Originally published in IATEFL Voices, issue 276 (September/October 2020)
As teachers around the world get used to teaching online, it’s easy to focus on the drawbacks; the things that we used to be able to do offline but can no longer do online. Far less attention gets paid to what we can do online that was never previously possible offline. In my experience as a trainer in an online language school, this context holds just as many opportunities as it does limitations. In this short article I will discuss six opportunities inherent in online young learner classes that were never previously possible in face-to-face lessons and how to take advantage of these.
Genuine communication
Many of the questions that teachers ask in face-to-face classes are questions to which teachers already know the answers. Questions like “What’s the weather like today?” “What colors can you see?” “What fruit is that?”. Because teachers and learners in offline classrooms inhabit the same physical space, questions about that space often tend to be display questions. The questions above would be unlikely to provoke any genuine communication, because everyone in the classroom knows it is raining outside, the room is painted orange and the teacher is holding a flashcard of a banana. David Nunan pithily sums this up, writing “in communicative classes, interactions may, in fact, not be very communicative after all” (1987, p. 144). Online teaching has the potential to change this. Because teachers and learners in online classes do not share the same physical space, questions about what learners can see, hear and feel are more likely to be genuine. The teacher does not know what the weather is like outside the learner’s house, what the learner can see in their bedroom, or what fruit might be lying on the table in front of them. The information shared by teacher and student is limited to what both can see on their computer screen. If teachers can ask questions about the learner’s world beyond their computer screens, meaningful communication is bound to follow.
Personalization
Learners need to be involved as individuals if they are to stay sufficiently motivated to successfully learn a language (Griffiths & Keohane, 2009). However, it can be challenging to get to know learners as individuals in offline classes. They sit in the same room, in the same chairs, use the same coursebook, and in schools with uniforms, wear the same clothes. Personalization is also especially difficult at beginner level, when learners often lack the linguistic resources to discuss their feelings, ideas and experiences in detail. One way to personalize at this level is by using objects and items familiar to learners. In offline classes, the use of realia is often limited to items inside learners’ pencil cases or the contents of the school’s lost and found box. In online classes, the learner’s entire house is giant repository for personalized realia. In online lessons, instead of using pictures in the coursebook to learn clothes, students can open their wardrobes and talk about their favorite outfits. Instead of relying on food flashcards, learners can fetch their favorite snacks from the fridge. Instead of retelling a story from a graded reader, learners can pick up one of their own books and try to describe the story in English. Doing this in an offline class would require learners to travel to class in a removal van. Online lessons give us the opportunity to personalize topics with the things our learners love.
Parent involvement
Much of what teachers do in face-to-face classrooms is invisible to our peers and managers (Bailey, et al., 2001) and also to parents. Parent involvement in offline education is often limited to pushing kids into the classroom at the beginning of lessons or waiting by the door during the final five minutes of class time. Online teaching tips the scales in the other direction: many parents sit next to their children during class. This can be potentially catastrophic, as some parents translate instructions (often wrongly!) into their child’s L1 or even answer on their behalf. This interfering sometimes deprives young learners of the confidence to speak in English without checking their accuracy with a parent first. But parent involvement can also be a blessing; students can bring their own teaching assistants to class who can help them focus, give assistance when required and manage behavior. In group classes, parents can also act as language partners for young learners to practice language with. Parents need to be carefully and respectfully managed if they are to work with your lessons rather than against them. Setting clear roles and expectations for parents in online classes will help to ensure their children receive the extra support the need to support without giving too much.
Screen sharing
Why do offline classes center around a whiteboard? Perhaps because the text on a whiteboard is virtually the only text large enough for everyone in the class to see at the same time. This is unfortunate, because there is an abundance of learner produced language in coursebooks and notebooks just waiting to be tapped into. Moving classes online means students can screenshare their stories, drawings, photos and answers, with the rest of the class. This opens up possibilities for personalization, where learner produced materials can take center stage in class in place of generic coursebook content.
Learning ‘online’ language
When I taught very young learners face-to-face, my first few lessons with a new group of students always involved learning phrases like “stand up”, “sit down”, “put up your hand” and “open your books”. These classroom commands are essential to offline classroom management. Online classroom management is just as important, but the language of classroom management is different. Learners need to know “click”, “circle”, “find”, “ask your Mum”, “show me a …”, etc. from the beginning of an online English course if they are to fully participate in English. Anyone reading who has participated in a Zoom meeting recently will also have noticed how “Can you hear me?” has become a greeting in the same way we use “hello” to answer the phone. Learners need to learn this, along with the language needed to rectify only class problems, like “move your camera up/down”. “The kinds of functions for which learners use language within a class will vary according to the age of the learners, the content of the class and the kinds of activities and learning arrangements that are used” (Richards & Lockhart, 2000, p. 195). The language we teach must also to reflect the needs of this new context.
Teacher supervision and evaluation
Most online lessons are recorded, making them available for viewing at a later date, by teachers and their supervisors. This has potential advantages for supervision. Observations in offline contexts are often hampered by the observer’s paradox, where the presence of an observer changes what happens in class. This can result in supervisors observing lessons which bare “little or no resemblance to what happens between teacher and class on a day-to-day basis” (Bolitho, 2013, p. 10) and teachers being evaluated on these. Online, supervisors often have the ability to search through a database of recordings of classes. This can allow them to evaluate teachers using a wide range of data rather than one single high-stakes lesson. If teachers are also able to access lesson recordings, this also creates opportunities for self-observation. Teachers could be given more autonomy in the supervision process, choosing some of the lesson recordings they wish to be evaluated on. This is bound to make an often-fraught process perceived to be fairer.
Conclusions
The recent exodus of lessons from face-to-face to online classrooms may have been one of the largest changes in education in the past century. As with any seismic shift, those caught up in it will need time to adjust and adjusting to online teaching means identifying the unique opportunities afforded to us by the online classroom and taking advantage of these.
References
Bailey, K., Curtis, A. & Nunan, D., 2001. Pursuing Professional Development: The Self As Source. Singapore: Cengage Learning.
Bolitho, R., 2013. Dilemmas in Observing, Supervising and Assessing Teachers. In: Assessing and Evaluating English Language Teacher Education. New Delhi: British Council, pp. 7-12.
Griffiths, G. & Keohane, K., 2009. Personalizing Language Learning. Shanghai: Foreign Language Teaching and Reserach Press.
Nunan, D., 1987. Communicative language teaching: Making it work. English Language Teaching Journal, Volume 41, pp. 136-45.