It’s been quite a while now since teachers like you and me started reading and talking about linguistic mediation. In the last two years, we have attended numerous conferences, seminars, and webinars, and I’m pretty sure most of you have taken part in teacher training sessions to learn all things related to linguistic mediation in the CEFR and its Companion Volume.
And it was no doubt, a necessary part of the process to introduce linguistic mediation into our classrooms, into our exams, and into our lives.
It’s been two years now. Wow, doesn’t that sound like a long time? And still, we are beginning to understand the methodological change that mediation implies. It opens the door ever more widely to integrated skills, a methodological approach to foreign language teaching that has been knocking on our doors for some time now. Integrated skills just for classroom practice, though. Not yet for the evaluation process, or at least not just right now; as Adolfo Sánchez Cuadrado @Sanchezc_Adolfo put it a couple of weeks ago in his interesting training session on linguistic mediation and its evaluation at EOI Zaragoza Nº1,
«Integrated skills are likely to become part of our certification exams, but in the future future. It is not something we are about to see happening any time soon»
What’s more, linguistic mediation also opens the door to a thousand types of real-life interactions and situations that were, until rather recently, totally relegated to what happens outside the modern language classroom, but that were encountered by our students on a more and more regular basis, as our societies grow increasingly multicultural and plurilingual.
So it is a great opportunity to actually help our students build part of their language practice around their real needs, complementing what we have already been doing well for so long.
In fact, linguistic mediation is not about turning everything upside down, but about adding up an enriching way of approaching language interactions that really matches what happens in real life, all around us, seven days a week. (360º – 24/7).
And this is why The Way Experience comes across as an innovative practical approach to linguistic mediation, making it easier for teachers and students to make the most of its practice in the classroom, developing the right strategies and microskills and at the same time allowing contents that characterize the level they’re preparing for to really soak in.
On The Way Experience website, you will find guided worksheets to tackle this practical approach to linguistic mediation from all angles and perspectives, worksheets with all types of mediation types and modes. Mediation lessons for classroom practice, for exam training, for group work, and for students’ projects to involve your class in the design and development of their own mediation tasks.
So this is how you become a great mediator and how you best prepare your students. Now, the question is, are you going to become a happier teacher right now, or are you going to wait much longer?
Welcome to The Way Experience, the website where Linguistic Mediation is celebrated, explored, practised, analysed and enjoyed by both teachers and students all around the world.
