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!