The famous Nighthawks painting, by Edward Hopper
Pick up a random coursebook from the shelf in your staffroom (or bookcase at home, if you're the sort that likes to keep coursebooks within reach). I'd say there is a reasonable chance that at least one of the units in that book, or at least part of one of those units, focusses on something along the lines of "dining out", "in the restaurant", "what would you like to eat?" or something reasonably similar.
There may be a menu to look at, and perhaps a dialogue to analyse and perform. What often follows is a vocabulary section featuring different kinds of food, representing a selection from a sort of uber-fusion hypothetical restaurant wherein half a dozen or more cultures get a showing. Remember, most coursebooks are meant for global or at least regional distribution these days, and it clearly wouldn't do to either come across as colonising our EFL students by only showing them British or American fare, or missing out on a chance to make them feel included by not featuring something from their own national cuisine in the example menu.
Whenever I see this restaurant/eating out unit in a coursebook, I can't help seeing an image of the Nighthawks scene (shown above at the start of this post). I've even been known, when perusing a potential coursebook for the schools I've worked at, to pause at the eating out unit and say "Oh, great -- Nighthawks!"
The restaurant in Nighthawks is one that I will never see or experience. I may one day come across something similar in terms of thematic decor, but otherwise this is just a scene -- a notion. I'm not likely to see people wearing the same clothes as in that scene. Nor am I likely to hear the sorts of food/drink related banter that might have gone on in that particular place at that particular time (nor for that matter need to engage in it).
For many -- even most -- EFL students, the resonance of the scenes, vocabulary, and language in the "eating out" unit of their coursebooks must be similarly distant at best.
How many of these students will actually eat out at an English-language-medium restaurant in the next 6-12 months, or 6-12 years, or even ever? Is novelty an acceptable rationale for exposing students to (and asking them to pretend to participate in) scenes and situations that they are highly unlikely to ever need to face?
Even with my ESL students here in Australia (where there is more likelihood that they will eat out in a location where English is required), the good old restaurant scene feels somewhat unwieldy. But that's a more complex matter, and I'll try to stick to the EFL-related issues for now (given I think that is where more coursebook sales -- not to mention blog readers -- come from).
Now, even with the sort of "poor man's Matrix effect" the eating out scene is likely to create in an EFL classroom, I want to point out that the notion of restaurants and eating out is actually a potentially valid one -- even in EFL contexts -- and the language used in those units is also potentially useful.
But we'll need to make some changes, I reckon...
What language are we looking at here? At the basic lexis level, we're talking food and drink items. In terms of utterances, we're looking at enquiries, requests, offers (if we want to roleplay the stereotypical waitperson, perhaps...), confirmations, and -- perhaps at higher levels -- complaints, descriptions, requests for clarifications, etc.
For a start, I think a CLIL or task-based approach to food -- and international food -- would be far more beneficial for our learners.
For a CLIL orientation, we could have projects about foods from different parts of the world, how they relate to culture(s), what ingredients they contain, how they are made, the economic and environmental issues related to food production, etc. It doesn't need to go that far or into that much detail, of course, but food is a very rich vein to mine in a CLIL-oriented classroom approach.
On the task-based front, why not have the class plan (and perhaps even conduct/host) a mini International Food Festival? Or, by referencing some sort of international event to be held in their country (anything from a summit to a conference to a Grand Prix race), have them brainstorm a prospective menu for the participants that features both a selection from the host country's cuisine as well as fare from the participants' countries to help make them feel at home.
And here's a great one I've done several times... Have the students bring in a menu that a local restaurant has attempted (almost always quite badly) to translate into English for international visitors, and get them to find ways to improve it, make it more accurate linguistically, and more attactive to foreign eyes. They can even offer it back to the restaurant to use (and I even had some students get free meals or a minor payment for their trouble!).
If neither CLIL nor task-based appeals to you, I think at the very least it might be a good idea to consider that:
1. The basic language featured in the eating out unit (with the exception of the particular food words) can be more than adequately presented and practiced in situations that are more closely related and relevant to the actual classroom context (enquiries, requests, offers, confirmations, complaints, descriptions, requests for clarifications, etc.).
2. If it really must be about restaurants, focus more on the idea of hosting foreign visitors at restaurants in the students' own country. Then the language will be more about naming and describing local cuisine in English, finding out what basic types of food the visitors like, making suggestions, and perhaps enquiring about the visitors' own cuisines and making polite or interesting comparisons.
Anyway, whatever we do when it comes to those food/restaurant issues, I hope we can try to keep things reasonably real and reasonably relevant. Most of the food/eating out units in existing coursebooks just don't make the cut, really.
Our students aren't going to go to the restaurant (or meet the people portrayed) in Nighthawks, are they?
=D
