Level: Upper Beginner, Lower Intermediate, and above
Time required: 15–30 minutes
Goals: To ask and answer small-talk questions about weekend activities
Materials: Chalk and blackboard, or markers and whiteboard; strips of paper with weekend activities written on them (see Preparation section for details)
Overview: This activity is a kind of mingle. In a mingle, students move individually from classmate to classmate, usually with a question to ask or specific information to find. After talking to each other long enough to complete the task, the two students move on to other classmates and repeat the process.
Although mingles can be noisy and sometimes look disorganized, they typically have a specific language focus. In this activity, students practice asking classmates about their weekend activities. As they move from classmate to classmate, they use the targeted language structure over and over. At the same time, they also need to listen to their classmates’ replies so they can react and respond appropriately.

Preparation:
1. Create a list of activities that people might do on a weekend. The activities do not have to be realistic! Use your imagination to think of activities that would be fun for your students to talk about. For ideas, refer to the Weekend Activities list.

Weekend Activities

Please feel free to adapt these activities to your teaching context. For example, you can change “I lost five dollars” and “I found five dollars” so that they mention your local currency. You can complete “I met _____” with the name of a popular singer or other celebrity whom students would be excited to meet. You can complete “I cooked _____” with an interesting kind of food, and “I went to ____” with the name of a place that your students like to visit. You can add your own activity ideas to the list as well, as appropriate for your students: I flew in a helicopter. I sang on TV. I smiled a lot. I ran a marathon. I bought a new car. Making the activities interesting will help students enjoy talking about them with their classmates.
Instead of strips of paper with the activities written on them, you can use photos showing weekend activities. See Variations near the end of the article for suggestions.

2. Cut the activities list into small strips of paper, with one activity on each strip. You should prepare one strip for each student in your class. If you have a large class, make more than one set of activity strips and plan to divide your class into groups; prepare a set of strips for each group. The number of students in each group should not be more than the number of activity strips you have. In other words, if you have 15 activity strips, you should not have more than 15 students in any of the groups.

3. Prepare two extra strips of paper to use if you want to demonstrate the activity to the class. One slip could say, “I visited some friends.” The other slip could say, “I went to a birthday party.”

Procedures:
1. Tell students that they will do an activity that gives them a chance to ask about each other’s weekend activities. Say, “You will talk to many of your classmates. But first, we will practice the question and answers you will use.”

2. Begin creating the How Was Your Weekend? chart by writing the question, “How was your weekend?” on the board. Tell students that this is a question people often ask when they see their friends on Monday—or whichever day follows the weekend. Tell students that people usually give a short greeting before asking this question: “Hi, [Name]. How was your weekend?” Tell students, “This is a friendly question. When people ask, ‘How was your weekend?’ they do not expect long answers.”

3. Tell students, “Usually, people answer this question with short answers. They tell about one thing they did, or one thing that happened, over the weekend.” Explain that people often answer this question with one or two sentences. The first sentence describes the weekend in general: It was great. The second sentence gives more detail: I went to a birthday party. Or My cousins came to visit.

4. On the board, continue developing the How Was Your Weekend? chart by writing possible responses to the question. If the weekend was good, people often say, “It was great/exciting/wonderful.” You can ask students to suggest other words they could use in the sentence. If the weekend was not really good, but not bad either, people might say, “It was so-so.”
If the weekend was not so good, people respond by saying, “It was boring/pretty bad/terrible.” However, since the question “How was your weekend?” is part of a friendly exchange, people usually respond with a friendly answer focusing on something good that happened.

5. Tell students that now the person who asked, “How was your weekend?” must respond. If the other person had a good weekend, the questioner can answer with one of these sentences:

• “That sounds like fun.”
• “That sounds nice!”
• “Lucky you!”

If the other person’s weekend was so-so or not very good, the questioner can say,

• “That’s too bad.”
• “I’m sorry to hear that.”

How Was Your Weekend?

Note: Other responses are possible. You can ask your students to contribute suggestions.

6. Tell students they will get a chance to practice this question and these answers—but for this activity, they will not talk about what they really did over the weekend; instead, they will choose a piece of paper with an activity written on it. Hold up a slip of paper and say, “I know this is not what you really did over the weekend. But for the next ten minutes, we will pretend that this is what you did.”

7. Model an example of a conversation for the class. Choose a student to be your partner. Give the student the slip of paper that says, “I went to a birthday party.” Keep the slip of paper that says, “I visited some friends.” Hold up your paper and tell the class, “My piece of paper says, ‘I visited some friends.’” Ask your student/partner to read his or her slip to the class. Then model the conversation.

With Upper Beginner students, the conversation might go something like this:
YOU: Hi, [Student’s name]! How was your weekend?
STUDENT: It was great. I went to a birthday party.
YOU: That sounds like fun!
Have the student continue the conversation by asking you about your weekend:
STUDENT: How was your weekend?
YOU: It was fun. I visited some friends.
STUDENT: That sounds great!
The immediate goal should be for students to (a) ask the question, (b) answer appropriately, and (c) react with an appropriate response.
(For a longer model conversation you can use with students at the Lower Intermediate level and above, see Extensions near the end of this article.)

