Learning English through the Cultural Interface
A task based approach to learning English in UK

Upper secondary adult
Roy Boardman, Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale, St Peter's English Language Centre, Naples

Cultural interface is the meeting between people of different cultures, where 'people' includes their social, recreational, family and occupational activities, their beliefs and values, their past, their present, and their future aspirations. In other words, the whole person in the context of their predominant, or usual, external environment.

Two people meeting - where 'meeting' may be of any duration from brief encounter to life-long friendship - involves a complex set of interactional strategies which partly, but by no means exclusively, find their expression in words, spoken or/and written.

It is essential, at all times, to remember this partially-linguistic nature of interactional strategies since it is one of the features which distinguish cultural-interface methodology from any language-learning/teaching methodology practised in the classroom, the self-access centre, or the home, none of which can be equipped with the real-world activities and environments of other people, with the unpredictability of real-world events, and which exclude the non-learning/non-teaching character of authentic interface.

Cultural interface goes on out in the real world, without the inevitable (if comforting) constraints of the classroom. It is authentic when it occurs without a conscious learning/teaching purpose, and therefore without the assistance of a teacher. It is an experience, such as chatting with people of other cultures in the interval of a theatrical performance, from which the language component is not, at the time of the experience, in any way separated. It has non-linguistic purposes (feeling comfortable in the company of the people nearby) and outcomes (getting to know the people so that they become either acquaintances or friends, people to remember, people who can be phoned).

Since it is widely considered that experiences of this kind do, however, facilitate foreign-language learning, it is worth investigating and exploiting its potential. We need a language-learning methodology of cultural interface.

The MURAL Project, which has been designed by the CAMPANIA ELT Association and which operates on the basis of such a methodology, makes the cultural-interface experience (staying in the UK for periods of time ranging from one week to one month) an English-learning experience. The methodology is called structured full immersion .

'Full immersion' here has nothing to do with intensive courses or courses in which the participant's L1 is never used; it is full immersion as diving into the deep end of a swimming-pool is full immersion, that is, total involvement in the tasks to be carried out (if you don't swim, you drown). It is, simply, staying in the UK, meeting people whose mother tongue is English, and becoming totally involved in 'English things'. MURAL participants stay, not in a school, not with a host family, but in a YMCA hostel where it is nobody's primary purpose to learn English, but everybody's to do things in the UK. The YMCA might be in the centre of London, in Bath (the MURAL pilot centres) or in one of any other of the 30 localities available. It depends what series of activities the participant chooses, whether s/he wishes to be in a large town or in the countryside, whether s/he already knows some parts of the UK or not.

This full immersion is structured in two ways in order to transform a simple 'stay' into a rich English-learning experience.

1) The participant structures her/his stay on the basis of a range of tasks, that is, focus activities such as going to the theatre, choosing somewhere to eat, having a walk in the park, visiting a museum - basically, the kind of activity that would anyway be part of a tourist's repertoire. So far, fifty tasks have been prepared for participants to choose from. Each task takes the participant through five stages:
- situation,
- preparation,
- activity,
- follow-up
- and feed-back.

Those familiar with task-based learning will recognise this cycle. Participants may carry out the tasks individually or together with a friend or two. They speak English, think English, do things in English, whether alone or in a group because without doing so the task outcomes cannot be accomplished.

2) The organisation which has designed the MURAL Project, CAMPANIA ELT, structures the participant's involvement in four phases.

PHASE 1: Briefing. The participant/group of participants spends two hours with an English cultural-interface specialist to learn how to carry out the tasks, and with an Italian member of staff who explains the logistics and deals with any practical queries. Phase 1 sometimes takes the form of a short course in dealing with exposure to often-incomprehensible input and setting up language communication situations.

PHASE 2: Stay in UK. The participant stays at her/his chosen UK locality, selects from and carries out the tasks, invents others, and collects material and information that will be of value in Phase 3.

PHASE 3: De-briefing. The participant/group of participants spends two hours with an English cultural-interface specialist to give an account of the UK stay, report on the tasks carried out, discuss both linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of the experience, using written, photographic and other records s/he has been encouraged by the tasks themselves to keep. An audio-recording of significant parts of the de-briefing is made. The whole of this, a kind of 'mosaic outcome', is the participant's personal 'mural' recording, in visual, spoken, written form, her/his unique experience.

PHASE 4: Analysis and advice. The audio recording made at the de-briefing is analysed in relation to the participant's learning objectives, and advice for future learning pathways is given. For example, one of the project's pilot-stage participants, 17-year-old Dalila, decided on the basis of her MURAL experience in London that she wished to study for IELTS in order to apply for the London School of Fashion.

The MURAL Project operates for 365 days a year. It is not a summer study-tour, but the application of a language-learning methodology requiring the participant's full commitment and understanding of her/his own learning style/strategies. At the same time, it is proving itself to be an extremely effective and enjoyable way of making the necessary move from classroom learning to real-world use, while obviating any need to attend a school, so radically reducing the expense; an important consideration in South Italy.

At the same time, Phase 4 provides a great deal of data for the further development of a methodology of cultural interface, which will continue to be fed into the briefing stage of the project.

Individuals or groups interested in participating or in discussing the project are invited to contact CAMPANIA ELT/St Peter's ELC on 081/683468 or at muralBCCI@email.it.