Powerpoint-drunk

Am I suspicious of virtual whiteboards? No.

Do I really need Powerpoint for every single lesson? No.

Can't students wait when we're writing on the virtual whiteboard? Of course, they can.

 

Though I suspect the online mode of communication has subtly changed our expectations. Some would argue that a culture of 'instant information' has taken hold thanks to Google. What do you do when you want to find information about something? Google (it's even become a verb!) it and you'll have the information available in a matter of seconds, which brings me back to the last question above.

Being a fast typer myself, I'm able to minimise student waiting time (SWT?) , but I still prefer pre-written Powerpoint sildes which work exactly as a planned whiteboard. It saves lesson time, which translates to 'greater practice time' (potentially) for the students.

 

Perhaps I should ask myself these questions instead:

• Do I really need to include a visual? Does it serve any teaching or learning purpose?

• Do I need to share my Powerpoint slides for the entire lesson?

• Can I put some slides on a digital worksheet so that my students can work 'off-screen (share)'?

For now, I'd be glad to say goodbye to the orange letter P. Bring on a Powerpoint-free Christmas!

Exam strategies: happy student, happy teacher

I was preparing a student for his CAE (C1 Advanced) in a fortnight.

In Reading (Part 7), candidates are given an article and have to complete gapped paragraphs.

This particular student was struggling a bit in the last lesson, so I came up with two different strategies which he subsequently applied to his homework. EUREKA! When we checked homework earlier today, he got all answers correct. What's more - he had done it under exam conditions!

I'd like to share my two strategies here:

• developing an overall structure of the text - thinking about the main idea of each paragraph (with the aid of topic sentences)
  
  N.B. There's a logical progression of such 'main ideas' in the text, so that candidates can deduce what goes in each gap.
  
  
• lexical references - using them to verify answers, focusing on the cohesion between the previous and the subsequent paragraphs
  

30-hour week (contact/classroom hours) ... Part 2

Some ideas adpated for online lessons which have worked well in my teaching context:

Get to know you (teacher)

• face-to-face (credits to Sonya): I would cut up 5 photos about me, set it as a puzzle, and let my student(s) come up with questions to ask me. For an added challenge, I would split my class into teams and give 1 point to those who asked me a question with a 'yes' answer.
  
   
• online (individual, pairs or trios): I show my students the same set of photos, but I've pixelated them so that everything looks blurry. My student(s) have to guess what the pixelated photos show. Then I progressively reveal the original photos. Finally, I let my student(s) come up with questions to ask me.
  
  
  
• online (larger groups): I show my students 5 (unpixelated) photos, put them in various breakout rooms, and let them come up with questions to ask me. In open class, I ask my students to type their questions in the chat box. Then I reformulate my students' questions where necessary and answer them one by one.
  
  
• online (larger groups): I set up a shared Word document on Google or OneDrive. In this document, I provide a short model paragraph introducing myself; there is designated space for each student to write their own introductions. In the lesson, I paste the link to the shared document in the chat box. My students can read each other's introduction and comment on it.
  

Get to know you (student)

• face-to-face: I would provide some ideas in bullet points for my students, e.g. name, current city, occupation, hobbies and interests, languages spoken, language learning history, motivation for learning English, etc. Then I would put them in pairs for 1 minute. After that, I would change the arrangement so that every student could talk to each other.
  
  
  
• online: I show my students the same ideas in bullet points. Then I put them in various breakout rooms. After a minute, I broadcast an announcement signalling the change of group arrangements. When I move my students to other rooms, I always do it in one of the breakout rooms so that my students know I'm moving some of them elsewhere and bringing others in their current room.
  

Information gap activities

• face-to-face: I would arrange my class into 'A's and 'B's and then give instructions while chesting the role/task cards. Before I hand out the role/task cards, I would check my students' understanding of instructions.
  
   
• online: I set up the breakout rooms first, so that I can arrange my class into 'A's and 'B's according to the breakout room list. Then I give instructions while showing a snapshot of the role/task cards. After that, I paste the link(s) to the role/task cards, which have been uploaded to a shared cloud storage, in the chat box. Before I put my students in various breakout rooms, I make sure everybody is on the same page (i.e. role/task cards fully downloaded) and check understanding of instructions. Finally, I open the breakout rooms.

