfied with the knowledge and skills that I have gained as a result of my Experiential Module.

ANDREW R. SEWICK - sewickan@gmail.com - INTERCULTURAL ACTIVITIES