The Teaching Tapestry TEFL

We all know how important it is to display clear aims and goals at the beginning of our classes. In addition to this, as suggested by David Byrne and Mark Heffernan in their introduction to their new MET column “On Reflection”, and following the approach adopted by the school I work for, I always try to relate these goals to students’ personal lives, including when teaching writing. The way I do this is by asking simple questions, such as: Have you ever written this type of text? When? When and why do people write these types of texts? In which settings? How can this type of text be useful to you?

Cue one of the most common writing tasks for Intermediate level students: the informal email to a friend. As most readers will know, the target texts for Intermediate writing classes tend to vary across a range of different types: short essays, reviews, and of course emails. And here’s where things get sticky. Every time I have to teach this oh-so-loved topic, I’m always internally rolling my eyes knowing I have to try and spin it in a way that makes it somehow relatable to students. And at times, students will ask back when did I last write an email to a friend, leading me to candidly state that yeah, no, I don’t remember. 

And it’s not just me. I’m sure most readers will relate to this feeling to some extent. In my school, the moaning consensus in the staff room is that teaching informal emails to friends is at best a mere exercise. And with good reason: I’m ready to bet that most of us won’t have written an email to know how friends have been, to ask for advice, or to know about their weekend plans for at least 10 years. 2007 it’s long gone (unfortunately!).

Of course, it’s not like we don’t write informal emails in English anymore. We actually do all the time – we just don’t write them to our friends. Most of us will write and receive informal emails in professional settings or when dealing with companies, providers, and so on. Let’s face it: in this day and age, most of us will use some form of instant messaging or arrange a video call regardless of how far the person lives or when the last time we talked was. Why, then, do syllabi keep teaching ways to write informal emails to friends?

Why emails?

Email and letter writing is a skill that has long been at the core of communicative language teaching. There are a good few reasons for this: we want to provide students with relevant, real-life language skills that they can use to produce real texts in real-life contexts. Email writing ticks all of these boxes: we often write emails in real life in a variety of different contexts, and there are a number of specific linguistic and pragmatic skills that are involved in email writing. In particular, informal emails tend to have a specific type of register due to what Baron (2000) calls the speech/writing line, which he claims is much thinner than in more formal types of writing. Informal emails also aim to teach other important pragmatic competence points, such as recognising and adapting a casual register, using contractions and engaging in a conversational tone in writing. All of these skills are still extremely valuable for students. In particular, readers will surely know that recognizing and being able to adopt the correct register and tone to a situation is one of the most complex skills for students to master.

Plus, informal emails are inherently easy to integrate in a classroom and inherently teachable. They’re a self-contained text of medium length which can be easily modeled and adapted to various contexts, making teaching and assessment for content, structure, coherence, cohesion, and language quite straightforward. I haven’t found any research so far, but my impression is that it’s hard to think of a similar task where we can assess learners’ pragmatic competence and informal writing skills in the context of talking to a friend.

The type of text that has replaced informal emails, instant messaging, would require us to step away from the way writing is commonly taught, which would in turn be much trickier to implement in an exam context. Informal emails aim to teach very similar types of writing skills, language and pragmatic competences without forcing us to adopt new or unorthodox approaches. 

However, even in the light of these reasons, the point raised by my students’ question still stands. Informal emails to friends are just not relevant anymore. They’re not something most people can relate to, or a type of text that they use. By still teaching them and presenting them as relevant, we are doing students a disservice. 

A task that is not relevant will be viewed by students as an “exercise” for the sake of the exercise, which goes against the idea of authenticity and removes communicative purpose. Ultimately, it’s a missed learning opportunity. 

What can we do?

The way I see it, there are two main directions of travel here: one is working on the text, the other one is working on the context.  

The first approach consists of introducing alternative writing tasks based on more relevant types of text, such as instant messaging and texting. As I’ve previously mentioned, this involves a number of challenges, and it is definitely more time-consuming for busy language teachers. Some books do have writing classes on the language of texting (one of my favourites is this lesson from NGL life Intermediate), but the setting is still quite artificial and struggles to reproduce the actual dynamics of texting or instant messaging, such as short messages and quick replies. I am currently working on developing a writing class on this topic so watch this space. 

A quicker fix to this problem is following the second approach, which is adapting the context of pre-existing writing materials on informal email writing so that it matches students’ real-life experiences. As we previously discussed, arguably, the most common setting for informal email writing today are work emails with colleagues or external companies.  

Let’s take as an example this writing task from the latest edition of a popular NGL coursebook:

Instead of writing to an old friend asking how they are, give the option to change the topic and make it about writing to a colleague working in another branch or department (for example), writing to a professor or teacher from a previous course or class, or writing to someone we know from a company we have dealt with in the past (e.g. our accountant, our property manager etc.). This type of setting will be much more relevant while still assessing very similar skills and competences, including functional language. 

Two things are important to notice here: first, there is a reason why I said “give the option to”. Despite the fact that most people don’t, it’s hard to make blanket statements on whether students actually write informal emails. In addition, some students might still want to practice informal email writing to a friend since this is an extremely common exam task. Giving them the option to do so takes little away from relevant practice, and having them autonomously choose this type of task puts them front and centre of their learning rather than pushing an artificial narrative where informal emails to friends are a-critically presented as a given. 

Secondly, many of these classes include some type of grammar or functional language point. When changing the context, it’s important to make sure these language points are still included in the task and assessment. For example, in our task above, the lesson plan included teaching phrases to refer to previous conversations, such as “the last time we spoke”. When preparing an alternative task, make sure to design it in a way that the language aims are as close as possible to the original task. For example:

Write an informal email to a colleague from another department. They emailed you a few weeks back, but you’ve been busy and couldn’t respond. Think about:

• Why you couldn’t respond to their email. 
• The situation you were both in last time you talked, and their request to you.
• Your situation with work at the moment.
• Questions you want to ask your colleague.

This is an example of how the task can be adapted to a more relevant setting while still teaching and assessing the same language points as the original task. Additionally, presenting different options for informal emails can be a springboard for active reflection. In some cultures, work emails are quite formal and it might be unusual to send informal emails to colleagues or professors. These tasks can be used to make students reflect on the fact that in English people tend to use an informal tone to appear friendly, even when talking to colleagues or managers (depending on the situation, of course)!  Highlight how it’s important to keep a fairly formal tone when unsure, but avoid sounding too formal which can be awkward.

These are, of course, only some of the ways these tasks can be adapted. Most teachers will have their own way of approaching this, and there is no one better suited to make (informed!) decisions for your own classes than you!

To wrap up, informal emails are not dead, but the context in which they are written is very different from the way many coursebooks and exams still present them. New types of tasks involving instant messaging and social media will certainly emerge and I am currently working on one myself, which I will present in a future article. In the meantime, however, considering alternative contexts that mirror how we actually interact today can do the trick – and make informal emails relevant again.