Alla Fridrikh, Rivne State University of the Humanities

Rationale. The topic ‘Tea Party: crossing cultural boundaries’ emerged when students of Rivne State University of the Humanities (Rivne, Ukraine) welcomed a Peace Corp volunteer from the USA. The students organized a party and invited the volunteer to “a cup of tea.” The expression is put in quotation marks as it is idiomatic in Ukraine with a pretty different meaning in comparison with English. When someone is invited to have tea in Ukraine, Ukrainians do not mean tea, but a full-price dinner. That is, everything and the best food are put on the table to welcome the guest. That is funny because there may be no tea. And in such cases, it is not about tea; tea party means hot dishes, sandwiches, and even strong drinks for adults. Therefore, the idea first arose when everyone felt the pun of the expression and lack of cross-cultural understanding despite everything being clear at first glance. The volunteer expected only tea and had lunch before that. In Ukraine, people go to tea hungry to avoid offending the hostess.

Such idiomatic expressions are excellent resources for understanding the culture and traditions as language is a message-sending communicative tool. They allow students to communicate fluently with natives and enable them to understand not only the culture and traditions but regional peculiarities of other communities. According to crossing cultural boundaries approaches (Wagner & Byram, 2017; Byram, 1997; Kramsch,1993; Zarate & Gohard, 2004), a communicative and interculturally competent person knows how to build relationships while speaking a language as well as how to communicate so that all interlocutors’ needs are addressed.

Comparing cultures is a practical focus for language teaching which allows learners to develop more sophisticated concepts of culture. The task is rather complicated, since the challenge accompanies it: a language spoken by a certain community implies a certain worldview which is not always shared by those who learned that language as a foreign one. Accordingly, intercultural communicative competence involves far more than word exchange; it is about building up relationships and communicating successfully with others.

So, the idea was to design activities in which students have to deconstruct the meaning of the idiomatic expression by doing the project about the foreign community tea party etiquette and welcoming guests. As such idiomatic expression indicates the culture of hospitality, treatment of guests, and social interactions the main approach was project-based learning to show cultural diversity through inquiry-driven tasks.

The lesson was firstly conducted for Ukrainian students. Many Ukrainian students are/were refugees due the challenging circumstances; they fled the war and are/were living in different countries all over the world. Being hosted, they had the opportunity to reach the intercultural experiences on their own. Therefore, they are aware of cultural differences and varieties of welcoming in other countries from their own life experience and feel all the complexities of intercultural understanding. Now they understand that not only knowing English as a Lingua Franca is essential for intercultural communicative competence but establishing relationships and communicating with others through cultural understanding as well. As for the background of Rivne State University of the Humanities’ students, they are mainly from the Rivne region and nearby. Most of them had never been abroad before the war. They learnt about tea party etiquette in other cultures during lessons of English via textbooks, educational panels, and internet sites before. That was the reason to try a project-based approach and an inquiry-driven lesson in particular, as they have to find out the cultural diversity and varieties through language, expressions that reflect cultural peculiarities. Such expressions complicate the foreign language learning but facilitate intercultural communicative competence.

Though the lesson was at first designed for Ukrainian students, it can be used for EFL students in other countries with some minor changes taking into account the portfolio of students.

Lesson Plan Topic: Tea Party: crossing cultural boundaries

Context: The activities promote discussions about idiomatic expressions and the role it plays in effective intercultural understanding. Engaging students in completing the project, debriefing the process, and discussing its implication activities aim to reach a more complex understanding about the culture without oversimplification.

Lesson general aim: to promote intercultural understanding in particular culture-bounded environments.

Learning objective: by the end of the lesson, relying on specialized content and tools, students would be able to approach language in a way that goes beyond the communicative competence that will allow them to develop intercultural competence. They will determine the value and impact of traditions in learning the English language.

Target audience: language learners or language teacher candidates. The lesson is appropriate for B1 - B2 levels of language proficiency in higher or secondary education settings.