Writing (50 to 100 words)

• face-to-face: every student would write on seperate pieces of paper. At the end of the Writing task, I would display my students' work around the classroom in a gallery reading activity.
  
  
  
• online: I use a Padlet board so that my students can post their written work. Students can read each other's work and give feedback on it. The Padlet board is automatically saved so that I can give further written feedback after the lesson.
  

 

30-hour week (contact/classroom hours) ... almost done!

(Part 1)

It's been a full-on week teaching online EFL/ESP lessons and one from which I've learnt more than any other.

As we're getting over the shock of the Great Online Shift, I think it would be a good time to shift our focus from how we teach online to how we learn online. Students need a new set of study skills: digital note-taking, organising computer documents, familiarity with software/platforms, etc.

I believe if teachers develop a greater understanding of the 'learner experience', it's going to help them to adapt face-to-face classroom techniques for teaching online lessons. Hence I shall sum up my principles of best practice in 2 'E's: efficiency and effectiveness.

IELTS class starting in 5 - Part 2 to come with practical classroom ideas.

...

"Imposter phenomena" by Teresa Bestwick

I've been doing a tiny bit of presenting recently - Teresa's mini-plenary session on imposter phenomena springs to mind. You can find her blog post here.

Personally, I'd be cautious of preaching something (methodology or tools alike) which I haven't tried out with my students. I do talk about teaching theories, but I use them in order to support my critical analysis of methodologies or classroom tools. Fortunately, nobody has said this to me yet: you haven’t actually tried this with your own students though, have you? However, I've already witnessed it happening to other people.

Unless the aim of our talk is to promote a methodology or tool, I think it's important to provide a critical view when presenting in webinars or at conference sessions. This doesn't mean we should be self-defeating, but adding something as simlpe as a qualifying statement would do the job (given that it's based on actual practice!). In the course of developing Second Language Acquisition theories, some methodologies have become fashionable only to be replaced by others. After all, no methodology is inherently good or bad, but rather it's about how effective or efficient they are for language learning, and this depends very much on one's teaching and/or learning context. There's one thing we can't deny though - language is a medium through which we communicate our ideas.

Now, I think we can easily spot an impostor 😁 by asking the 'silver bullet' question, but let's be kind and supportive to them.

Afterthought: my talk at IH Milan's annual ELT conference 2020

In my recent talk at IH Milan's annual ELT conference, I shared 5 materials-light language practice ideas.

In my Activity 4, I was talking about the idea of appropriacy (Hymes, 1972) in using functional language. Here were my two examples:

• buying a cuppa at a busy train station - 'A large tea, please.'
  
• visiting the post office to pick up a parcel - 'Could I collect my parcel, please?'
  

In the second example, I used an unnatural model in order to highlight the contrast of registral style with the first. On second thoughts, who would even be that formal in the UK? Unless you live in Windsor or (maybe) Sandringham, most people would just ask 'Can I pick up my parcel?' 

Thanks also to my colleagues for raising my awareness of English varieties. I'd always thought the word borough was pronounced /bʌrə/ until the week before my talk. There's a different pronunciation in the US, /bɝːoʊ/, which I didn't know before.

Lexis: connotations and culture

 A brief snapshot of yesterday's lesson with Teens FCE Preparation:

... we were grouping some adjectives of personality by connotation. The two groups are 'usually positive' or 'usually negative'.

The word emotional came up. My two students, who are first-language Italian speakers, immediately said it's 'usually positive'. Then I asked them this question - 'If someone is emotional, does that person often over-react? Is he or she stable emotionally?'

We concluded that most people use emotional in the negative sense to criticise others, not in the sense of describing the state of being filled with emotions, e.g. 'I'm getting emotional.'

Reflections:

I've questioned why I associated emotional immediately to a negative connotation. Was this one of my numerous British moments? After all, we've inherited some traits of Victorian England, one of which says you shouldn't be expressing your own emotions too outwardly. In other words, it's the famous 'British/English stiff upper-lip'.

Maybe being emotional is considered acceptable in Italian societies, whereas in the UK such behaviour is usually frowned upon and would be regarded as aggressive. Cultural differences.

