Little did I know when I started to plan a unit in our grade 9 'study skills' class on writing formal and informal emails that teens at my school don't actually use email. All I knew was that the previous year group had had problems writing to their work experience employers, and that formal letters and emails were not taught in any other part of the curriculum. That left the 'study skills' weekly class as the only place lessons on this topic were going to take place.
I did a google search for lesson plans and other resources and put my unit together over a weekend. In particular there was a good work sheet from the BBC on the differences in format between formal and informal emails. However for some reason on the Sunday afternoon before the class on the Monday, I started to rethink the topic. I knew that students wrote very few if any formal letters. If that were the case, perhaps they didn't write emails either. When I thought about my own communications with friends, I realised that I rarely email them, I use Facebook Messenger for most communication and only when a friend doesn't have an account, do I email. For me email is mainly for work and for more formal communication. I then asked myself what would my students do. They wouldn't email friends any more than I do. Would they ever have a reason to write a formal email? Perhaps to teachers but not often. If I were right, then there was no point in me teaching informal email writing. Thus, I decided to change my tact for the lessons.
My first lesson became one of exploration. I wanted to know how my students communicated with each other, with other friends not at school and with family. It was fascinating and obvious from the start that email was the least likely form of communication for them to use. When I asked them to open up their school email, I discovered that most of them had hundreds of unopened emails. Though the school uses email to communicate with students, students rarely check to see if they have any. I don't think we had thought about that. Students said that they checked managebac for messages from their teachers but seldom their email. The irony of that is that they do email their teachers but never seems to read the replies.
So how do they communicate with each other? They use their phones (not surprising) but not to make calls as I would; instead my students use the apps on the phone such as Snap Chat. They tell me that they also text but rarely use the phone function of their smart phone. This knowledge led me to another realisation: since they didn't make phone calls, they were very likely nervous about making calls to someone they didn't know. So, though I had decided to include making phone calls as part of our unit, I decided that we would have to do a lot more work on it than I had expected.
