My culture and your culture by Eva Szabo

Role-playing family matters in Baku

A truly memorable session which I love to think back to (since I enjoyed it so much and I learnt so much from it) was the one about effective speaking activities. The idea came from Krzysztof when one evening we were discussing news from home, and a Skype chat with my daughter seemed to be a good starting point for next day’s speaking activity.

At the beginning of the session I told my group about Skyping with my family the night before, and explained how difficult it was to see my teenage children going out more and more and coming home late at night, to pick them up after parties, to organize lifts among families to make sure that our children are safe after dark, and to accept that after a while they simply refuse to be picked up by parents and want to return home on their own. I could see that my story engaged the teachers some of whom were also parents or were planning to have a family. Another thing which I already noticed at the very beginning of the course and which made all my stories interesting was their curiosity towards anything related to my country, my culture, and my life in general. 

Slide 2 

And then it was over to them: I asked them how teenagers in Azerbaijan would behave in a similar situation and what sort of decisions they can make as they are growing up. To make it even more specific I used a situation of a 15-year old boy who starts coming home late, and I asked the teachers how conflicts like this are handled in the families (slide 2, above). The question and the situation triggered a really heated discussion – the teachers were eager to tell me about how their culture is different from mine, sometimes all speaking at the same time, disagreeing with each other over some details and trying to convince the others about their point. I was just sitting there listening to them, asking back or trying to clarify issues, and I have to say that it was one of the best cultural learning situations I have ever been part of.

I would have liked to continue it much longer, but we needed to come back to our point, so we stepped out from the discussion and looked at it from a methodological perspective. We identified some important features that made it a good activity, such as there was a real information gap and a desire to exchange information thanks to the genuine interest in the topic on both sides, and that the situation was realistic, and everyone spoke a lot.

Slide 3

The next task was to turn the topic of our discussion into a role-play activity. I showed the teachers a role card of a similar situation (slide 3, above), 

Slide 4

they listed some useful phrases to use in the role-play and compared with the ones on slide 4, and they acted out the situation. It was so much fun to listen to them! Finally, they designed their own role-play, prepared the role-cards and displayed them on a poster (slides 5 and 6). 

                                                                                                                             Slide 5

Slide 6

I would say that the whole session went really well, but the most rewarding for me was to experience the teachers’ interest in my story and their enthusiasm for sharing theirs with me. I felt like someone who is given a warm welcome in a new world, is shown around by really friendly hosts and makes plenty of new discoveries.  Many thanks again for the experience! I look forward to having more of these in the future.


[Here are some photos of the work that participants created.]