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

Demand High, Dogme ELT and some reflections

Demand High - Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill
Dogme ELT - Scott Thornbury

Let's put the jargons and names of ELT stars aside. Look into what these terms really mean.

Demand High and Dogme ELT

My humble view is that the joint effort of publishers and content writers have pushed the content in many English (EFL/ESL) coursebooks to such a high quality that a teacher can just 'hide' behind a curtain. Let the coursebooks teach the students by themselves. Teachers risk simply becoming teaching machines by simply managing a task set up and giving basic feedback. Arguably, software developers have been using A.I. to carry out just those classroom tasks.

If teachers simply leave the coursebooks to do the job, then, are we pretty much the same as self-checkout machines in supermarkets? (By the way, those 'please remove items in the baggage area' announcements really get on my nerves, especially when a machine gets it wrong!)

If my memory serves me correctly, Demand High was a reaction to us not doing enough to challenge/push our students. Dogme was a reaction to how we could still deliver lessons effectively even without coursebook materials and by tuning in to what our students genuinely wanted/needed to learn.

Dogme - 'it was all by accident'

A Dogme lesson by accident. How did it happen? Well, I blame hay fever. Before recalling the story here, my original lesson plan was on writing skills (IELTS Academic Task 1) through reading guided models.

So, my nose has been complaining loudly and resoundingly about the pollen. Sunny Italy doesn't help at all. Having been running a mucus factory and trying to cope with a running nose for the last 2 days, small talk always started with hay fever. It turned out the student who cannot be named thought I'd been having a temperature.

CCQ moment: Do I have a temperature? (No.) Are we talking about an allergy? (Yes.) Am I having allergic reactions to grass/tree/flower pollen? (Hell yes.) Omit the word 'hell'. There you go, hay fever.

The student then started to talk about her skin allergy, so we moved on to vocabulary extension in the topic of 'allergy'. 30 minutes later, she showed me the draft of an email, which she would need to send to her manager. We started incorporating some of the vocabulary items in her writing. All went well with the first two sentences.

Then, we touched on the third sentence which she needed to use a conditional structure in order to express her idea. The lesson then moved on to conditionals review: present and past (or the first, second and third). Since we were set a coursebook to follow, I suggested doing some IELTS listening as a check revision to our previous lesson.

Perhaps I should have just carried on with some on-the-spot practice activities of the conditionals, rather than introduced the IELTS listening tasks and taken some useful practice time away. Who knows?

Reflections of my past weeks

Lots of 'unprofessional' moments - when there are many things flying around

• 1) Don't ever ask students any question unrelated to THE task during FB, e.g. asking them the first question of a 'detail' task when they were focusing on the 'gist' task, thinking they may remember something. Not the wisest idea. Had to reassure my students indirectly!
• 2) Don't ever rubberstamp answers - it's very tempting in 1:1 or 2:1 lessons to acknowledge your students. Maybe, just nod, say 'thank you' and turn to the other student to ask what he/she thinks. And a quick 'no' reply at the heat of the moment could damage a student's confidence.
• 3) Check the listening track 5 minutes before a lesson - even when you're 100% sure you loaded the right track!
• 4) Nervous smile - probably look sarcastic depending on the teacher-student rapport.
• 5) Grading language - easy to resort to my normal speed of talking and give longer than necessary instructions (fillers, politeness, etc.). Some students did get confused because of my ambiguous wording.