Coursebook writer and teacher trainer Ceri Jones talks to us about mediation. How can teachers mediate their coursebook content to make it more meaningful for students? Why are students now expected to be able to mediate between languages? And how can we help learners to mediate texts?
Hi Kerry, thanks for joining us. To start off with, what is mediation? What are some of the different meanings and connotations of that and how does it manifest itself in the classroom and an evaluation? Okay, so right the mediation buzzword as it were is an interesting one because it has recently appeared as a descriptor on the CEFR and so it's now creeping into assessment, well not creeping, and galloping into assessment in a lot of countries. So I think yes, the teacher mediates the materials in the coursebook all the time but that's a different form of mediation.
So we do, we take the materials, we decide how to adapt them, we help our students, we help to make them more relevant and accessible to our students but mediation now in language terms, it's a new descriptor for a skill that's always been there. It's one that's quite difficult to incorporate into the classroom. The basic mediation is you have three people, one person speaks L1, one person speaks L2, the third person speaks both.
So there's a language gap between person one and person two and person three is the one who can bridge the gap. So it's classic interpreting or translating. Okay, so that would be a very, very basic idea of mediation.
So you could set up a task in class where you have student one whispers something in L1 to their partner and then they have to repeat it to student three in English. So that could be kind of like a mock-up of mediation for example which would be quite fun but also it's taken as mediating texts. So students could, and I think we do this as teachers anyway, students read about a story in their L1 which is happening within their local context but then they have to mediate it in the sense of they have to then give a summary of it in English and that's quite a complex task because there's a lot of cultural stuff that you need to be able to express in English and the things that are packaged within a word in your own language becomes very difficult then to know exactly how to express.
So that's a very delicate and kind of language operation, a complex process and that's a lovely side of mediation. So we can ask them to for example choose a news story and then write a summary of it in English, that would be mediation. We can give them a text in English and ask them to pick out the information that a third party wants from that text and explain it to them in simpler terms.
So you might say to an intermediate student, here's a letter from the bank and this person's English isn't great, they can't understand it, it's too formal, can you write a short summary of the main information? So basically that's summary writing but that's mediation because the student is mediating between a text and the needs of a third person. So part of it is information selection, part of it is cultural awareness and a lot of it is paraphrasing and always with this awareness of the person that you are speaking to or the person that you're trying to help through the mediation. So at the moment lots and lots of teachers in Europe particularly maybe because it's a CEFR thing are trying to get their heads around how best to teach these skills or practice or facilitate these skills and to what extent we can teach them because they are going to be assessed on them.
University exams for example in Spain are taking them on board and the students in Spain have to pass their English exam in order to graduate whatever the subject is. So this is becoming something which is key to those teachers so it's interesting yeah. So maybe we can start off with teachers mediating the course book.
A common time that I see teachers need to do this is when they're localising the materials. I mean for example I was observing a class recently which was about food and the teacher was sort of trying to find this balance between teaching these very sort of generalised quote-unquote western foods like pizzas and hamburgers and also helping students be able to express themselves about the common foods that they eat every day. There's obviously I think a problem with both of those in that in terms of those western foods if students don't eat those very often then what is the point in actually learning the words for foods that you don't eat and equally with those foods that you do eat very often there might not actually even be words for those in English depending on what country or culture you're from.
So I think there's loads of stuff in there isn't there. First of all is that elementary students have to learn these lists of vocabulary that as you say when exactly are they going to need to use those in a conversation with someone who doesn't speak their L1 and even when do you talk about food. There's definitely kind of this generic thing of ordering in a restaurant fine and you could probably think well that might be outside of it's going to be outside of your context if you're ordering in English so it's going to be in another country.
Wouldn't it make much more sense if we just kind of said okay well this is a fish dish, this is a meat dish, this has got cheese in it or whatever and go right down to the nitty-gritty of how exactly will the students use or could the students use or would be useful to them. Then there's the coursebook trope explaining one of your local dishes to a visitor but then again I go to a restaurant maybe where the menu is in Spanish with a visitor who doesn't speak Spanish and I'm doing a lot of mediating of that menu if we think of it from a mediation point of view is so the students will need the vocabulary from their own culture to be able to mediate something which is in their language for someone who doesn't speak their language so being able to work with mediation tasks very simple mediation tasks would give us an excuse stroke reason to be teaching that vocabulary. We have to try to open up to students adding their own vocabulary so an elementary coursebook that I worked on for example we had elementary so let's say it was the food unit you'd have the food map and then one of the activities would be now add three items to each type of food which you eat locally and then they had to say if they liked it or not so that's when you get your local vocabulary coming in and maybe if you're going to go into a mediation situation that's the vocabulary that's going to be important so they're going to need to say parsley and garlic in Spain at A1 and you know that's not an on an A1 vocabulary list anywhere but that's far more important than teaching them pizza which they already know so I think the problem is that in that case the teacher does have to mediate the vocabulary and get the students to add in what's relevant for them.