Proper first day of 2020-21

The slight build-up of excitement appeared on the day before the start of year - face-to-face lessons. How would my students feel in a socially distanced classroom? Can they completely avoid touching role cards in simulation or role play practice? Would they get bored or frustrated by not being able to mingle or work with their classmates beyond their social bubbles? Would they be worried about falling innocent victim to some invisible viruses (google 'long covid'), even though they agreed to come to the lesson in person?

A million questions went with me on my first proper commute to Milan this morning. At 8°C, the autumn air is brisk - what a pleasant surprise for September in Italy.

I taught two groups of teens today - FCE preparation and PET preparation.

Some reflections on teaching socially distanced face-to-face classes

What worked really well:

To let my students give their personalised responses to the pandemic situation, I used a PET-style pyramid discussion task in the context of various modes of learning. They discussed the pros and cons of online, face-to-face, asynchronous (graded down to 'forum' or 'online exercises'), and flipped classroom (graded down to 'video tutorials'). The 'New Normal' it is.

My students also discussed their learning goals - what they wish to achieve on their course. This gave them the chance to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, which helps them set learning priorities. In one class, this led to a brief discussion of our attitudes to mistakes. Feeling I've got some shy, self-conscious (or maybe they're pushed by their parenrs) students, so we've set the slogan/motto of the class: mistakes are OK.

In my FCE class, we touched on study skills training too - the use of Cambridge Learner's Dictionary online for pronunciation.

What worked okay:

Dogme-style (more like strong-end TBL) post-task focus on language. I'm still new to the part of whipping out a practice activity - thinking on my feet. The language point was quantifier, or too + quantifier. I elicited 3 things each person had eaten; when we had a list of food and drinks on the board, the students told each other about what food or drinks they'd like to have more or less/fewer than now in general. Change of conrext was set clearly, a model given - I eat too much ___. The activity took off nicely, but the langauge clarification bit could have been more complete to include too many, too few, too little. Devising materials-free communicative practice (not just any) on the spot is the fun challenge of Dogme.

What didn't go as planned:

The lessons' digital role cards were prepared and put in one place - a Powerpoint file, which changed into Google slide once uploaded to Drive. This was intended for my students to bypass the touching and passing bit with materials in the traditional paper format. They can use their own smartphones to access role cards. While I could have shared my documents on Drive directly, the URLs were too long to type.

QR codes were trialled but some students had older smartphone models without QR scan function. They might have to install a QR code scanner app which could potentially be unsafe. We went back to taking photos of my laptop screen as a contingency plan.

Next experiment: shortened URLs like bit(dot)ly.

The 'New Normal': online, face-to-face or hybrid EFL/ESL lessons?

It's a dynamic concept. There have been lots of talking about a 'new normal' in the UK, but nobody really knows what to expect. An array of contextual lexis has cropped up: remote teaching, online learning, working from home (Italians use the term 'smart working'), socially distanced, social distancing, and so on.

For ELT or, more specifically, EFL/ESL, the past few months of online teaching and learning has definitely left its mark on teaching techniques and the wider discussion of 'post-digital ELT' (if I can describe it as such) methods/approaches.

These are some possible scenarios:

• fully online
• fully face-to-face with social distancing in place
• a hybrid mode: face-to-face and online with various degrees of flexibility
  

Every teacher has their own preference, but I believe this discussion should focus on learning contexts. Of course, a flat screen will never beat face-to-face interactions - I'm thinking about paralinguistics here. And it'd be nice for both the teacher and the learners to have the peace of mind that their next-door neighbours aren't going to inadvertently cause disruptions to the online classroom.

Putting the teacher's preferences aside, I'd say the most effective online lessons are those with one-to-one and small groups up to four students. If technological innovations allow teachers to monitor two or more groups simultaneously, then this will provide the case for having larger classes.

Then there's the flipped classroom approach. It's part of the Blended Learning method and compatible with both online and face-to-face lessons.

Synchronous and asynchronous learning theories are more relevant to the post-lockdown hybrid mode of EFL/ESL lessons. What if a student can't physically come to the lesson? What if half of the class have face-to-face lessons while the other half join the same lesson via videoconferencing? This is going to be a curious experiment for 2020-21 and I shall look forward to hearing ideas and reflections from others.

Distance learning in the age of 5G

It was some time last month when the talk of slow Internet speed popped up again. I was in the middle of delivering a session for IELTS candidates when one of them said her slow connection couldn't get her into a breakout room for group discussions.

