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Inside Online Language Teaching
If you want to rethink, improve or learn more about teaching online, this book is for you.
Inside Online Language Teaching is a series of discussions and interviews with lecturers, teachers, trainers, and school leaders. These conversations focus on the opportunities in online teaching, not the drawbacks. Read about how to train students to use breakout rooms. Find out how to use your students’ homes as a teaching tool. Learn how to take your students on a virtual school trip. And consider how technology can benefit teacher development. Inside you'll find advice on:
· Keeping primary and pre-primary aged children engaged online
· Encouraging adults and teenagers to develop autonomy
· Conducting one-to-one lessons
· Online teacher training and teacher development
I used to be a civil engineer. On construction sites, there were two ways people stayed safe. There were safety regulations to prevent accidents. But no matter how many safety regulations there were, everyone wore a hardhat. If something went wrong, a hardhat improves your chances of survival. Managing behavior of pre-primary school age children is similar. Teachers can prevent behavior problems from happening by planning engaging classes where children are engaged and feel valued. But when behavior problems happen, we also need tactics to deal with them. Here are two sets of strategies for encouraging positive behavior and dealing with negative behavior when it occurs.
It can be very difficult to get and keep the attention of very young learners. I was once teaching a class about toys when a boat sailed past the classroom window. How can you compete with that?! Whatever you do to get the attention of your very young learners it has to be more interesting and fun than just shouting “sit down” or “look at me”. Below are my four favorite refocusing strategies. Each of these packages “sit down and look at me” in something more fun than whatever is distracting your class. Start whenever you feel your students’ attention is beginning to wander. Everyone will join when they see the fun.
How long can you pay attention for? Will you make it to the end of this blog post before you get distracted? You’re an adult, so it should be easy. But what if you were four years old? How long could you focus for? Young children have short attention spans. If you’re teaching very young learners (three, for and five-year olds) it’s very unlikely then can pay attention for more than five minutes. So what can you do to keep them engaged for an hour long class?
A lot of what occurs in our classes is a mystery to us. Several years ago, I did an action research project on group work. Beforehand, I thought I was a great teacher. I was sure my students spoke English all the time in class, even when my back was turned. As part of the project, I recorded two of my students during a running dictation. These two young learners were meant to be using the language they’d learnt in class to describe a picture of a monster posted outside the classroom. After class I listened to the audio. I expected to hear “It has three eyes.” “It has blue teeth.” “It has green hair.” What did I actually hear? Chinese. My students didn’t speak any English at all during the activity. My perceptions of what was happening in my classroom were the opposite of reality. This is apparently true of most teachers. Jack Richards and Charles Lockhart say “Much of what happens in teaching is unknown to the teacher”. So how can we make more of these unknowns known? Here are five ways of uncovering hidden truths in your classroom.
The concept of teaching English in English is so common, we rarely stop to think about how unconventional and challenging it is. No other subject is taught so immersivity. Can you imagine receiving instruction on interpretive dancing through an interpretive dance? Or getting taught to code by reading java? Probably not.
Teaching English in English would be impossible without one key skill - grading language. Here are 5 strategies to help you help your students understand. And to help you remember them, they spell G-R-A-D-E.
Cognitive biases screw up everyone’s thinking. They make us more afraid of flying than driving. They stop the U.S. enacting universal health care. And they convinced Tony Blair and George W. Bush that the Iraq War was a great idea, even when we knew it wasn’t. In short, cognitive biases make us less logical, less rational and less efficient decision makers. All of this applies to teachers too. Here are five cognitive biases that screw up your thinking in the classroom and why they stop you from being a better teacher.
Your PowerPoint slides are a masterpiece, your materials are back from the printer’s and the opening speech you drafted would put Martin Luther King to shame. But wait a minute, is that good training?I don’t think it is. ‘Less is more’ in art, design and architecture, and I think that less can also be more in training. Here are five principles that will set you on your way to becoming a minimalist trainer.
We’ve all been in there before. Pieces of wood strewn across the floor. Packets of seemingly identical (but vitally different) nails encircle you. At the center of this carnage you sit with furniture assembly instructions on your lap which require the Rosetta Stone to decipher.
Is this also how our students feel in your class? Listening to instructions in a foreign language can be every bit as confusing as assembling those bookshelves. Next time you give instructions for an activity, G-I-V-E instructions.
Picture a class of six-year old’s learning English. What do you see? Dancing? Coloring in? Flashcard games? Face-to-face lessons are naturally kinesthetic, meaning more blood flow to students’ brains, more engagement, and more variety. Online ESL classes can be the opposite: fidgety students struggling to overcome the compulsion to move. As online English teachers, we need more movement in our online classes. Where to start? The 5 ‘i's.
“Please email us your training."
