| Body | By Isabelle Sackville-West, CASLS Fellow
This activity is designed to help students engage with a target community as they simultaneously try to increase their language proficiency and social competences. It is designed help learners become aware of how their words and actions are received by expert speakers, reflect on their experiences, and make adjustments according to their needs and goals. This activity is best suited for intermediate-advanced speakers.
Learning Objectives:
Students will be able to:
- Identify felicitous language use in context
- Analyze their own language use and evaluate its effectiveness
- Identify areas for improvement and gaps in their pragmatic knowledge
Modes: Interpretive, Interpersonal
Materials: Note-taking device (journal or notebook, or attached handout)
Procedure:
- Prepare:
- First, students should identify a specific target community. This should be more specific than “French speakers” or “Chinese speakers.” Instead, they should aim for something with a narrower scope such as “Chinese-speaking World of Warcraft gamers” or “French speaking college students in cities.” For each narrower community, there will be a different set of social and linguistic norms that may vary from the theoretical “standard” variety of the target language and culture.
- Once students have identified a target group, have them think about the ways that they can engage with that group. For example, one could join a sports club, go to an event in the community, hangout at a specific café, or talk to players of a specific game.
- Prepare: Jumping right in can be nerve-wracking for some. To help learners prepare for what to expect, they should think about possible topics that the target group likes talking about or activities that they might enjoy and brainstorm language they might need to engage with them.
- Take the leap: Now that students have thought about how to engage with their target group, they must do it! The only way to improve their communication with that group is to practice.
- Interact: As learners engage with members of the community, they need to pay attention to how community members react to their use of language and other communication strategies such as the use of gestures. For example, perhaps a student tried to make a joke, but it didn’t land, or it went great!
- Document: Immediately after each interaction, learners should jot some notes in a journal paying attention to how their language, gestures, and social tendencies were received. It is especially helpful to write down specific phrases and instances that stick out to them so that they will remember what was said later.
- Reflect: Have students look back at their observations from a particular interaction or a series of interactions. They should then think about the following questions.
- What did you say/do?
- How did others react?
- How did community members interact with one another? What did they say/do?
- Overall, how did the interaction go?
- How did you feel after the interaction? Why?
- Would you say/do the same thing next time? Why or why not?
- What might you do differently next time? What might you do the same?
- What strengths do you want to keep developing?
- What are some areas for improvement and how will you go about improving them?
- Repeat:
- Now that students have reflected on their previous experience(s), it is time to try again! Have students repeat the whole process and continue to engage with the target community in new ways, observing and reflecting as they go.
- Developing social and linguistic competences is a long process and students should be prepared to experience difficulties. However, as their competences and confidence grow, they will be able to connect to community members in new and deeper ways.
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