This led me to think how greatly teachers and students depend on a functional Internet connection for remote lessons. Frustratingly, we're in the age of 5G but most of us are still struggling with having access to a good-quality, consistent 4G window to the Worldwide Web.

Just how can we ensure our connections are 'good enough' to deliver online lessons as EFL teachers?

• Mode - there are two ways of getting fast Internet at your home. You can choose broadband through rental of your fixed landline - if the telco provider which you choose has already installed optic-fibre cables in your local area. The old-school copper cables can't transmit data signals fast enough for modern-day use.
  
  If renting a fixed line isn't your cup of tea, choose mobile Internet - you'll need a hotspot tethering device as a modem (e.g. your smartphone or purpose-made 'mobile Wi-Fi' devices) to connect to the 3G/4G network.
  

• Internet speed - consider asking your tech-literate neighbours about the quality of their network. Preferably they're with a different mobile network provider so that you can make comparisons. Downlink (download speed) should ideally be above 10 Mbps and uplink (upload speed) above 3 Mbps.
  

• Data limit - shop around for the best pay-as-you-go or pay monthly option. Roughly speaking, an hour's lesson can consume anything between 500 MB and 1 GB. Beware of 'unlimited data' plans because some cheaper ones come with a limit on the Internet speed.
  
  

What's Mbps?

8 megabits per second (Mbps) = 1 megabyte (MB) per second

Your computer uses the latter unit of measurement for file size calculations: KB, MB, and GB.

What are 3G, 4G, and 5G? Simplified answer:

The 'G' stands for generation. Think of your smartphone as a radio signal receiver. The mobile network providers use towers to emit radio signals; when these signals reach your phone, a connection is established.

1G is the stone-age way of radio signal transmission. You don't have to worry about it in this context.

2G (GSM) is the analogue way for voice and text messages.

2.5G (GPRS) is an upgrade of 2G's GSM standard - the start of 'Internet on phones' with data being transmitted in packets of radio signals. 

2.75G (GPRS+) makes data packet transmission faster.

3G (HSPA) raises the top download speed to 21 Mbps.

3.5G (HSPA+) raises the top download speed to 42.2 Mbps.

4G is in effect 3.75G (LTE) raises the speed again. It still uses 2G-type infrastructure to transmit radio signals and gets swiftly overwhelmed by the amount of smartphones and devices connecting to the network.

4.5G (LTE-A) is an attempt to raise the speed without using entirely new infrastructure to transmit radio signals (sort of!).

5G requires new infrastructure to allow high-capacity packets of radio signals to be transmitted. The only problem is that the radio signals can't be transmitted far and wide. There's a trade-off between speed and distance. To be honest, it's unlikely for 5G to be made widely available outside metropolitan areas since we'd need to build radio towers at every 250 or 300 metres!

Interesting facts:

• Public vending machines still use 2G technology to send automatic text messages to a vendor's office when drinks or food are sold out. This is now being upgraded to 3G technology as some countries have decided to phase out 2G.
  
  
• The marketed 'maximum download speed' assumes when you're right next to a radio tower and your device is the only one connected to it. The real download speed you get at home is multiple times slower. For example, my nearest tower should be an LTE-A type at 350 Mbps, but I'm getting 30-35 Mbps downlink and 15-20 Mbps uplink.
  

Reflections on 2019-20

Summer is usually a quieter period - this is the best time for catching up on various teaching-related stuffs. The 3 'R's: reading, reorganisation (of materials), and reflections.

Some of the things I've learnt over the past year (in no particular order):

• garnering moments of plenary learning through spontaneous teaching
  
• using shapes and colours to clarify language for YLs - bypassing metalanguage
• further understanding of how every lesson stage builds up progressively towards the main aim
• criteria for defining a lesson's main aim - how it is expected at DELTA level
• differentiating between teaching and testing receptive skills
• identifying and implementing appropriate scaffolding stages - not to make some students cry again
• ideas for teaching IELTS in a communicative approach
  
• a new perspective of the place of grammar in language learning
• personalising lesson or practice contexts - which I personally call 'Dogme-Lite'
• using self-evaluation of abilities as a means of needs analysis - teaching Business English (not exclusively)

Some experiments I've tried out but yet to be backed by further research:

• developing my own procedure of teaching IELTS Academic Reading (I call it a '20-minute formula') - based on how I would approach it and with further input from my colleague who mentored me on this
• psychological perception of timing - training IELTS Speaking Part 2
  
• lessons shaped in the weak TBL and Dogme (both full and partial) approaches
  
• using videos in the classroom - Action Research carried forward for 2020-21

Online teaching has got to be the number-one learning for me in the past school year. I'd lived through the SARS pandemic in 2003 and certainly didn't expect the current SARS-II episode to be this serious. Though I suspect I still haven't perfected my tea-making skills - been making cuppas during lockdown (practice makes perfect maybe?) until I ran out of PG Tips teabags after a week or two. Those who appreciate PG Tips will surely feel the emotional pain. Well, at least they sell teabags in supermarkets in Italy.

Finally, I'm thankful to my supportive colleagues - sharing ideas, giving me pointers, laughing with my (not so funny) jokes. Let's call it partially British humour, shall we? What an unforgettable journey through uncharted waters - with water mines which look disturbingly like coronaviruses!

Choosing digital resources for the online EFL classroom

Another quick post before I start teaching in 20 minutes.

Sandy Millin's blog post on The Rock's voice-over inspired me.

Just how the online classroom is supposed to be different to the face-to-face setup in terms of activity formats:

1. the Analog online classroom
   
   At one extreme, we've moved EFL lessons online but are still relying on the traditional way of teaching.
   
   Students have access to coursebooks, the teacher uses shared Word documents of picture files (jpg/png) to hand out role cards and worksheets. The chat box as a whiteboard. Much relies on communicating through our webcam videos.
   
   This has the potential of developing into Dogme in Online ELT.
   
   
2. the Digital online classroom
   
   At the other extreme, we see dazzling (in a positive sense) digital resources. The seemingly infinite amount of free products to enhance our lessons.
   
   On this point, Wordwall seems to have the best integrated features - it combines Kahoot, Quizlet and Google Jamboard. Jamboard is student-centred, interactive, and suitable to group work, whereas Wordwall seems to be a one-way presentation of tasks and materials.
   
   Google Doc is as good as Padlet. Padlet seems to be better suited to group work since there's a single 'pad' (board) for multiple posts.
   
   
3. The Integrated online classroom
   
   Would this be the new 'principled eclecticism'?
   

Teaching - not Testing - Listening

This is going to be a quick post. I've just finished teaching a General English adult lesson online. The lesson's topic was 'I wish' (now) and we used Unit 12A from face2face (Intermediate), 2nd ed. Something interesting came into my mind as I was setting up the lead-in activity. I then decided to change my plan and improvised a bit on the spot, while I was thinking about the flow of activities all the time.

The original plan went like this - the very standard CELTA way:

1. a lead-in where I showed my students a visual of 'Aladdin and the Genie'; they had to tell each other 3 individual wishes (in groups)
2. pre-teach vocabulary: informal phrases on the topic of wishes and desire
   
3. pre-listening task: my students would guess what the 5 pairs of people were talking about from 5 photos
4. listening for 'gist': match 5 conversations to the 5 photos
5. scan listening for specific words: gap-fill (marker sentences)

I first came across the following blog post when I was on my CELTA training: Teaching listening - tweaking the CELTA approach. It has made me question my 'convenient' way of running listening activities in the classroom. I've already explored ways to develop my students' listening skills, including focusing on certain speech features which they struggle with, predicting the type of answers prior to a task, starting and stopping (repeating several times), and listening with the script to connect sound to spelling.

Now, I decided against disrupting the flow of 'wishes and desire' by having a pre-teach vocabulary for the sake of it, the lead-in (#1) naturally leads to the pre-listening task (#3). I then ran the 'gist' listening task (#4), in which my students wouldn't be required to understand the 'blocking vocabulary' in order to complete it successfully. After that, I ran an extended stage of pre-teaching vocabulary (#2): peer teaching, clarification, followed by a practice activity (dialogue Q&A: find something in common). Finally, we returned to the scan listening task (#5); at this point, my students should have understood all the pre-taught phrases in the recording.

The time between the two listening tasks was wide apart. Has any other teacher ever adopted this path/framework when they gave a language lesson with listening?

Reflections on Teaching English Online

I made the shift from the face-to-face EFL classroom to the online digital world in late February. Even before the current pandemic, the popularity of language learning online had already made me question the relevance of face-to-face lessons in our times.