8. Divide students into groups, if necessary.

9. Make sure everyone understands the activity. Tell students, “Everyone will get a piece of paper. Read the activity on the paper silently. Decide how you will answer the question, ‘How was your weekend?’ when your classmates ask you.”

10. Hand out the strips of paper to students. Give one set of activity strips to each group. Students should not look at the strips before choosing one. Add interest by putting the strips in a box or bowl and have students close their eyes when they pick their strips. They should read the activity on the slip to themselves, but they shouldn’t tell anyone else yet what the slip says.

11. Start the activity. Tell students to stand up. Then say, “When I say, ‘Begin,’ find a partner. Ask each other about your weekends. When you finish your conversation, find a new partner and have another conversation about your weekends. Keep talking to different people in your group and finding out what they did over the weekend!” Then say, “Begin!”

12. Stop the activity when students have had a chance to talk to most of the people in their group but before everyone has finished; you don’t want them to be bored.

13. Bring the whole class together. If you like, you can have a few students ask other students about their weekend activities. Encourage anyone in the class to ask follow-up questions.

You and the class can demonstrate the use and importance of follow-up questions like this: Suppose that when a student named Marie is asked about her weekend, she says, “It was great. I saw two movies.” Write “I saw two movies” on the board, and then ask the class, “What would you like to ask Marie about the movies?” Students might ask, “What movies did you see?” or “Where did you see them?” or “Who did you see them with?” or “Did you like them?” (Students at lower levels might simply ask, “What?” or “Where?” That’s fine; they are expressing their curiosity.) You can write these questions on the board if you want; you can also have Marie give pretend answers.

Do the same thing with other activities—write the student’s activity on the board, then elicit follow-up questions that students naturally want to ask about that activity. This is a good chance to bring students’ attention to the use of question words and an opportunity for students to engage further in natural communication.

Extensions
Lower Intermediate students
With students at the Lower Intermediate level and above, you can have them extend the conversation. The conversation should include the following parts:
(a) greet the partner
(b) ask the question
(c) answer appropriately
(d) react with an appropriate response
(e) transition to the second partner asking the question and the first partner responding
(f) take leave (say good-bye)
Students might also be able to ask follow-up questions about each other’s weekend activity.
A model conversation might be something like this:
STUDENT A: Hi, [Student B’s name]! How was your weekend?
STUDENT B: It was great. I went to a birthday party.
STUDENT A: That sounds like fun!
At this point, you can elicit possible follow-up questions from the class if you want. Suggestions include “Whose birthday was it?” and “What did you do at the party?” Otherwise, the conversation continues:
STUDENT B: Yes, it was. What about you? How was your weekend?
STUDENT A: It was good, too. I visited some friends.
STUDENT B: That sounds like fun.
Again, you could elicit follow-up questions from the class. Suggestions include “Where do your friends live?” and “What did you and your friends do?” Otherwise, the conversation could continue:
STUDENT A: Yes, it was.
STUDENT B: Well, I have to go now. Nice seeing you!
STUDENT A: Bye.
You could elicit other things that friends might say when they part after a small-talk conversation. Suggestions include “See you,” “See you later,” “Take care,” and “Have a good one.” (“Have a good one” is a less formal way of saying, “Have a good day.”)

Future classes
The following Monday—or in the next class you have after a weekend—repeat the mingle, but this time have students ask one another about what they really did over the weekend. Or let your students make up their own “pretend” activities.
After a break or vacation, students can mingle again and ask, “How was your break?” or “How was your vacation?”

Variations
1. You can conduct this mingle using photos. Instead of preparing strips of paper, prepare photos showing possible weekend activities. The photos might show people swimming, camping, cooking, having a picnic, etc. In class, you might have to review the related vocabulary with the class and introduce new words as needed. Then distribute the photos to students. They will have to find a way to describe the activity (using the past tense)—so there is additional language practice involved when you use photos.
If you have a large class and not enough photos for everyone, that’s not a problem. Suppose you have 45 students but only 15 photos. Simply ask students to get together in mini-groups of three, and give each mini-group one photo. Together, the three students discuss the language they can use to talk about the activity shown in their photo. Then ask students in each mini-group to pick a color: red, blue, or yellow. Form three larger groups: the red group, the blue group, and the yellow group. After that, the “How Was Your Weekend?” mingle can begin, with each group having its own mingle.

2. When you use mingles, sometimes you can vary the activity by having students exchange strips of paper after their conversation. That is, Student A and Student B have a conversation based on the strips of paper they chose, but when they finish their conversation, Student A takes Student B’s slip of paper, and Student B takes Student A’s. Then they find new partners. Each person will then have a new activity to talk about in his or her next conversation. Students keep exchanging strips of paper throughout the activity; they may get the same slip of paper two or three times! But exchanging the strips of paper in this way gives students a chance to talk about different activities—and use different language—instead of giving the same answer and describing the same activity to everyone they meet. (On the other hand, keeping the same slip of paper and giving the same answer in each conversation could increase students’ confidence as the activity progresses.)

