Cross-Cultural Liaisons in Language Teaching

Teachers from Kostroma, Russia, visit Durham County

The International Office of Durham County Council (DCC) organizes regular, annual exchange visits to Durham of school teachers of foreign languages from various European countries (Spain, Germany, Russia, etc.). The aim is to maintain international contacts among language teachers, to facilitate transnational discussion of the challenges and opportunities of the profession, as well as to share expertise and experience in teaching foreign languages to schoolchildren of different ages.

During the exchange visit of school teachers of English from Kostroma (Durham’s twin-city in Russia) in November 2017, the Cross-Language Dynamics project collaborated with DCC in the running of two supportive events: a pre-visit introduction to Russian language and culture in one of the local schools hosting the visiting Kostroma teachers; and a round table discussion on the problem of intercultural education in different national contexts, with the participation of visiting teachers, Durham University staff and students, as well as some interested representatives of Durham County’s local community. A similar round table (.pdf) was then also organized in November 2018.

‘Welcome to Russia’: An Introduction for Primary School children

These sessions were offered to hosting schools as preparation for the visits of teachers from abroad. They were designed to raise the children’s cultural awareness and cross-cultural interest. On 10 November 2017, we organised a series of four sessions, introducing life in Russia to pupils in Years 2 and 3 at St Margaret’s Curch of England Primary School in Durham. Each session lasted 25-30 minutes and provided basic information about Russia, the Russian language, and Kostroma as an example of a Russian city.

We started with basic facts about Russia that pupils were likely to know already – its size and location, popular cities and cultural associations. We then proceeded to the concept of time zones: by doing simple arithmetic calculations, children were asked to guess what their peers in Moscow, Irkutsk or Vladivostok were doing at that moment. We went on to discuss the Russian climate, as most of the children mentioned the cold Russian winters, but few had heard about its hot summers. This included a conversation about the Russian children’s most common activities in each season, establishing parallels with the pupils’ own experiences. By introducing a range of characteristically ‘Russian’ objects (such as Russian nested dolls, a samovar, a balalaika, a traditional brick stove), connections were again made with the children’s own material culture (for example, many of the pupils had Russian dolls at home and identified them easily). The session concluded by introducing pupils to the Russian alphabet, inviting children to make connections with letters or symbols that they were already familiar with. For example, when presented with the Russian letter Ж (pronounced zh), one child identified it as two K’s back to back; another associated it with a beetle making a buzzing sound; yet another was reminded of the Union Jack.

Children were then introduced to customary ways of greeting visitors in Russia, as well as how to say ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’ in Russian (some of which was already familiar to some of the children who had learned about this in cross-cultural training sessions that their school already provides). They also learnt some of the key facts about Kostroma as the place from where their guest teacher came. The final task for the children was to prepare to ask the visiting teacher to tell them the story of ‘The Empress’s Fan’ - a well-known local legend from Kostroma about how Catherine the Great used her fan to instruct the city’s builders how to design its layout.

During this short introduction, the children with no or little prior knowledge of Russian culture or language learnt some basic facts about the country, made parallels with their Russian peers’ interests, found Russian objects around them, studied basic vocabulary, decoded the alphabet, and learned about the place of origin of the visiting teacher.

Intercultural Education in Russian Schools: Roundtable Discussion

On 14 November 2017, the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University, in collaboration with DCC, hosted a roundtable discussion on the specificities of intercultural education and foreign-language teachers’ professional experiences in Russian schools. The group of visiting teachers from Kostroma were invited as key participants of the discussion facilitated by Dr Polina Kliuchnikova. The event gathered a diverse audience of teaching faculty and current students of MLAC, other visiting foreign-language teachers from Germany and Spain, DCC staff, and active members of the local community who hosted the international visitors.

One of the main issues that concerned both visiting teachers from different environments and local educators was the assessment of the virtues and drawbacks of, on the one hand, the more conservative, traditionalist, textbook-based, teaching methods and, on the other, the modern, interactive, communication-based and student-oriented, paradigm of language provision. There were supporters and opponents of both strategies in the room, and the question of whether one needed a ‘course book’ for language teaching, especially at primary and secondary school level, was addressed repeatedly, both in personal reminiscences of language learning and through accounts of professional teaching practice.

Another key question that was addressed was the nature of language teaching in the contemporary digital age, which required teachers to develop new ways of guiding their pupils’ language learning trajectories. While this problem was highlighted by a number of speakers, no clear framework of working with the new 'digital generations' of schoolchildren was proposed. The role of the teacher as a 'cross-cultural mediator' was introduced by the Russian visitors in their opening observations on the teaching styles of their Durham colleagues; this then became one of the recurrent topics in the discussion. The status of the native speaker as promoter of a given language and the related language-based culture, was seen as providing clear benefits. Another point of general concern was the imbalance of foreign languages taught to schoolchildren worldwide: whereas English was dominant across all school levels in practically every country, the lack of variety in languages on offer was seen as misshaping children’s understanding of global cultural and linguistic diversity.

Thus the round table raised a number of essential issues of intercultural education worldwide, opening up dialogue between practicing teachers of foreign languages from different cultural and educational backgrounds. The event was followed by a reception that helped strengthen contact among the participants through less formal discussion and further networking.

Following the success of this event, a similar round table (.pdf) was then organized the following year, on 1 November 2018.