Recommended Setting: blended learning. One 45-minutes class period and the second 45-minutes class period for students to share with the class their presentations done as homework.

Materials needed: a collection of materials that discuss various tea time rituals from around the world; chart paper and markers.

Activity

Think-pair-share.

Propose students to mention beverage-related (tea, coffee, other drinks) traditions. Ask students to point out tea being the choice from a collection of materials that discuss various tea time rituals from around the world (some examples of images can be used for this activity from the resources below).

The results of our lesson showed that students were not aware about white tea in England, which is tea with milk. In Ukraine milk to tea is offered to women who are feeding infants. Instead a lemon is widely added to tea in Ukraine that is very strange for Englishmen. So, no one chose milk for a “tea party”, but some pastries, honey, and lemon. Students who were in Italy at that time and spoke to natives noticed that you weren’t invited to “tea parties” there. You hardly find tea in Italy as there the culture of drinking coffee is highly-developed. Students who lived in Ukraine chose quite a different range of products for tea parties, indicating that tea party is more social interaction and national tradition of welcoming guests than a meal. Students were encouraged to discuss the differences in tea party etiquettes and the meaning of the expression “to come to a cup of tea” in Ukraine.

Match students into pairs to think and discuss orally about tea parties in their families or describe tea-related traditions with which they are familiar. Students might mention different cultures and their relationship to tea. Discuss what these traditions have in common.. They have 3 minutes to share their stories. In three minutes the student has to share about the traditions of the partner to other students. After sharing, discuss what these traditions have in common. Record similarities and differences on chart paper.

Highlight/ discuss such cultural aspects: tea party as a part of social interaction, tea traditions as a cultural component, tea party as the time to spend with friends.

Project-based task.

Each student researches tea time rituals in a country of their choice. They will present the country’s tea rituals, in particular types of food eaten, participants, period of the day, duration, the origin of the tradition. If desired, students can create visual presentations emphasizing cultural heritage, or rituals that are customary within this cultural heritage.

Ask the class to note similarities and differences among the presented traditions, making connections to the culture of the described country, social interaction, settings and so on.

The post-task activity includes solving questions: What helped you to complete the activity? How do you search for the meaning of the idiomatic expressions? Do they help you understand cultural diversity? What are their roles for intercultural communicative understanding?

Meeting the learning objective: To evaluate your students’ understanding of the importance of intercultural communication and understanding, ask questions during the debriefing such as: Why did we do this activity? What does it relate to? What have you learned by completing this activity? How important is intercultural communicative competence in your understanding? How can we reach better intercultural learning outcomes?

Final reflections:

Intercultural understanding benefits every language learner. It paves the way to deepened learning, and approaches the world from various perspectives. By showing cultural diversity of tea parties as social interaction, my students developed a more complex understanding about the culture without oversimplification. By learning our cultural diversity through learning the language, we teach students to respect each other’s differences, acknowledge that all cultural expressions are valid, and celebrate differences.

Designing the right environment for culturally responsive learning benefits intercultural learning outcomes. Inquiry-driven learning of such idiomatic expressions is a bridge to intercultural communicative understanding as they unveil intercultural aspects. They serve as a mediator between language and culture.

References

Byram, M. & G. Zarate (1997). Socio-cultural competence in language learning and teaching. Council of Europe.

Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford University Press.

Zarate, G. (2003). Identities and plurilingualism: Preconditions for the recognition of intercultural competences. In M. Byram (Ed.), Intercultural competence. Council of Europe Publishing.

Zarate, G. & A. Gohard-Radenkovic (Eds.). (2004). La reconnaissance des compétences interculturelles: de la grille à la carte. Didier FLE.

Wagner, M., & Byram, M. (2017). Intercultural citizenship. The international encyclopedia of intercultural communication, 1-6.

Learn-About-Tea.com: http://www.learn-about-tea.com/tea-resources.html