Scaffolding
1. You might want to explain to students that the first person asks, “How was your weekend?” in a normal questioning tone, but when the second person asks the same question back, he or she will stress the word your: “How was your weekend?” The same kind of stress is used in the shorter question “How are you?” A person who is asked this question will often respond by saying, “I am fine, thank you. How are you?”

2. Students ought to know that they should ask, “How was your weekend?” to people they already know after not seeing them over the weekend. It would not be an appropriate question to ask someone they have never met before.

3. People often say “Thanks” or “Thank you” when they respond to the question “How was your weekend?” For example, they might say, “It was great; thank you!” or “It was fantastic; thanks!” Feel free to incorporate “Thanks” or “Thank you” into the chart and your model conversation if you want.

BIODATA:
This activity was written by Tom Glass, Assistant Editor of English Teaching Forum.

Before becoming a teacher of English to speakers of other languages, I taught French, and too often I saw that impersonal grammar exercises about “Jacques” and “Nathalie” were meaningless to the students. Worse, those exercises led to apathy and stagnation. So I decided to do grammar activities in which students used each other’s names, instead of random ones, and used the grammar to express ideas about their own lives. I hoped that instead of grammar being impersonal and meaningless, it would become a tool to help students get to know one another better. Now, I incorporate group grammar techniques into my lesson whenever possible. In the following activity, I describe ways to use group grammar effectively. In this activity, students practice using the target grammar to do something they naturally enjoy: learning about each other.

What did you do over the weekend?
This activity is done after teaching the simple past. Sometimes, I do it on a Monday as an icebreaker to reengage the students after a long weekend. It is a way to review and practice the simple past, but mainly, it is a way for students to learn more about each other, each other’s weekend activities, and even the local community.

First, I tell students to silently write down four to six activities they did over the weekend, using the simple past tense to reply to the question “What did you do over the weekend?” I give them about three minutes to do this. If they have trouble remembering their weekend, I tell them to think chronologically, starting with Friday evening all the way to Sunday night, and list the activities in order. I remind them that no weekend activity is too boring to report. To model this, I give them an example from my own not-so-exciting weekend: “Friday, I went grocery shopping and made a stew. Saturday, I stayed in bed until noon because I graded papers until two in the morning the night before.”

While students are writing their sentences, I circulate around the room to offer help with vocabulary. I let the students know that they can also ask classmates for help or consult their dictionaries.

When they have finished writing their sentences, I put students into groups. I tell them they must work together to make a master list of all the activities the group members did over the weekend. I tell students that there are two important rules:

1. Do not repeat any simple past verb; each verb can be used only once.
2. You must include the name of each group member an equal number of times.

I give them a specific amount of time to compile their group list, say five or six minutes. Group members will need to decide which group member will write the sentences for the group. The master list may look something like this:

     Patricia played tennis.
     Akmed saw a great movie.
     Taki made sushi for his friends.
     Sylvie had a headache.
     Patricia ate a burrito.
     Akmed did his homework.
     Taki wrote an essay for his English class.
    Sylvie took a walk.

   (This group would have eight correct sentences.)

To determine the winner, I simply ask the groups to read their sentences aloud while the rest of the class counts the number of correct simple past statements. Although incorrect sentences are not counted, during this time we correct them together as a class. The group with the longest list of correct sentences wins. For larger classes, you can have two or three groups get together and read their sentences, with the “listening” groups counting the number of correct sentences.

Along with giving students a chance to practice the simple past and learn about one another, this activity can help students get ideas about what activities are fun and interesting to do in their community. Some students may discover similar interests and decide later to do things together. For example, maybe Patricia learns that Akmed also loves tennis and will invite him to play a game with her. This interaction builds community in the classroom and makes learning more rewarding and fun.

Another Prompt
This activity can be modified to cover various grammar points. For example, as an icebreaker at the beginning of the term, the prompt could be “List new and unfamiliar activities you have experienced since you arrived in your host country” (or “since you started studying here” or “since the semester started”).The students’ sentences might look like this:

      Patricia has eaten a burrito.
      Akmed has seen snow for the first time.
      Taki has gone river rafting.
      Sylvie has tried zumba class.

Group grammar activities engage and motivate students because these activities put people and ideas before grammar and correctness. They also help in building a close, friendly classroom environment that includes and values everyone while giving students opportunities to use the target grammar.

BIODATA:
Karen Adams has two master’s degrees in language and education and a PhD in French. She was a 2014–2015 English Language Fellow in Leon, Mexico. She teaches at the American English Institute at the University of Oregon.