Distance learning has become the new norm for now. Hence I'd like to share what I've learnt so far in this post. Most of the ideas below come from the following sources:

Webinar on 'Getting Started with Teaching English Online' - Helen Allen and Ollie Wood (Cambridge Assessment English)

Teaching English Online - Lindsay Warwick and Marie Therese Swabey (FutureLearn, The Open University UK with Cambridge Assessment English)

The role of the EFL teacher

• An additional role for the online EFL teacher - a remote IT technician. Have you ever used remote assistance when something didn't work on your computer or gadgets? I think an effective teacher would be one who can quickly grasp a problem, make decisions on the spot, and provide clear solutions to it.

• Knowing the online platform inside out and using good checking techniques in a diagnosis are always helpful. In a group class, it may be a good idea to use the chat box to resolve tech issues with an individual student. In doing so, there's no need to stop the lesson abruptly or make every other student wait passively.

• It's easy to assume that everybody has access to broadband Internet at home these days. What about the students who come from less privileged backgrounds? They may not have access to generous data allowance at home. (To illustrate my point, an hour's lesson on Zoom uses some 500 MB to 1 GB of Internet data.) While there's nothing we can really do about their Internet situation, being aware of this could position the teacher better for creating an inclusive online learning environment.

 

Techniques

• I've recently started examining my positive bias towards spoken production as 'communication' in the classroom. Moving to the online world has made me appreciate the value of written communication more. After all, texting has replaced phone calls as the way how we communicate these days, hasn't it?

• The chat box is a useful tool for eliciting and brainstorming. Purposeful typing is meaningful communication. Nomination is more common in the physical classroom; however, it limits participation from those who aren't called out to speak in an online classroom. Typing in the chat box can also circumvent a free-for-all situation in which everybody either shouts at the same time or waits for everybody else to start talking - and nobody says a thing. 

• The chat box is also an invaluable tool for giving feedback - personalised and plenary. Feedback giving in the chat box can sometimes get messy with clusters of messages, so it's not a bad idea to keep everything organised. I found it more useful to use the chat box for 'immediate' feedback; the virtual whiteboard or a Word document is better suited to 'delayed' plenary feedback.

• Screen sharing is great for showing visuals, clarifying a lesson's target language, and eliciting peer-to-peer corrections. It's also a handy tool if you play audio or video from your computer. Check the end-user quality - make sure it's not patchy on the students' ends.

• Shared documents are useful for handing out worksheets, role cards and (longer) reading texts. They're also great for collaborative activities. It may be a good idea to check compatibility issues before a lesson, so that the students can access the materials on their own device.

• Teaching online has made me pay greater attention to my instructions. Instructions online need to be as clear as, if not more succinct than, those in the physical classroom. Checking is more crucial than ever because of the teacher's reduced ability to monitor the students through small webcam windows.

 

Lesson model

• I've so far experimented with a range of methodologies and approaches to facilitate language learning - depending on my students' individual styles and preferences. PPP, Test-Teach-Test, hybrid of TTT and PPP, TBL (light), Dogme (light), to name a few. These underlying directions don't really change in an online teaching and learning context.

• What I'd be interested in doing is to adopt a flipped classroom approach to some of my lessons. I'm going to start out 'light' by setting receptive skills work, which has a target language embedded therein, as homework. The eventual goal would be for me to move the clarification stage to the digital video space. I think it's a great way of letting students take responsibility of their own learning process.

I've mainly focused on teaching and learning online in this post, but I haven't touched on Internet safety, 'netiquette' or digital learning apps. I guess these topics can form the basis of one of my future posts.

Happy teaching or learning, or both!

Maximising the benefits of Zoom's breakout rooms

Much has been said about Zoom's breakout rooms, which teachers can use to put their students into different pairs or  groups. Then the teacher can monitor them by 'joining' (my personal favourite: 'popping in and out') various breakout rooms.

I'd like to share two more advanced ways of using breakout rooms:

• Swap students between pairs and groups - when they're already in breakout rooms
  
  
  Use the 'assign to' function and move your student(s) to another breakout room - there's no need for everyone to return to the main session.

• Put the 'fast finishers' into a breakout room - more students can be added to it
  
  The rest of the students can stay in the main session as they complete a lesson task.