"What do you mean? How can I email you interactions, epiphanies, questions, reactions, reflections and learning?”
"Just send your PowerPoint deck".
When did people start to think that “PowerPoint” is a synonym for “training”? Do they think the “T” in “PPT” stands for “training”? Training is so much more than a series of slides, handouts and bullet points. If your new year’s resolutions included cutting down on fats, sugars or caffeine, here are five reasons to add PowerPoint to your list of things to avoid in the new year.
When I was a first-year teacher, my lesson plans looked like this.
"Warmer (game)
Grammar
Game
Book p14-15
Game
Review"
Games were great at entertaining my classes. Much later I realized that some games were also great for learning English. The challenge was figuring out which games.
If you want your games to be more than a break between grammar drills and book work, check your games against “GAMES” (Group, Appropriate, Motivating, English, Skills).
Maybe you hate your school. Maybe you’re working undercover for a competitor. Maybe this is your next gig after hacking the American election. Whatever the reason, you’re in good company; there are a lot of people dedicated to destroying teacher development. Little has been written about the field of destroying teacher development (or “DTD” for short), so to make your work easier, I have compiled this list of the highly effective DTD techniques. Go forth and destroy!
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln (via Penny Ur),
You can teach some of the students all of the time, or all of the students some of the time. But you can’t teach all of the students all of the time.
Why not? Because most classes are mixed level. Some students learn faster than others, some write better than others, some are quieter than others. So the question we need to ask ourselves is…
How can we teach more of our students more of the time?
We can teach more of our students more of the time by making our mixed level classes “MIXED” (by using Materials, Instructions, eXpectations, Evaluation, Discipline).
Moses Chilufiya once said, “A school without teachers is like a ship without a sail.” Great teachers can set schools and students on a course for success, but finding great teachers is easier said than done. Do your new recruits have more in common with Alfie Vickers than Socrates? Here are three simple mistakes to avoid in teacher recruitment.
There are so many things to think about when you’re being observed, it’s easy to forget the obvious. Here are seven ways to make sure you rock your next observed lesson.
Hold it! Step away from the photocopier. Do you really need those extra materials for your next class? Are those handouts going to help your students learn or just clear a couple of inches of Brazilian rain forest? Before printing anything more, check your materials (or ‘mateRRRRials’) against the four ‘R’s (real life, relevance, reaction and recyclability) and make sure you and your students get the most out of them.
Can you remember some of the things you were “forced” to do when you were a child? Forced to wear a school uniform. Forced to go to the dentist. Forced to eat vegetables. Being forced to do things sucks. And yet every week we force teachers to attend training in the hope teachers can be forced to develop. They can't.
What do you think of when you hear the name Barak Obama? Some think race. Some think drone war. Some think health care. I like to think education. Here are my three favorite Obama quotes and what they mean for teachers.
When you see a police car in the rear-view mirror, do you drive more cautiously? Do you work later when your boss is staying after hours? Researchers call this behavior “the Hawthorne Effect.” And, it affects your ESL classroom more than you think.
In 1998 the United Nations decided that it was going to eradicate drugs from planet earth by 2008. This project was doomed to failure from the start. Human beings have been getting high since prehistoric times. How could the UN ever obliterate in 10 years something which has been in used for 10,000 years? Instead of removing narcotics from society, the war on drugs created public health crises, mass incarceration and violence. Counties are now trailing alternative approaches - Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001 and drug use hasn’t increased there since. In many TEFL classrooms a similarly futile war is being waged. I call it the “war on L1” (L1 = students’ first language).
Yesterday, I was Cc’d in an email. My coworker, Annie, (who handles all the online payments in our department) emailed our mutual boss, Gary. The email read,
“Hi Gary, Ross is asking me to pay the website fee for 149.95USD, but the bank is asking for a verification code to complete the payment. What should I do? Thanks, Annie”
I read this and thought, ‘what a bitch....
100 couples get divorced in America every hour. These divorces cost 11 billion dollars a year in legal fees and result in 43% of kids in the States being raised without their dads. Tragic. But what’s causing all these divorces? Getting married too quickly? Staying out too late? Not enough sex?
How many of us start lessons by asking students to put their mobile phones away? Probably too many. The vast majority of our students come to class with a computer more powerful than all of NASA had in 1969. NASA used their technology to put men on the moon with a rocket. Our students use their technology to fight zombies with plants. Doesn’t that sound like a waste?
Listen. You can’t hear learning taking place, can you? You can’t hear the cogs in students’ brains turning as they try to get their heads round a new language concept, can you? You can’t hear the humming of a learner’s’ brain as they internalize a new word, can you? Well, I think you can. The best classes I’ve ever observed and taught all had this sound in abundance. You’ve heard this sound before. You know what it sounds like. What’s the sound?