Question formation is a basic part of teaching and learning English. However, we often focus on the ability to form the question properly and not as much on the quality of the information the question is seeking. Whether teaching English language learners or students who want to be English teachers, teachers need to carefully consider the intent of questions.

If students are expected to provide simple factual information, a question such as “What kind of pet do you have?” will elicit that information. However, if you want your students to discuss their preferences for certain types of pets or the advantages and disadvantages of different pets, then another type of question must be asked to promote discussion—in other words, a discussion question. The purpose of discussion questions should be to guide and stimulate discussion, not just to acquire information.

What makes a good discussion question? A question that results in a Yes/No answer or one that elicits only factual information is not likely to promote discussion. More fruitful are open-ended questions that elicit factual information as well as opinions and differing perspectives.

Suppose your class is discussing environmental issues. One may pose the question, “Do you recycle?” The appropriate answer of “Yes” or “No” stimulates no discussion. The questioner could then add the qualifier, “Why or why not?” However, this type of add-on still may not promote much discussion, especially with lower-level or younger learners. The respondent might say, “Yes, I recycle because it’s the right thing to do.” On the other hand, consider this question: “If you were going to design a recycling public-service poster for your city, what would you focus on, and why?” With appropriate scaffolding, even upper beginners could discuss that question. For upper-level learners, a question to stimulate discussion might be, “Some cities offer refunds to people when they recycle and impose fines when people do not. What kind of incentive program do you think your city should adopt to encourage recycling?” This question gives a framework and ideas with the introductory statement and then asks the respondent to present his or her own ideas. Within a lesson that provides background information, intermediate students should also be able to discuss that question.

Why focus on discussion questions?
I realized that we do not focus on teaching English students how to develop discussion questions when I was teaching a graduate-level course in intercultural communication in Poland; the students were at B2 and C1 proficiency levels, and the course included opportunities for the students to lead small-group discussions. While most of the questions students asked were technically correct, few of their questions were effective discussion questions. For example, I overheard one student ask, “Do women in our country have equal rights?” Because these were upper-level students, this question did provoke some discussion despite not being an open-ended question. However, in most English classrooms, it would not have. I thought it would have been better to ask, “What evidence have you seen that women have equal rights in our country?” or “How has the status of women changed in our country over the past 20 years?”

To address the issue of how to develop effective discussion questions, I planned an interactive activity that required students to write questions about a topic we had just focused on; in this case, the topic was sociocultural influences on intercultural communication. After writing discussion questions, students then critiqued one another’s questions. Although I used this activity with a class of 30 students, this would also be an effective activity in larger classes because it involves small-group work.

Q/A Activity
Because of the interactivity this technique encourages, it would be appropriate for almost any type of class. The first step is to choose a topic that you would normally use and present it in whatever way fits the topic and your class. The only criterion is that the topic should be one that promotes discussion—that is, a topic on which students can express their opinions and perspectives.

Next, divide the students into an even number of groups. The ideal group size for this activity is four students. The group will have two identities: in Part 1 of the activity, they will be Group 1; in Part 2, they will be Group 2. As Group 1, students write three open-ended discussion questions about the topic the class has been studying. Once students have completed this task, they give the questions to another group (Group 2). Although I prepared a handout (see the sample at the end of this article) and gave a copy to each group, students could just as easily prepare this activity themselves using notebook paper.

As Group 2, students orally respond to the questions they received. Tell them not to write their answers, but to read the questions aloud and discuss them as they would in a small-group discussion.

Next, tell groups to write a critique of each question. Ask students:

• Did the question stimulate much discussion? Why? Why not?
• How could the question be improved to be a better discussion question?

You might want to write these questions on the board.

Then have a full-class discussion about the activity. Ask students to identify the question they thought was the best and to explain why. Ask for suggestions to improve the questions that promoted less discussion in their groups. Elicit from the students the differences between Yes/No questions and open-ended questions, along with observations about how the latter promote more discussion. Conclude by having students summarize the characteristics of effective discussion questions. You might want to list those characteristics on the board.

Conclusion
This multistep technique engages students in authentic discussion at several levels and uses a variety of language skills and functions. Because of the technique’s simplicity, it could be used with almost any age and level of student, except very young learners and beginners. To start off, students have to be familiar enough with the topic to be able to develop their questions; that may require them to read about or do research on the topic and to discuss it with classmates. Or, students can develop questions about a topic the class has recently studied.

Writing the questions will provide opportunity for discussion about how to properly phrase them. As students answer another group’s questions, they are discussing the topic again, perhaps from a different perspective than they did originally, because each group will approach the topic differently. Then, as students analyze, discuss, and write about the quality of the questions, they have to use appropriate language to explain the strengths and weaknesses of each question.

Finally, the whole-class discussion about the most effective questions and suggestions for improving weaker questions promotes speaking about the topic using relevant vocabulary; it also engages students in the functions of comparing and contrasting the various questions, making suggestions, and perhaps agreeing and disagreeing. These are all skills and functions that students at the upper-beginner level and beyond can manage and continue to develop.

