Activities for Mediation: Building bridges in the ELT classroom
By Riccardo Chiappini and Ethan Mansur
DELTA Publishing, 2021
ISBN: 978-3-12-501744-3
I will at the very beginning admit that when I first received the emailed offer to review this title I thought it contained a typo and should have read ‘meditation’.
When I queried this with a colleague who is much less of an ELT dinosaur than me, she informed me that like ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘mediation’ was what she called a ‘buzzword’; then she asked if I knew what that meant. I’m glad to say I did, but before I opened my copy I still thought I was going to be reading about settling legal disputes and so on.
Things improved somewhat when I worked through the lengthy, rather technical introduction. I noted that while COVID was occupying most busy minds a couple of years ago, the Council of Europe had once again been at work. By constantly whittling away at its well-known framework of reference (CEFR) it had established mediation as a key concept in language use, and by extension, language learning.
A closer reading of the introduction reveals that mediation has in fact been around in less nuanced Council of Europe statements since 2001 but only slowly caught the eye of a small number of ELT practitioners. This eventually led to the CEFR establishing a new set of ‘can do’ statements in 2014.
The resource book under review here covers the three categories of mediation: based on texts, concepts and communication. Most tasks within are for learners at level B1 and above, although several are for those at A1 and A2.
Mediating a text involves, among other things, explaining data, translating and note taking. Common classroom tasks to develop such skills include information gap and jigsaw activities. In contrast, mediating concepts requires collaboration and group work in which the focus is on the process rather than the product.
Tasks enabling the development of this skill include producing a poster or writing a report. Mediating communication is related more to the layman’s understanding of the term as it covers, among other things, acting as an intermediary in informal situations with friends and colleagues. Page 12 reveals a chart put together by the Council of Europe in 2020 that outlines the above in great detail.
The authors point out how barriers to communication, such as linguistic, cultural, semantic or technical may be broken down by simply providing more information, and that mediation can be intra-linguistic or cross linguistic.
Thankfully, the introduction ends with these erudite thoughts and moves swiftly onto strategies to enable mediation development; these are listed on page 16 and then explained individually in detail. Among them are the higher-level skills of paraphrasing and translating.
By far the longest section in this title deals with mediating texts. This firstly provides tasks working with data and notes, such as ‘Gaming Galore’ (page 52) in which learners have to select data from an infographic about playing video games and include these in an essay for a magazine.
Within this section, I personally felt those concerning translation were of most interest. ‘Celebrations around the World’ (page 91) requires language learners to provide a written account in English of a short talk they gave earlier in their L1.
Mediating concepts includes an interesting group work task which involves summarising and explaining. In ‘First Day at Work’ (page 140), participants roleplay a work situation where a manager briefs new employees on what is required of them on day one in a new job.
An eye-catching task among those dealing with mediating communication includes ‘Host Family Meeting’ (page 169) concerning facilitating cultural space by summarising socio-cultural elements relating to food and meal times with a host family. Sounds fun!
At first I had my doubts about the relevance and value of this title. As I worked through it, however, I gradually realised the importance of developing skills in all three categories of mediation, and am sure this term will increasingly permeate many a language teaching syllabus. Please take a look at this title and let me know your thoughts.
