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In this presentation, I shared my impressions of living as a foreigner in Russia and working as a member of faculty at a Russian university. In it, I first shared relevant details of higher education in the United States which helped to shape the context within which I garnered my understanding of the the nature of higher education and how I defined it.

Then, I shared some of the things I noticed about higher education in Russia which I found particularly interesting and which also led to a series of “culture bumps” with my students and colleagues.

Finally, I detailed a series of adjustments I made after my first semester which helped me to better fit in to the system of which I was now a part.

Here is the link to a presentation I wrote about the history and culture of Alabama, my native state. I gave it first at the Arkhangelsk American Corner in April, 2011.

Format: Workshop

Time: 45 minutes

Title: “Register, Face and Email: A Writing Lesson for the Electronic Generation”

Target Students: Intermediate to advanced

One of the most important skills our students learn is how to use language differently in different situations and with different people. Speeches are not like telephone conversations. Essays are not like newspaper articles. And an email written to a friend is not like an email written to a professor.

The way in which we use language is the most important and effective tool we have for establishing the nature of our relationships with others. Strategies of deference and respect look very different from those of solidarity and intimacy. Our use of language is how we maintain our identity and membership in different discourse groups. It is also how we get what we want from others, whether they be our friends, our bosses or our teachers. Thus, in order to be successful communicators, our students need practice using these strategies.

In this workshop, teachers will review the concept of face negotiation and the two major strategies we use when establishing and maintaining our relationships with others. Then, teachers will examine and practice a lesson in which students explore the type of language used in electronic communication, after which they will draft and then send different types of email messages to various recipients.

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Format: Workshop
Time: 45 minutes
Title: “Negotiating Face and Making Requests: Speech Changes and Imposition”
Target Students: Intermediate to advanced

One of the most important skills our students learn is how to use language differently in different situations and with different people. Speeches are not like telephone conversations. Essays are not like newspaper articles. And an email written to a friend is not like an email written to a professor.

The way in which we use language is the most important and effective tool we have for establishing the nature of our relationships with others. Strategies of deference and respect look very different from those of solidarity and intimacy. Our use of language is how we maintain our identity and membership in different discourse groups. It is also how we get what we want from others, whether they be our friends, our bosses or our teachers. Thus, in order to be successful communicators, our students need practice using these strategies.

In this workshop, teachers will review the concept of face negotiation and the two major strategies we use when establishing and maintaining our relationships with others. Then, teachers will examine and practice a lesson in which students explore the type of language used when making requests from. How does the way we use language change when the request is of greater or lesser imposition? Why does this happen and what is its relationship to the overall study of discourse and culture?

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Format: Workshop/Plenary
Time: 45 minutes
Title: “On NOT Teaching Culture: Giving Students Tools for a Future without Borders”
Target Students: Intermediate to advanced, any age group

When teaching “culture,” many EFL teachers focus on the simple academic learning of various traditions, rules of behavior and values of one or more groups of people. In this workshop, we will explore reasons why this is an insufficient method for preparing non-native speakers of English for a future in which the chances students will interact with native speakers of English will continue to shrink.

Firstly, the word “culture” has become less and less useful, since it is a mostly abstract notion that allows little room for the enormous diversity within even small groups of people who would claim to be members of the same culture.

It is perhaps more useful to look at interaction between peoples of different backgrounds as interdiscourse communication, since it can be said that two people who grew up in the same neighborhood, but have entirely different groups of friends and colleagues, may have a very hard time communicating with each other.

In addition, we now live in a world where there are more non-native speakers of English than native speakers, where English as an international language is growing more and more relevant. Thus, our students’ opportunities for conversing with non-native speakers will be drastically higher in the future.

Thus, I propose that students be given a basic notion of the need for simple awareness that all people come to every interaction with often very different expectations. In addition, students should be made aware of the various ranges of possibilities for such expectations, including those of personal space, face-saving, eye contact, solidarity, deference and topic introduction.

In this workshop, we will explore these concepts and practice some activities designed for intermediate to advanced students of English to develop their skills of intercultural communication.

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Format: Workshop
Time: 45 minutes
Title: “Fun with Prosody: Creative Explorations of Intonation in English”
Target Students: Low-intermediate to advanced, any age group

Much of our communication involves the successful interpretation of intonation. Often, a listener who is a non-native speaker may understand every word of an utterance, but still misunderstands it because of a lack of understanding of the target language’s prosodic patterns of intonation. Such “tone contour” can add stress to syllables, words or phrases as a means of expressing conversation or discourse cohesion and reference to shared knowledge.

For example, when a teacher asks a student, “Have you finished your homework?” and the student answers, “Yes, I finished my homework” (with stress on the word “my”), the student is communicating something very different than he would be if he had placed the stress differently.

I argue that this is an essential aspect of English and that our students should have the opportunity to learn and practice prosody in our classroom. In this workshop, I will discuss various forms of prosodic intonation and offer arguments for their inclusion in our lessons. Then, I will share several approaches and activities to teaching this skill to our students so that they can begin to grasp the potentially very complex system of intonation in English.

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This week in my two intercultural communication classes at my university, I taught students about prosody, or intonation and timing, in spoken discourse. I have found that many of the skills of intonation and timing are similar between Russians and Americans, with only a few exceptions. This would make adjustment for non-native speakers not as difficult as it might be, for example, for someone from India or Bangladesh who is learning Russian or English. So this is good.

Still, this is something all teachers of English need to be aware of, since it is a very important, but not-so-salient, part of the way we communicate. We use pauses in different ways to show that we are think (cognitive), to show that we want someone else to speak (interactive) and to show that we want brief feedback from our listener(s) (backchannel). In our native languages, we can identify these without even thinking. Indeed, we often are completely unaware that we even have this skill.

In addition, there are several ways for listeners to show that they are interested in the what the speaker has to say, and they are all culture-specific. For example, many westerners would say that maintaining eye contact is very important for showing interest. But this is not true for everyone. In fact, eye contact can be seen by some as a sign of rudeness.

I taught two classes on this same topic this past Monday. For the first, there were fewer students. I had prepared several situations in which students were asked to act out a hypothetical conversation and act in a certain way. For example, one student was given a sheet of paper that asked him to describe something that happened to him that day. They other student was given instructions on how to respond and show interest. The students did not know what was written on each other’s papers. I thought that the activity went OK, but it did not elicit much natural speech, and students tended not to talk very much at all.

So, for the next group, I changed the lesson a bit. Instead of asking students to speak in created dialogs, I asked them to create a new culture with totally new ways to show pauses and also new ways to show your listener that you are interested. This went much better, since the students, in their groups, used more English as they prepared their ideas, and also enjoyed demonstrating their new forms.

In addition to getting students to practice their English, this lesson also exposed students to the concept of pauses and timing with the hope that they will pay closer attention to the ways in which they themselves use such skills of discourse to communicate with others. Since these are all future teachers, such awareness will be invaluable to them.