Lynn W. Zimmerman, PhD, was a 2014–2015 English Language Fellow in Elbasan, Albania, where she taught at Aleksander Xhuvani University. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer and a Fulbright Scholar in Poland.
 

Q/A Activity Worksheet
Group 1: Write three open-ended questions that could be used in a discussion group. Give the list of questions to Group 2.

Group 2: Discuss the questions. Do not write your answers to the questions.

Write a critique of each question. Did the question stimulate much discussion? Why? Why not? How could the question be improved to make it a better discussion question?

It all began in Norwich. As they do every year, teachers from different parts of the world went in July 2012 to that beautiful little city in the east of England to take part in one of the two-week professional development courses offered by the Norwich Institute for Language Education (NILE). Sponsored by Rio de Janeiro’s Instituto Brasil-Estados Unidos (IBEU), I had chosen Advanced Language and Intercultural Awareness.

On the second day of the course, I—the only Brazilian participant—went with Karolina Isio-Kurpińska—the only Polish one—to a supermarket just outside the campus of the University of East Anglia, where our classes took place. We had a long talk about our respective countries and how similar and different our experiences were. During the rest of the course, we became good friends and even did our final project together. What we had gotten from that exchange would come to matter a lot very soon.

After returning from the trip, I read Intercultural Language Activities (Corbett 2010), one of the titles recommended by Uwe Pohl, our main teacher at NILE. The first chapter is about setting up an online community where students from different places interact and make discoveries about each other’s culture while practicing their English. The idea sounded fascinating; as we know, social networking programs are an effective way to get students communicating with each other (Harmer 2012), and foreign language classrooms create new cultural contexts every school term (Kramsch 1993). If I were to give it a try, I thought, it would be only logical to work once again with Karolina, who agreed the project could be interesting. We looked forward to finding out what contexts would be created in a virtual environment, where participants were to feel free to contribute their own ways of looking at themselves and each other.

This article describes the ensuing ten-week project we developed for students from the two countries, and it offers an evaluation of the results along with suggestions to make online intercultural projects a productive way to improve the teaching and learning of English.

Getting ready
Karolina and I have come to understand culture as more than a body of knowledge about works of art, places, institutions, events, symbols, and ways of living—it is also “a framework in which people live their lives and communicate shared meanings with each other” (Scarino and Liddicoat 2009, 19). That is why, as essential as reading is, no amount of it can replace actual experience and contact with what seems foreign and distant. Our main goal was to give the teenagers participating in the project something they cannot get from watching television and movies and at the same time enable them to see that learning English can be a real gateway to discovery. Most importantly, we wanted to make sure the cultural information participants shared with each other would be received “in a nonjudgmental fashion, in a way that does not place value or judgment on distinctions” between the cultures of the participants (Peterson and Coltrane 2003, 2).

By the end of 2012 we had made a few decisions:

• We would offer a ten-week project to a limited number of students at the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) intermediate level B1 (Council of Europe 2001).
• The project would take place on an exclusive Facebook group, the social network used by most students.
• Participating students would have a new task every week to share what they knew and felt about different aspects of their realities. Our view, based on Freire (1996), was that each task should stimulate students’ curiosity and allow them to independently explore the possibilities of dialogue.
• Once we posted the tasks, the students would be the only ones to write.

We then formulated a ten-week plan; teachers of both countries added ideas (in Warsaw, as Karolina was now involved in other academic activities, two of her colleagues, Krystyna Rubiec-Masalska and Agata Guzowska, were directly responsible for the participating students). On Sundays, after a brief exchange on Facebook, either Karolina or I would post the task(s) for the coming week on the group page. We would always be in complete agreement about the content and wording.

I created the Facebook group, and we selected the students who would participate. Although we limited the actual groups from each country to ten students, all who wished to be involved could participate; we assigned students who were not selected to work with the ones who were, even though only the latter would be posting on the group page.

I told all students who were interested that they had 24 hours to friend me on Facebook and send a private message indicating why they wanted to be in the project. In the following class, from among those who had sent me the message in time, I randomly drew the names of ten students. We also went over the main principles for students to observe, including modesty, politeness, sincerity, interest in the other party’s answers, and, above all, interaction.

The ten-week Rio–Warsaw Connection
The “first edition” of what we called The Rio–Warsaw Connection included students from Rio’s IBEU and Warsaw’s General High School 34–Miguel de Cervantes. Following is a description of the ten-week project in intercultural exchange.

Week One
Students were tasked to introduce themselves, talk about any cultural assumptions they had about the project, and suggest guidelines for the group to follow. At the end of the week, we summarized the following four netiquette rules:

1. All participants should post at least one comment a week in each thread, but we encourage you to post more!
2. You are all students of English, and this project is about fluency and communication, not language accuracy. Mistakes that do not influence meaning should not, therefore, be corrected. If you have doubts about what the other person means, ask him or her to clarify!
3. The use of emoticons is allowed and encouraged, and we also suggest you post photos!
4. We are here to learn about each other’s cultures, so the most important netiquette point is mutual respect!

