IATEFL 2019. Language Teaching to Make a Difference: Soft Skills in Action!

Do you aspire, as any passionate teacher, to offer a transformative learning experience? But how can you make a difference in your students’ lives?

You can shape their future through the early development of transferable life-oriented soft skills.

The present article develops the insights of my talk selected to be presented at the international conference IATEFL Liverpool in 2019.

I hope that reading this article will encourage you to start your own IATEFL journey.

Why should you attend this incredible event? First, it is an amazing meeting place for passionate educators worldwide; furthermore, it gives you a plethora of opportunities to GET INSPIRED and inspire. To learn how to empower your students and peers.

Last but not least, personally, for me, IATEFL 2019 was an unforgettable learning adventure in an incredibly vibrant city. I have collected indelible memories from Liverpool, home of the Beatles, culture, and impressive historic buildings, to name just a few.

The so-called ‘soft skills’ or ‘transversal skills’ (Malik, Suhandi, Permanasari 2017) mostly spark researchers’ interest in higher education. With a lack of pedagogical frameworks for young learners, there is a critical need for tools and teaching materials. Ultimately, these would help educators change the preconceived ideas of soft skills as extra skills, not teachable, not measurable, not significant.

This IATEFL talk aims to examine why should language teachers develop soft skills in primary and lower-secondary classes. Furthermore, I will deconstruct how any teacher can achieve this goal. First, I will outline the theoretical background behind the latest ELT trends supporting soft skills (social and emotional learning, neuro-cognitive science, whole brain teaching, etc.).The talk will then explore the best practices to embed soft skills into daily language teaching. Mainly, it will focus on critical and creative thinking, communication and negotiation, and work ethics. Participants will take home a range of practical activities and tools that can help them enhance both language and soft skills.

Finally, my IATEFL talk will illustrate some meaningful and practical learning activities designed according to the core principles of INSPIRE framework, a didactic tool I designed to check the integration of soft skills into language classes by blending social and emotional learning with real-life tasks and language aims.

Nobody denies that today soft skills are critical abilities sought by employers and vital for our students’ success in life.

However, the need for soft skills is not only connected with employability. It intersects different discourses (economic, social, educational discourses) and different perspectives (the global, national, and personal ones) (Cinque 2016).

Undeniably, we all acknowledge this as a reality. Yet, how many of us use specific strategies and tools to integrate these skills into our daily language lessons? If so, how effectively if they are considered difficult to be measured? Do we assume that soft skills are an automatic byproduct of language learning? If so, do they need to be explicitly taught?

So, join us on a quick journey to better understand some important aspects. What are soft skills? Why do they truly matter? And how to bring them into the English language classroom with younger pupils?

Certainly, people may filter perceptions of hard and soft skills through a gendered-based approach.

For instance, they can relate them to the relationship between masculinity and femininity. Undeniably, the typical mentality views softness as inherently feminine and hardness as innately masculine.

However, leaving aside these stereotypes, almost all teachers and educators admit the critical importance of soft skills today. Yet, they do not take systematic action in this sense.

Generally, the employer’s discourse is rooted in the common complaint that university graduates, regardless of their level of expertise, often lack basic communication and soft skills (Organ 2017).

The top ten soft skills sought by employers are communication, making decisions, showing commitment, flexibility, time management, leadership skills, creativity, problem-solving skills, collaboration, and being able to work under pressure.

An insight into the literature on soft skills reveals that teachers understand the critical importance of soft skills. However, they complain about the lack of time to develop these so-called life skills at the expense of teaching content (Macianskiene 2016).

We can’t deny that sometimes it turns out to be quite a challenging journey to navigate through our heavily loaded syllabus. We get lost in a daily race to tick all the teaching goals on our agenda to produce the expected outcomes and hard skills for exams.

Firstly, these types of engaging activities challenge students to use the target language while solving a problem integrated into a meaningful, real-life situation.

Additionally, task-based activities bring added value benefits in soft skills development since they trigger creative and critical thinking and result in team building, to mention just a few.

Undoubtedly, the most widely used tool to develop soft skills is to set up mock interviews and workplace situations.

These involve ethical issues and dilemmas. Furthermore, these tasks create the opportunity of providing feedback to colleagues. For instance, trying to manage a conflict between two employees requires the student to implement their interpersonal skills and critical thinking.

It is known to be one of the best ways to develop students’ public speaking skills.

Furthermore, it also enhances a wide range of micro soft skills. For instance, information management skills (ability/skill to learn, search and process relevant information), critical thinking, and self-management skills (increased awareness and control of their emotions, self-discipline, resistance to stress, etc.).

These generic strategies prove to be useful and appealing to students. However, they do not help us if we tend to postpone applying them. So, how can we check that our activities incorporate life skills along with language ones?

To find a solution to this problem, I designed a soft skills checker tool (INSPIRE) (see video below), very easy to remember.  Actually, it is a useful didactic tool designed to check the integration of soft skills into language classes.

Whenever I create an activity, apart from checking language goals, I use this tool to quickly assess if I incorporated soft skills. To sum up, I simply ask questions and provide concrete evidence, as you can see in the video below.

I managed to do it by using specific collaborative rubrics, such as Cambridge Framework collaboration Can-Do Statements for the specific level, exercises to promote collaborative problem solving (The Thinker’s Toolkit by Morgan Jones).

For more details, click on the gallery to see the slides from the IATEFL  presentation.

A very effective way is to design activities that challenge learners to express empathy using the language structures in a specific real-life situation.

To clarify, let me illustrate how I exploit the principles behind the approach presented in the figure above. For instance, let’s say my language aim is to develop house and environment-related vocabulary.

So, what can I do to consolidate this topic vocabulary and, at the same time, develop empathy, and critical and creative thinking?

Well, I love challenging my younger learners to solve the following task:

“Imagine that your favourite cartoon character (Mickey Mouse) got homeless after a natural disaster. Work in teams and help him rebuild the house and present it!”

INSPIRE  can be taken to another level by giving them the chance to make a real difference in the world with their language knowledge while developing empathy. Why not exploit the potential of digital apps and vocabulary games with social impact? I will illustrate here with an app designed to develop empathy and sensitivity to global issues like poverty, and hunger.

For example, I challenged my intermediate students to use a fun and award-winning educational app, supported by the United Nations World Food Programme, Freerice. For each correct answer, this app offers them the chance to donate 10 grains of rice to children from underdeveloped countries. Thus, they feel empowered in their mission to help reach zero hunger and make a difference in other children’s lives.

Most importantly, students feel successful and happy after completing these activities. How can I explain my students’ level of excitement and enhanced confidence? Well, by the fact that they were not only capable of achieving the language aims but also because they proved they could contribute to making someone’s life better!

I also experimented with and applied the principles behind INSPIRE approach with video-based learning.

For example, I encouraged my 6th graders to watch for a week a selection of short clips. These were about the morning routine of famous successful people from various walks of life (royalty, sportspeople, actors, inventors and humanitarians, young leaders).

After that, they had to create a video tutorial with morning routine tips promoted by those inspiring people. Additionally, they had to show the way it affected their lifestyle. You can find more interesting details about my approach to student-produced videos.

In a nutshell, this is how I try to articulate my teaching approach, how I strive to enhance my language classes with aims for real-life and personal development, and how I strive to design life-changing lessons with lasting impact.

We hope that these suggestions can help you design interesting activities that integrate soft skills!

Feel free to share with us your own strategies and tools! What do you do to ensure that you integrate soft skills and use language teaching to make a difference in your students’ life?

Happy teaching and don’t forget to add value, create, teach…to inspire and transform lives!