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.

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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.

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'?
   

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.