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.