Breaking the invisible wall
Instructions
Task 2 explores EAP students' plurilingual identity
This is a warm-up to activate students' schemata about their plurilingual/pluricultural identity. Students are not expected to have a correct answer for these questions. Some thoughts are in the next slide.
Suggested time: 5 minutes
Go over the 3 topics with students. You may ask them if these answers confirm what they had in mind. You might want to ensure that students understand that a plurilingual person in NOT a polyglot. In fact, even if people know very few words in another language or another dialect this indicates they are plurilingual.
Suggested time: 5 minutes
Encourage your students to reflect about the languages and cultures they have learned so far (even if partial or limited knowledge). It is also important to get them to think about languages and cultures they want to learn in the future.
Suggested time: 2 minutes
This task is aimed at getting students to reflect on the many languages/dialects and cultures they know (even if knowledge is very limited). It also allows them to be creative when drawing and placing the languages/cultures.
Suggested time: 10 minutes
If you feel students find it challenging to understand the task, you may want to show this slide with a few examples. You can also do this task along with students and show your “Plurilingual identity." Students typically enjoy learning more about teachers.
Suggested time: 2 minutes
Get students to work in groups of 3 or 4. Give each one about 2 minutes to share their stories. This can be more of a conversation than monologue delivery so others are welcome to ask questions during students' delivery.
Suggested time: 10 minutes
Ask the 2 questions to the whole class and have them share a few thoughts.
Suggested time: 5 minutes
This is the end of task 2. For a copy of this task, download the PDF document below.