On Friday, at the end of the week, we posted a pre-task: without doing any kind of research, students were instructed to tell what they knew about their counterparts’ cities.

Week Two
Week Two was a chance for students to talk about their cities—what they liked and disliked, and what they would recommend to visitors. As expected, all Brazilians could say about Poland is that “it’s cold,” and Polish students could think only of beaches, sunny weather, and the “giant Christ statue.” When students had the chance to share something about their cities, the teachers were pleasantly surprised by their enthusiasm. They posted pictures of places they liked, commented on each other’s posts, and spontaneously discussed food. One of the best moments in the whole ten weeks happened right then, when a Brazilian student talked about (and posted pictures of) brigadeiro, a popular local sweet, and one of the Polish girls went and made some. The moment we saw the photo she had proudly taken of the first truly Polish brigadeiro was definitely a highlight.

At this point, one of my students asked us if they could add each other as friends on Facebook. We told her that that was a great idea. Soon, almost all of them had friended one another.

Week Three
We had every reason to enter Week Three optimistically, and that taught us a lesson. The topic was national culture. We asked students to talk about how their countries are viewed by themselves and foreigners and any stereotypes they were aware of; we also asked them to describe some typical dishes, as well as any gestures and body language, that might be specific to their country. After the excitement of the first two weeks, this time few students posted. Karolina sent a message encouraging them to post, which resulted in more contributions towards the end of the week.
This first bump in the road led us to conclude that the lull had most likely been due to some fading of the initial excitement and that our direct intervention might be necessary at certain times to encourage students to participate. All tasks should be presented as exciting opportunities to share—and learn—something that matters to them. That is, of course, provided we had designed the tasks well enough.

Week Four
We were more cautious with our expectations, but things got back on track. Once again, there were two tasks. The first was for participants to share the TV shows, movies, books, and music they like, a topic they enjoyed talking about. The second task was for them to post pictures of what they see from their windows and also pictures of their desks at home. The pictures aroused everybody’s curiosity and brought everyone closer together.

Week Five
Week Five was our second low point. When asked to share which news sources they usually turn to, and what the major headlines were at that moment, students found little to say. After some encouragement, a few stories were posted, but it became clear to us that, for our teenagers, knowing what was going on in the world was not a top priority.

Week Six
In Week Six, we took a gamble. The previous Friday, again as a pre-task, we asked students to watch the 1994 U.S. movie Forrest Gump and list the various cultural and historical references they found. Then, as the week started, we asked them to imagine what Mr. Gump’s journey would have been like had he lived in the students’ respective countries. It turned out that (1) that movie was too old for most of our students to even know what it was about, and (2) they were not willing to do much research, even if that meant watching a film that was easy to find. I eventually got a few of my students to post something meaningful, but there was no denying it had been the worst week yet.

Week Seven
We went for something completely different. The first of two tasks was for students to find and post pictures of examples of “English around them” in signs, shops, and street art, and a few of them did. The second task was for them to list English words frequently used by people in their countries, even if those people were not English speakers, indicating whether the words were cognates or false cognates and whether specific groups used them. There were enough contributions for the week to be considered satisfactory. Among the examples listed by both groups were words related to computers and the Internet, along with names of foods (e.g., hot dog and cheeseburger) and the expression “Whatever,” which I presume students are using to mimic young Americans they see on TV.

Week Eight
In Week Eight, students talked about national TV shows and movies they liked. They were to post pictures and links to videos and discuss which ones they thought people from other countries would enjoy and which ones were highly culture-specific. This was another good week, with less interaction than we would have liked but with interesting examples; for instance, the Brazilians named a few comedy films and light afternoon TV shows, while the Polish students mostly mentioned dramatic, historical movies. The female students did seem to agree on their favorite male actors, though, with George Clooney and Daniel Craig being mentioned most often.

Week Nine
At the beginning of the week, I posted a short message congratulating the Polish on their National Independence Day. When my students were encouraged to follow suit, a spontaneous conversation began, and participants from both countries posted pictures and discussed how they felt about that kind of celebration.

Also in Week Nine, students discussed how much of the movie, television, and music content they were exposed to was from English-speaking countries and the heavy influence of that entertainment on their countries. Here there was some interesting sharing.

Week Ten
We asked students to talk about what lay ahead. What were their plans and expectations? How important did they think English would be in their future lives? Students produced a few long responses, and again we were happy with the result.

Finally, Karolina and I posted our reflections about the project, saying how happy we were with everything students had shared and how they had shared it. We also said the group would remain active on Facebook, so they would always be able to find each other there. At that point, all the Brazilian students who had participated got a certificate signed by the Polish teachers, and vice versa. We also sent each other’s students little souvenirs from our countries.

