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Project For Intercultural Awareness And CommunicationsThe telecommunications project developed by Ntambi Baker of Uganda and James Backer of Israel aims to improve the students’ intercultural awareness and their use of English skills. Introductory messages between the two classes have indicated a lack of general knowledge on both sides.
To structure the work of the classes, the project will entail the creation of two "A Day in the Life" stories. Each class will write a story about a typical student in the other class, including information about the student’s country, family, home, school, hobbies, etc. In order to do this, each class will have to research the other’s country (on-line and off-line) and present a long list of questions to the other class. The information gathered by the students will be then incorporated in to the story of "A Day in the Life". The other class will then comment on the story and the comments will be incorporated. The final draft, with pictures, will be presented as a webpage.
Since both schools will be working with only one computer connected to the Internet, the format will be "the open pool" system of class-to-class correspondence. In this format each student writes a message to either a particular student or to all the students in the other class. The teacher collects his student’s messages and sends them as a batch. The second teacher, receives the batch of messages and gives the entire batch to all the students to read and consider. The teacher might give questions to encourage all the students to read all the messages. Then the students write a new message, answering any questions directed to them personally. This process continues throughout the year.
In the terminology of Stephen Krashen, this is an ideal situation where a small amount of student output brings a large amount of "comprehensible input" which is necessary for the further acquisition of language. Michael Long and Theresa Pica have refined Krashen’s concepts of "comprehensible input" by focusing on interaction and negotiation of meaning within that interaction. The proposed project indeed offers an opportunity for receiving large amounts of comprehensible input via negotiated interaction.
Mengo Senior School (Kampala, Uganda)
Ntambi BakerHar V'gai Regional School (Kibbutz Dafna, Israel)
Jummy Backer