Learner Agency - how learning happens online

It sometimes feels as if the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed a sizeable part of TEFL back to pre-Chomsky days, but not all is lost!

This isn't so much about researches on how languages are learnt but rather how learning happens online, which brings me to the topic of Teacher/Learner Agency.

Oxford University Press has invited several speakers to deliver webinars on this topic: Andy Gao, Terrie Cradd, Kathy Kampa, and many more at their ELT Online Conference 2021.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUyxvfJQNH4 (Andy Gao)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHVZyD_Ce0s (Terrie Cradd)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCpuZbYg2nI (Kathy Kampa)

How to teach online, but how to learn online

I was a schoolboy when the SARS pandemic broke out in 2003. Back in those days, there was unlimited broadband (yes, you read it correctly!) at home already thanks to the digitisation push in 1997. School moved online to the internal email network for two months. Video meeting was still in its embryonic form on the laggy MSN Messenger, so online lessons were out of the question.

Fast forward 17 years, we had to move online all of a sudden, but the methodologies which most EFL teachers are using in their online lessons still consist of assumptions based on the in-person mode of instruction. I, myself, am one of such teachers.

This has got me into thinking about how learning actually happens online. With little time to delve into research results, webinars are a much quicker way of getting as much information as I possibly can. The webinars above are a good place to start.

My current belief is that there need not be massive changes to language acquisition theories, but I'm going to have to think hard about the potential affordances which some digital materials can offer. Learner Agency comes into play because students need to know how to take notes (screenshots? Word documents?) and organise the information they've received in online lessons. No matter how effectively we teach, students need to be taught online study skills before they can reach their full learning potential.

Success stories

I wrote a post about being Powerpoint-drunk, but I still use Powerpoint as a (prepared) digital whiteboard in my online lessons. It's worked better with older teens and adults than younger kids. I've also verified successful learning with some of my most motivated students by using language proficiency tests and appropriately designed end-of-course tests. Maybe 'motivated' isn't the best word, but I've noticed those students tend to possess good note-taking and organisational skills which help them refer back to their past learning.

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.

...

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.

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 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.