The second and third editions of the project
After the ten-week project, Karolina and I shared our experience on the Facebook group I had created for NILE. Two of our former NILE classmates, along with some of their students, joined in to create a second edition of the project, which was now called the The Motril [Spain]–Rio–Warsaw Connection.

We updated the plan based on what we had learned from the first experience. Now, instead of discussing the news, our students were asked to talk about their respective schools—what they liked, disliked, and would change if they could. We kept the Forrest Gump activity, but now with some real preparation time in the classroom. We watched the trailer and a couple of scenes from the movie and had a discussion about them in preparation for the task. With the support of our respective schools, the Motril–Rio–Warsaw Connection thrived.

Nevertheless, at the end of the tenth week, as I reflected on everything we had done, I realized that the participation of students had been irregular and their interaction less impressive than in the original group. Because of the difficulties in coordinating tasks among three groups and communicating among a larger number of teachers, we decided to go back to the Rio–Warsaw format. Krystyna, IBEU teacher Sandra Saito, and I made the third edition of the project similar to the first one, with some improvements based on our accumulated experience. For instance, we would no longer have more than one task per week. Also, now that we had tried “horizontal expansion” by including more students at the same level, it was time to try “vertical expansion” by including students of different levels.

We created a second group, also with Brazilian and Polish participants at both the CEFR intermediate B1 and advanced C1 levels (Council of Europe 2001). This time, we dealt with more challenging tasks, most of which were designed by Krystyna, who had been with us since the beginning. These tasks included (1) having students share their favorite songs in their native languages (sharing English versions of the lyrics with the group); (2) creating a chain story (in which participants took turns adding five to ten sentences to the same story they told collectively); and (3) posting personal messages to each other (we paired them up alphabetically). The undisputed highlight was when three of my students spontaneously made and posted a video on how to make brigadeiro. (One might think that sweet is an obsession of ours … .) Meanwhile, the intermediate students interacted a lot more than the ones in either of the first two editions. Their posts during the Forrest Gump task were particularly creative.

In the end, all three projects have enabled our students to learn things they otherwise would not have and to practice their English in a way they did not expect. We have been opening doors that lead to understanding and, as a consequence, increased tolerance.

After the third edition came to a close, I began to imagine a fourth Rio–Warsaw Connection. Some of the tasks may be rethought a bit, but the main improvement we will make is to follow our students even more closely and ensure they remain motivated and able to balance their everyday responsibilities with their participation in the project.

How you can do it
Just as I have tried to adapt this project for students of different levels, I believe that fellow teachers from around the world can do something similar with their students, even if technological resources are limited.

What we are doing is all about interculturalism, so the starting point is to get in touch with people from another country—or even another city in the same country, as we know there is typically wide cultural variety within a single nation (that is certainly true of Brazil). Facebook itself is a place to find teachers from around the globe, as are some helpful websites from Corbett (2010):

• ePals (www.epals.com)
• Tandem City (www.tandemcity.info)
• eLanguages (www.elanguages.org)
• The British Council (schoolsonline.britishcouncil.org)

As mentioned before, some students who are not selected work with ones who are. This creates opportunities for pairs and trios; even if a few are entering the posts, all can be involved. That has worked well. When talking about themselves, some students would often actively include their partners. For example, one student wrote about her favorite band, while another classmate, who had not been selected, stated her preference for a different band. Teachers may select participants any way they want, provided all see the process as fair. And it is essential that no one feels left out.

Some teachers may be working with students who simply do not have Internet access. It might still be possible to collect the group’s contributions in class, type them at the school or at some other facility, and later bring printed images of the screen to share and discuss with all participants.

At IBEU In-Service sessions, my colleagues and I discussed the notion of adapting the project for lower-level students, which would entail developing a set of simpler tasks and closer teacher supervision. It may even be necessary for the teacher to review each post before it is published. That is not ideal, but it might be advisable in some cases. Another idea is to conduct the project in a shorter time frame, perhaps five or six weeks, if the availability of teachers and students—and their time—is limited.

As far as the lesson plan itself is concerned, teachers may choose to talk about any topic they think students will be interested in. Here are a few examples:

• Bullying is a serious problem in a lot of places. Is it a problem in your school? How do people deal with it? Let’s compare the approach to this issue in the two countries.
• Let’s talk about your favorite outfits. What do you wear to school? Are uniforms required? Should they be? What about the times you go out with friends? Post a few pictures, and we’ll see how similar teen fashion is in your countries.
• We are having a great time interacting online, but is that how you normally chat with your friends? This week, let’s compare the different ways teenagers interact with classmates and relatives.
• In Week Seven, we talked about how English is all around us—in street signs and in the vocabulary we use. This week, let’s see how much each of us is in contact with the language on a day-by-day basis. When do you get to practice your English? Chatting online? Playing videogames? What are the expressions you use the most?

Sustaining student motivation is often challenging. Actions that might help include:

• making sure that tasks for successive weeks are not too similar to each other
• having the class discuss the weekly task as group work
• praising students’ contributions
• allowing students to propose the task for a given week. (That is something I plan to try in the next edition by organizing an in-class election of the best proposed task.)

