APAC - Alex Warren: Finding your Voice – Incorporating linguistic mediation into your everyday teaching

 APAC ELT CONVENTION 2022

This year’s APAC ELT convention took place online between the 3rd – 5th February. EIM teacher Lisa summarised a talk she particularly enjoyed.

Alex Warren (NGL)

Finding your Voice – Incorporating linguistic mediation into your everyday teaching

The plenary session given by Alex Warren (NGL) in the recent APAC ELT convention was interesting, informative, and refreshingly interactive. His talk, ‘Finding your voice – Incorporating linguistic mediation into your everyday teaching’, introduced the concept of ‘linguistic mediation’ as part of the communicative classroom and explored how educators can create and incorporate mediation tasks using existing content from coursebooks.

@APAC_ELT & @elt_alex

The talk addressed using textbook tasks, in this case written, and creating mediation tasks which focus on who is mediating, to whom and why. An example used was taking a typical jigsaw task - ‘Student A and student B each read your texts and tell your partner what you read’ – and changing it to ‘Read your texts (about inspiring people) and use the information to make suggestions to a friend who has been asked to give a presentation about an inspiring person and is having trouble thinking of someone. The task asks the student to make suggestions based on the article, share key details and give a personal opinion.

@APAC_ELT & @elt_alex

Changing the task from a classic information gap activity to a ‘mediation task’ makes it more creative, personalised, interactive, collaborative and also helps to build rapport. Alex illustrated how taking existing content and incorporating mediation tasks combines reception, production, and interaction to make language learning more authentic and creative, and thus, more memorable. Certainly, many educators have been using ‘linguistic mediation’ for years, but perhaps weren’t aware that there was a term for it, and hopefully will be more aware in the future of how to incorporate linguistic mediation into their lessons. 

Lisa McConnell is an EFL teacher at the EIM. She holds a BA from U.N.M. and the Cambridge Delta. She’s from Alaska and has lived and taught English for many years in France and Spain. She is interested in neuroplasticity in language acquisition.

https://www.eim.ub.edu/en/delta/