Yeah I think it makes a lot of sense Kerry that those skills are recognized I think that anyone who can speak two languages has probably experienced similar situations before where they need to translate something or they need to interpret and unfortunately I think it's taken about 50 years or so for our profession to get out from under this cloud of grammar translation to realize that although grammar translation might not have been a great way to help people learn to speak new languages that doesn't mean that it's not useful to include interpretation or translation in the classroom. Yeah and even that thing you mentioned there of taking a wordy or jargon filled letter from a bank and getting students to rewrite it you can see that as being a sort of a useful maybe rehearsal task for the real world but that's also a useful way of getting students to practice very clear writing that's able to be understood by as wide a number of people as possible. It's definitely opening a door for kind of plurilingual skills to be recognized in the classroom and that it's a strength the whole idea of being able to take something in your own language and then represent it clearly in another language but I think what's happening with materials a lot is that they're taking more of the mediating a text route because then it can all be in English you don't have to bring in another language because I guess the majority of teaching situations teacher and students share the same L1 there's no problem at all but it also makes the mediation less real whereas if you have a situation where you have the teacher doesn't speak or doesn't have a good command of the student's L1 suddenly the mediation task is real because they have to mediate something for the teacher so that becomes interesting and in a multicultural class likewise it kind of becomes yeah well that's what we do all the time actually we've been doing that for years you know so so yeah it's an interesting new twist on valuing the L1 and the ability to code switch I guess as well.
I really agree with the importance of students being able to code switch for a long time I think language teaching tended to compare students to monolingual native speakers but those translation or mediation tasks that you mentioned those really do take into account the amazing things that people who can speak two languages can do that monolingual native speakers can't. Related to this I remember seeing Jason Anderson demonstrate a great activity a few years ago where he mentioned a story that was in the news and asked everyone to look this up on a news website either in their first language or in a language that wasn't English and then afterwards got everyone to discuss and compare what they read with the other people in the group and everyone had had slightly different input on this because they were reading it in different languages. Yeah yeah so that was a pure mediation task yeah.
I think he called that a trans-language jigsaw. Yeah yeah yeah because the trans-languaging is also a term that's kind of becoming a little bit more mainstream as well so there's this whole movement which has been I would say for the last 10 years the there's been a lot of shift in ground on the use of L1 in the classroom. It's interesting and I think refreshing.
So in terms of that bringing L1 into the classroom then what what are some benefits of bringing that into the teaching process beyond just translation or interpretation? As you say there's been a real I think about turn in how L1 is used in the classroom now but I still don't see it as being something that's used that much in course books at least not books that I've used. Well you can use very simple kind of contrastive analysis questions in grammar presentation. So you know do you use the same form in your language? Does this form exist in your language? How is this different in your language? How would you say this in your language? Notice the differences.
It's obviously easier if you know that you're writing for a particular language market. So for example if we're talking about textbooks for schools very often they're either written specifically for a country or they're versioned. So something that you see is there may be you know common errors for Spanish speakers for example, common errors for Portuguese speakers, common errors for Japanese speakers is something that's added on as an extra layer.
So then there will be either on the page a box which changes according to the market or a section in the back of the book. The simplest and easiest way is just to have that question of how do you say this in your language? Is it the same? Is there anything different? What do you notice? And just simply having that having a noticing question. But as I say if you know what language the students have as an L1 then you can target the contrastive analysis because you know sometimes there's no point asking the question it's the same.
And then you go like this is where I really want you to translate because this is where you'll notice that it's completely different. So you might take something very very very simple like adjectives for romance speakers which come after the noun but in English they're before the noun. So if you have a contrastive analysis you can just say in your language does the adjective come before or after the noun? And they kind of go oh yeah okay hadn't thought about that.
The obvious and natural place for us is for it to come afterwards but in English it comes before. And then that hook is obviously going to help them. Having that in the book is lovely.
I mean it's obviously as teachers we can add that in. But it is pretty easy for the materials to just include the question which says now translate this into your language. Kerry thank you so much for coming on.
You obviously have multiple presences online. Where would you direct listeners to go for them to find out more about you? So there's the ELT Footprint Facebook group. There's the blog which has lots of links and ideas and resources.
You need to look for ELT Footprint. Brilliant. Well thank you very much for joining us Kerry and thank you everyone for listening.