There is always the possibility that students will stop posting for a while—or altogether. That is why it is a good idea to establish a few ground rules right at the participant selection stage. Is it acceptable for someone who has been selected to quit? Is there a penalty for that? Halfway through the third edition I had to replace a participant for the very first time—even after being warned and without presenting a reason, he stopped contributing. It is certainly wise to prepare for that possibility; in my case, a number of students had expressed interest in the project but had not been selected, so finding a replacement was not difficult.

Expanding student interactions
One idea that has come up over and over again to enhance interaction is to use a program like Skype to get participants from different countries to see one another. The reasons I have not used it so far are the time-zone difference and Internet connection limitations. I do think it would be exciting to have students send video messages to each other at some point. One option would be to have students record their own videos, and then their respective teachers could put them all together.

Teachers who find this intercultural project interesting might want to investigate different, deeper ways to explore the proposed topics. It is my experience that the tasks assigned each week lead to lively classroom discussions, especially when we turn them into activities that lead all students to further examine their own culture and of that of their counterparts. Here are a few examples of such activities based on tasks in the ten-week project:

• When students are asked to think of English words used by people in their countries, they can begin by carrying out small-group conversations on the differences between the slang and the specific vocabulary that they and their peers normally use and those that are characteristic of other groups. In Brazil, for example, students are very much aware of vocabulary currently used by Internet surfers, such as the word brother and variations of it to mean “friend.” How do those differences come about? Do they serve a purpose? This is an opportunity for students to reflect on why they speak the way they do. In the same task, talking about cognates and false cognates is the starting point of an activity that could go on for several classes, in which students investigate the origins of words and their relationship to history and geography.
• The task in which participants reflect on how much they know about each other’s country and on what stereotypes are commonly associated with their own country could lead to a role-playing exercise. For example, a student from Rio plays the part of a tourist from Warsaw, in the city for the first time, meeting Brazilians from various regions and walks of life. What would this tourist expect to encounter? How would the people the tourist meets behave? What aspects of local culture might be especially difficult for him or her to understand? This activity could be a lot of fun as well as an invitation for students to think critically about their own homes.
• When students learn about their counterparts’ schools, they could be asked to write an essay on what it would be like for them to suddenly find themselves as newcomers there. If students have time to do additional research, they could make a presentation to the class about what life is like for a student in the other country, focusing on what they perceive as being easier or harder than what they are used to. Students could also try to imagine what, for them, a perfect school would be like. Then the class is divided into teams, and each one does the exercise from a different perspective—that of teachers, hall monitors, cleaning staff, and so on.

These ideas are potential follow-ups to activities in the project. As the goal is to enable students to expand their horizons as much as possible, it is a good idea to help them revisit and rethink assumptions under which they might not even know they operate every day.

Conclusion

Not so long ago, we had pen pals and used actual pens and paper. We would sometimes find each other through ads in magazines and initiate a kind of correspondence in which it could take weeks to get a reply to each message. Now that technology has made instant, inexpensive communication between people on opposite sides of the earth a reality, many of us are still looking only for those who are much like ourselves. Such massive underuse of the potential that is in our students’ hands presents teachers of English with a golden opportunity to broaden their students’ horizons.

We have departed from the notion of teaching culture by simply transmitting information. We are exploring interculturality, which includes a reflection on both cultures, as both are “target cultures” at the same time, in a truly interpersonal process (Kramsch 1993). We are looking at people with whom we could not imagine what we have in common, and we are learning to identify and take apart stereotypes.

“Learning to be intercultural involves much more than just knowing about another culture: it involves learning to understand how one’s own culture shapes perceptions of oneself, of the world, and of our relationship with others” (Scarino and Liddicoat 2009, 21). What we are accomplishing with our connection is just a first step, but it might be a rather meaningful one.

References
Corbett, J. 2010. Intercultural language activities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Council of Europe. 2001. Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/Framework_EN.pdf
Freire, P. 1996. Pedagogia da autonomia: Saberes necessários à prática educativa [Pedagogy of autonomy: Knowledge necessary for educational practice]. São Paulo, Brazil: Paz e Terra.
Harmer, J. 2012. Essential teacher knowledge: Core concepts in English language teaching. Harlow, UK: Pearson.
Kramsch, C. 1993. Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peterson, E., and B. Coltrane. 2003. Culture in second language teaching. CAL Digests. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Scarino, A., and A. J. Liddicoat. 2009. Teaching and learning languages: A guide. Magill, Australia: Research Centre for Languages and Cultures, University of South Australia. www.tllg.unisa.edu.au/guide.html

BIODATA:
Hugo Dart is a teacher at IBEU (Instituto Brasil-Estados Unidos) in Rio de Janeiro. He holds bachelor’s degrees in Law and in Portuguese-English and is a postgraduate student in English Language.