People-Places-Things (P-P-T) began in 2008, with a vision of community building through language and culture.

At first we were mainly interested in teaching English to immigrants and refugees. And at first, grammar was the focus of our instruction. We worked very hard to try to create relevant, real-world activities for grammar practice. But we kept getting frustrated that our grammar activities wouldn’t fit neatly into the real world.

So we turned our focus to real-world themes. We had a pilot class in an industrial kitchen and learned some crucial lessons about situating language learning in a real-world setting:

The language that seems important is not always the language that is important
The real world contains a lot of communicative ambiguity
The difficulty of real-world tasks doesn’t match the difficulty of the language structures used to describe them
Learners are highly engaged if the learning environment is relevant to their needs
The real world is a multilevel environment – anyone can participate, and people work together to achieve goals
Spending time with people is crucial to language learning - language is a social skill
Every culture has different expectations about learning and those differences do not always fit together

One of the main reasons why people take so long to learn a language is they are often practicing unreal language, in unreal locations, in an unreal way. So instead of trying to simplify the real world to make it fit our language teaching approach, we began to use real-world artifacts and settings to practice the relevant communication.

We went from trying to explain grammar through cultural examples; to exploring culture through language practice.

The skills sets that we developed are Intercultural Communication and Cultural Navigation, which encompasses code switching, lived experience, empathy and a desire to connect across difference.

People-Places-Things

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