Of course in a class of 50 students it’s impossible for everyone to have equal opportunities to come up and interact with the remote volunteer. The graph above shows that the increase in enjoyment wasn’t dependent on having interacted a lot with me - it happened for nearly everyone. In fact the students who interacted more than 10 times with me over the whole period were the only ones who actually went down in enjoyment. Maybe you can have too much of a good thing?! :-) 

We think that these results are really exciting and have implications for other contexts around the world too. We’d really like to know what you think of course as well. Please leave a comment below. And if you think you’d like to do something similar in a large class that you teach too then please get in touch and we’ll try to arrange it.

Some of our most recent blog posts have focussed on the kinds of activities we’ve done in the ‘Interculturalising the coursebook’ sessions with large classes in Gaza. You can read more about this here and here and here.

But many of our readers will know that we’ve also been researching the impact of doing these sessions on a number of different areas.

The first thing we looked at was test scores. The 200 boys and girls in the experimental groups and the 200 boys and girls in the control groups took two English tests, administered and created by their schools. The first test was the mid semester test and it happened immediately before the students started doing Hands up sessions. The second test happened right at the end of the intervention, after almost 2 months of doing weekly online link ups.

The theme of this unit (friendship and talking about feelings) has the potential of course to be highly personalized, with students taking part in speaking and writing activities related to their own lives. However, there are actually very few suggested activities in the coursebook which do so, and even those that are personalized seem rather unnatural and contrived to practice particular areas of language, rather than aiming to foster genuine communication.

This is Ella. She’s 11 years old and lives with her mum in Torquay, England by the sea. She likes music, animals, baking and writing. She’ll be starting secondary school in September and would like to be a photographer or a journalist when she grows up.

On Saturday, with her mum, she came along to our stall on Totnes High Street when we were reading out poems by Palestinian children. She was so impressed that she decided to go home and write her own poem as a kind of response. And here it is…. Thank you Ella!

The Hands Up Project recently announced the winners of the Remote Theatre Competition, a major event in the lives of teachers and young people from Palestine and around the world.

This year's competition was based on a set of short, one-act plays that explore social and political issues. The plays were taken from the recently published book "Doing Remote Theatre" by Nick Bilbrough. This book is a collection of more than 20 plays that were written specifically for remote performance by some of the most respected names in literature, theater, and English language teaching. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for inspiring and engaging plays that can be performed remotely.

As with the previous unit, the theme is potentially interesting and engaging for young people, and you would expect the opportunities for intercultural dialogue in our online link-ups to be very good. This potential was made even greater by the fact that the three weeks that we worked with this material were exactly when the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was happening and many of the young people in Palestine, as well as the teachers and me, were watching it avidly. Throughout the whole period there was lots of unplanned chat around who was doing well in the World Cup and which teams students wanted to win.

We were fortunate having this unit as a starting point for our weekly online zoom link-ups. It seemed very universal in its theme but also to have the potential for some interesting cross-cultural dialogue, since what is considered healthy isn’t entirely the same amongst different communities around the world. The unit aims to teach vocabulary related to healthy or unhealthy diet and activities, as well as structures for giving advice (You’d better, Why don’t you, etc.) plus the present perfect continuous tense for repeated recent actions.

English for Palestine, like most localised coursebooks all over the world, facilitates learning with familiar and easily accessible content. It’s also organised using broadly communicative principles and includes speaking tasks which are designed not only to activate specific areas of language but also to link these areas of language to the learners’ own lives through personalisation.

A governmental school for teenagers in Gaza must surely be one of the most challenging places on Earth to teach English. Imagine working in an extremely cramped classroom (50 students to a class), with very limited resources, trying to teach English to young people who, almost without exception, have never left the tiny piece of land that is the Gaza strip, have very little hope of ever leaving, and have never had a real opportunity to use the English they are learning in any kind of meaningful way with someone from another country.

For our poetry competition we’d like to invite young people all over the world to handwrite a poem of maximum fifty words which is inspired by one of these two paintings. We want you to write it by hand and also decorate the piece of paper in any way that you would like to. See for example how Angela from Spain has decorated her poem which was the winner of a competition we ran in 2020.