Writing & Cross Cultural

Pen Pal Letters

I have taught ESL in the United States and South Korea.

One writing and sharing activity my American class enjoyed was writing Pen Pal Letters to a sister class in Korea.

• Setting It Up

This is the difficult part of the activity for the teacher. It takes patience:

I used an ESOL/TESOL website popular with expat language instructors in Korea called Dave's ESL Cafe.

(You can find other TESOL sites with links to other countries anywhere English education is a major focus.)

That link will take you to the Korea Teaching Forum. Sign up and post a message asking if anyone teaching your class' age group would like to set up a Pen Pal Exchange - and give them your email address. You will get several replies.

The difficult part is that foreign ESL instructors in Korea are transitory. They often stay in Korea for one year or less and at one school for only a year typically.

You'll also have to generate confidence with them that you are serious about the exchange.

One fallback idea is to photocopy each student's letter and put it in a file in case the teacher on the Korea side is not reliable. Your students will not have to rewrite an introduction letter if you have to set up an arragement with a different person.

The writing itself is easy -- Have students write a letter on notebook paper or stationary - adding any images or designs as they like.

I like to put the letters into individual envelops then put the collected envelops into a folder for overseas delivery.

Mail the letters and wait for replies...

Repeat the exercise as you and the students desire. What I try to do is encourage the students to keep up the coorespondence themselves outside of class and class grades after we have used this exercise for the first 2 letters or so.

Another benefit of setting up Pen Pal Letters with students overseas is --- you can point the "sister class" to the class blog where the foreign students can view what your students are doing week-to-week.

This gives students in your class a name and often face to think about as an audience member when they are producing material they know will be uploaded to the class blog...