Teaching Mediation Skills in the Language Classroom
Teaching Mediation Skills in the Language Classroom
Mediation asks a student to take content from one text and give a named reader what that reader actually needs, in the right language and register. It is neither translation nor summary. This page covers how to teach it in grades 9 to 12 and how to mark it fairly.
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The teaching problem
Mediation is not translation
The task looks simple and marks badly. A student gets a source, a situation and a reader, and has to decide what that reader needs. The decision is the skill; everything else is packaging. Most students never make it, because they fall back on one of two habits. Either they translate, following the source sentence by sentence until the word count runs out, or they summarize the whole thing evenly, so the one detail the reader came for ends up in the last line. Resourcing is awkward because textbooks tend to file mediation next to translation, and model answers are scarce, which leaves teachers marking it as a summary with foreign vocabulary attached. The selection criterion has to be taught on its own before any writing happens.
A sequence that works
Five lessons from selection to fluency
The sequence separates deciding from writing. Students choose content before they compose anything, and only later work on register and the phrases that make a mediated text sound like it was written for its reader.
- What the reader actually needsOne source, three different addressees. Students list five points for each and compare, discovering that most of the source is irrelevant to at least two of the readers.
- From five points to an emailThe same five points become a short email with a greeting, a reason for writing and a close. Content is fixed, so all the attention goes to structure.
- Register: formal, neutral, casualStudents rewrite three sentences at three levels and identify which words carry the shift. Contractions, phrasal verbs and modal choice do most of the work here.
- Explaining what has no equivalentCulture-bound terms, school systems, job titles and legal words that do not map across. Students practice the one-line gloss rather than leaving a term untranslated.
- Timed mediation with the mark schemeA full task under exam conditions, then a lesson where partners mark each other with the same grid: content points covered, task fulfilled, language accurate.
Where it goes wrong
Marking mediation without marking translation
Score three things separately and say so on the sheet. Content points: did the required information reach the reader? Task fulfillment: right medium, right register, right addressee, sensible length. Language: accuracy and range in the target language. Kept apart, these stop a fluent student who ignored the brief from outscoring a careful one who did the job asked. The recurring errors are predictable enough to plan for. Source word order survives into the target sentence. Idioms come across literally. The greeting and sign-off vanish. Personal opinion appears in a task that never asked for one. Length runs to double the limit, usually because nothing was left out. Treat omissions as decisions, not gaps, when the reader did not need them.
What's in the download
Inside the files
Editable Word and PowerPoint plus print-ready PDFs, with answer keys throughout.
- Mediation tasks with full scenarios
- Model answers at two levels
- Register and phrase bank sheets
- Marking grid with worked example
- Editable Word and PowerPoint files
- Peer assessment sheets
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
Does this only work in a bilingual or foreign language classroom?
The classic task assumes a source in one language and an answer in another, and the material is written that way. It also runs monolingual with one change: keep the source in English and shift the register and reader instead, moving a technical notice into a message for a parent, or a formal report into an announcement for students. The selection and task-fulfillment skills are identical; only the language transfer is missing.
How is this different from teaching summary writing?
A summary is judged against the source: did you represent it faithfully and in proportion? A mediation is judged against a reader: did that person get what they came for? The difference changes what counts as a good answer. Leaving out two thirds of a text can be correct in mediation and wrong in a summary. Students with a lot of summary practice usually need the first lesson twice before it sticks.
Can I use it if my students have never met the task type?
Yes, and that is roughly the assumption behind lesson one. Nothing in the first two lessons requires prior exposure, since the scenarios do the explaining. What helps is a class that can already write a paragraph in the target language without heavy support, because mediation adds a decision layer on top of composition. For weaker groups, run lessons one and two, then repeat lesson two with a new scenario.
Teach the decision before the writing
Students who learn to choose content for a particular reader stop translating. Everything after that is register, phrasing and practice.
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