At some point in the past, we decided on a “native speaker” model of English. We recruited millions of “native speakers” as teachers. We recorded and played thousands of “listening's” featuring other “native speakers”. And we forgot about all the other English accents in the world. Now, we have millions of students who can understand American English and British English. But what about the other Englishes?
If you have, you’ll know one of the reasons that Fight Club is great is because of the ending. Ed Norton and Helena Bonham Carter look out over a sea of destruction while Black Francis croons and creams an apocalyptic tribute to mental illness. Brilliant. But what does this have to do with teaching English?
A few days ago I observed a class. The students were engaged, spoke lots of English, stayed on task and laughed when the teacher made jokes. There was just one thing missing. The thing that learners desire above all else. Feedback.
As soon as the lesson finished, I thanked the teacher for letting me observe and asked her if she’d like to chat about the class. “Absolutely,” she said, “I’d love to get some feedback.”
This study investigated how effective four tasks were in supporting meaningful spoken language production between young learners and their teachers. The context of the study, online one-to-one lessons, is commonplace but largely unresearched. Transcripts from seventeen teacher-student dyads using four tasks were analysed using conversation analysis. These were then coded and the number of instances of meaningful communication counted. The number of instances of pushed output and negotiation of meaning were also noted. The most successful task was an open opinion-gap task, which motivated the young learners. Crucially, the task outcome (a plan of a shopping centre) allowed learners to check their teachers had understood them. Teacher misunderstandings gave learners opportunities to take control of the discourse and negotiate meaning. Aspects of task design which impeded meaningful communication included sentence stems, which resulted in drill-like interactions. Task topics familiar to learners but unfamiliar to teachers hindered meaningful communication. Also, tasks located near the end of a lesson sequence tended to result in less meaningful communication than those nearer the start.
This interview originally appeared in the EL Gazette in September 2020 and covers challenges in teaching children online as well as tips for encouraging meaningful communication and overcoming tech problems in class.
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.
The proliferation of online teaching in the wake of the coronavirus has profound consequences for teacher development and teacher evaluation. If we are to improve online teaching it is vital that we take advantage of the opportunities this new medium affords us, while being alert to the potential ethical dangers.
We know that our industry discriminates against “non-native English teachers”, but what about plain and simple racism? Read to discover to what extent to which schools in different parts of the world make recruitment choices based on race and discuss what can be done about this common, yet little-discussed issue.
Discrimination against non-native English-speaking teachers (non-NESTs) is commonplace: non-NESTs tend to get paid lower salaries, are given fewer promotion opportunities and get passed over for jobs. But what is the rationale behind these discriminatory hiring practices?
Ask more or less anyone what motivates people and you will hear more or less the same answer: money. Without exception, every time I have a run a workshop about how to motivate teachers, the participants pick “salary” as the most important factor. The participants at this workshop at IATEFL 2017 were no different. Their answers to “What do you think motivates teachers?” collected at the beginning of the workshop, are shown in Figure 1. There is research to support this belief. In 2006, Andy Hockley surveyed 105 teachers about their motivations at work and found salary was one of the most commonly identified factors for teacher motivation (Hockley, 2006). But is that still true now?
Sixty years since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Fifty-five years since Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”. And, four decades after George Wallace said “I was wrong.” You might think, by now, we’d have racism under control. We don’t. In fact, the prevalence of racism in recruitment has not improved in the US since 1989 (Quilliana, Pagerc, Hexela & Midtbøenf, 2017). Is TEFL recruitment racist? We know that our industry discriminates against “non-native English teachers”, but what about good old, garden-variety racism?
This article will investigate the attitudes of service and sales staff, parents, students and teachers towards native-speakerism in the Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) industry in China. It will briefly review literature on the subject, consider survey responses from 1123 respondents at a language teaching organization (LTO) in China and attempt to explain the results and consider the implications. I will argue that if we (as an industry) hope to change parents’ and students’ preferences for “native English teachers” we must first change the views of our own staff. Additionally, as they have a key role in setting customers’ expectations about language learning, sales and service staff are of paramount importance in any attempts to change consumer preferences. Yet, until now, these groups have not been part of our professional discourse on this matter nor have many attempts been made to better understand their beliefs.
This article will investigate teacher recruitment in the Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) industry in China. It will review literature on the subject, consider survey responses from 1220 teachers who either accepted or rejected offers of a job at a language teaching organization (LTO) in China and will attempt to explain the results and consider the implications for language teaching institutions.
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Students need to speak to learn a language and the more students talk, the more they learn. Not according to Professor Stephen Krashen. For 40 years he has championed the concept that what students should be doing in class is reading (and listening), not speaking. In this episode, Stephen tells Ross some of the arguments against forcing students to speak, something which might not just be inefficient, but in some cases counterproductive.