The Great Shift: Teaching and Learning Online

These are some upcoming webinars on synchronous and asynchronous learning:

• Oxford University Press - https://elt.oup.com/events/global/synchronous-teaching-your-first-online-lesson?cc=it&selLanguage=en&mode=hub

• Macmillan - https://www.macmillanenglish.com/us/training-events/events-webinars/event/thom-kiddle-principles-and-practices-in-asynchronous-online-learning

There are excellent blog posts by Sandy Millin on teaching communicative English lessons online:

• Sandy Millin's blog post (14 March 2020) - https://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2020/03/14/ideas-for-adapting-group-lessons-to-working-on-zoom/ 

Reflecting on my first-hand experiences

Many things have been written or said about 'how to use (an online platform)' and exploiting various functions for lesson activities, such as chat, file sharing (worksheets and activity role cards), screen sharing, breakout rooms, virtual whiteboard, and so on. I'm not going to repeat them in this post.

I'd rather like to share some less discussed aspects of teaching online:

Tech check - training the learners

• It's not a bad idea to spend 5 to 10 minutes of the first online lesson on tech check. Students get to try out various functions one by one. The idea is to let them become familiar with a new online platform.

Look at the bottom of your screen. Do you see the menu bar? Click on 'Chat'.

If you're on a smartphone, click on 'Participants'. Then you'll see 'Chat'.

• This is a good opportunity to lower learner anxiety substantially. Progress is often made more quickly once everybody is comfortable with the new classroom environment.

• Another nice warmer would be a communicative activity (information gap/exchange) - with the language that a particular group of students is already able to produce. This provides further opportunities for them to get used to communicating over their webcams.

Expectation management

• Bear in mind we always use visual clues to formulate ideas of what a person is doing. A small webcam window, however, gives us greatly reduced clues. Markers of intention can fill the expectation gap, so that everybody knows they're waiting purposefully but not aimlessly.

I'm going to share my screen with you. 

In a moment, you'll see three photos on your screen.

• Is everybody waiting for everybody else to start talking? Students can actually be trusted with their turn-taking and self-control abilities. Once set up properly, the teacher as the moderator can stay muted in discussions and brainstorming activities. Students talk among themselves and the teacher intervenes only when necessary. 

• Stop webcam is another useful function when you play videos and/or audio using screen share. Students can be told about your intention before they start. This can minimise distractions and the teacher can take a breather!

Over and out, more on this later!

Coronavirus, Teaching Online, and CPD

I can't say this is the case for every EFL/ESL teacher, but I suspect I'm not the only one who has felt a bit of information overload as a result of our scramble for the online world.

Having found myself attending some webinars on 'how to use ___ to teach' and reading through numerous accounts of how someone else's first online lesson went, I started wondering if it was the best use of my professional development time. What I really need is to ensure that I can maximise both learner engagement and communicative use of language in all my online lessons.

(I'm fortunate to be one of those naughty kids who won't stop touching random buttons, so it doesn't really take me long to get to grips with new technology.)

Thus I've come back to the familiar mantra of the 'action plan':

• Step 1 - Putting myself in my students' shoes, how would I want my online lessons to be? Interactive? Webinar-style? Conference-style (the teacher as an online moderator)?

• Step 2 - What criteria should I measure the level of 'success' in any lesson? The classic 'talking time'? Level of interest? Learners' achievement?

• Step 3 - Using the above criteria which I've set for myself, reflect critically on how a lesson went.

• Step 4 - Identify areas for improvement, then research how another way of using the same technology can bring about what I want.

IELTS preparation

Apart from the usual 'compare your answers' (pair check), here are some ideas of how you could make IELTS preparation lessons communicative:

Listening

• Discuss a list of test strategies - valid or not valid?

• Discuss and justify predictions about some test questions, e.g. gap-fill and multiple choice

Reading

• Jigsaw reading - piece an article together (different paragraphs or sections of the article)

• Discuss and justify predictions about some test questions, e.g. multiple choice

Writing

• Writing Task 1 - work together to identify key features of the given visual(s), or even collaborative writing

• Writing Task 2 - brainstorm ideas and discuss/select ideas for writing

Speaking

• Discuss a list of test strategies - what's valid and what's not
  
• Discuss and justify predictions about some test questions, e.g. gap-fill and multiple choice