Adapting Approaches and Methods to Teaching English Online: Theory and Practice

By Dionysios I. Psoinos

This book provides a framework for synchronous and asynchronous online language teaching. It elaborates on the key features of an online teaching setting, including the instructional media that are involved in it, their affordances and limitations, and recommends ways to adapt pedagogy to suit the online environment. To this end, the book draws on well-established language teaching methods that have been widely used in the physical classroom and puts them to the test by applying them online. This results in the emergence of an e-clectic approach that enables language teachers to be flexible and intentional in their online classroom-related decisions and combines good practices that cut across the broader methodological spectrum with personal teaching preferences, teaching style, and stakeholders’ specifications always considering the capabilities of the setting and the tools currently available to teachers and learners. 
The book enables teachers to be critical and reflective of their own online teaching practices and equips them, via analysis of live online language sessions, with the necessary skills to confidently engage with screen layout. It also addresses the prominent issue of adapting teacher and learner identity in the online context, and examines their respective roles in online language sessions in a holistic way, offering guidance and support for the practicing online language teacher.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Jul 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030799199

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

D. I. PsoinosAdapting Approaches and Methods to Teaching English OnlineSpringerBriefs in Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79919-9_1

1. Modes, Media and the Online Teaching Space

Dionysios I. Psoinos¹  

(1)

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

This chapter reviews key terms in online language teaching and learning and familiarises the reader with the numerous, diverse variables involved in using a platform to teach languages online. Inherent features of the online setting, interface, and environment in which teaching and learning take place are discussed, tools that the platforms offer are being critically examined for their pedagogical value and potential, and current concerns, including integrity of assessment, are brought to the attention of the reader as factors that have an impact on the quality of ELT/language teaching courses offered online. The chapter closes with a ‘sneak peek’ into the online language education setting to come, which seems to be inextricably linked to the galloping advancements in areas such as Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology.

1.1 Synchronous, Asynchronous, and Blended

Online courses can be delivered in several modes, namely via live sessions, recorded ones, a mix of both live and recorded classes along with written coursework, or even require some physical presence. To a great extent, teaching online offers quite many opportunities for learners, teachers, and educational institutions to tailor courses according to needs and circumstances. Thus, the combinations of course design and delivery can be both numerous and diverse. Nevertheless, online language courses mainly revolve around the synchronous and asynchronous modes, while blended learning is a category of its own.

Synchronous language education involves the delivery of live online sessions where learners and the teacher can interact in real-time via an online platform or app. Synchronous classes are time, and place-specific, and all participants must log in to the platform at the same time, hence the term ‘synchronous.’ These sessions presuppose that learners and teachers have the necessary equipment that will allow them to attend the class, such as a computer or a smart device and a stable internet connection to say the least. In synchronous classes, participants can see and hear one another, share materials, work in pairs or groups, and engage in interaction similar to a ftf class. Nevertheless, when learners are in different time zones, synchronous learning can be quite a challenge as sessions have to be arranged at times convenient to all, which may not be feasible. There are a number of practical as well as ethical implications involved in synchronous language teaching and learning that will be discussed later in this book.

Asynchronous teaching and learning refers to online courses in which sessions might be recorded, materials uploaded, and learners can perform different tasks in their own time and at their own pace. Such courses address the issue of course participants residing in different parts of the world, and in a sense, democratize access to education by giving learners and teachers the opportunity to attend a course without disrupting their personal or professional routine. Asynchronous courses tend to be highly and very clearly structured, arranged in weeks, or learning blocks so as to monitor learner progress within the course as well as build up on course content. Communication occurs via message board discussions or fora where participants can post and respond to one another at a later time but within a deadline. Lacking the ‘live’ element, asynchronous learning is deprived of the interactive choices available in courses delivered synchronously. Both synchronous and asynchronous language learning courses are categorized as distance education or online courses as most, if not all, of the content, coursework, and assessment is delivered online.

Blended learning attempts to make the most of ftf and online teaching and learning features. As the name suggests, blended learning courses combine physical presence in the classroom and activities performed online (Garrison & Kanuka, 2004; Graham, 2006). The onsite-online ratio may vary, but the online element will usually not exceed 50%, or the course will be classified as online or distance education (Bernard, Borokhovski, Schmid, Tamim, & Abrami, 2014; Porter, Graham, Spring, & Welch, 2014). The main sub-categories/models include the well-known to many ‘flipped classroom’ whereby learners do preliminary work with course materials at home and engage in higher-order skills in class such as problem-solving or responding critically to what they read at home. Regulation and management of blended courses also vary significantly among schools. For example, some institutions may use the online element for homework and short assignments done asynchronously, while others may have learners working in groups online in order to complete an assessed project that they may later present live onsite or online. The variations, composition, and weight of activities in blended learning courses are, evidently, quite versatile and flexible (Hrastinski, 2019).

This book addresses all three modes of online language teaching and learning in that it focuses on session delivery and management. In applying the most well-established approaches and methods in ELT online (see Chap. 3), I specifically refer to teacher and learner actions, which implies that the session is live. What is more, in the last chapter, where I present and analyse online language learning activities and explore their potential adaptation to suit the online context, I am referring to both synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Lastly, the book is relevant to blended learning teachers who deliver online classes in which there is some learner-learner-teacher interaction.

I must clearly state at this point that my primary focus on the teacher in this book by no means implies that online learning is teacher-centred, and I explicitly illustrate that in Chap. 3, where the roles of learners and Critical Digital Pedagogy are discussed. Rather, I intentionally concentrate on the target audience of this book, i.e., language teachers and their concerns about the online teaching context, to raise their professional awareness and enable them to make decisions that suit them and are pedagogically sound online. To do that, one has to start from the seemingly plain yet, highly complex online teaching and learning setting.

1.2 The Screen as the Online Teaching Setting

After the first quarter of 2020, the teaching and learning environment changed for many practitioners and their learners. What we once took as a given, i.e., the fact that most of our teaching took place in a physical classroom, was no longer true, and the virtual space became the sole environment/context in which we could teach. In discussing approaches and methods to teaching online, one cannot neglect to take into account the new environment, which in this case, is largely shaped by the media of instruction that it incorporates and which affect what teachers do in class as well as the learning outcomes of online courses (Hampel & Stickler, 2005). In this part, I will refer to the virtual and the physical classroom, not in antagonistic terms, but rather to highlight the features of the first. The rationale behind this choice is to relate the new teaching setting to something with which all teachers are familiar, i.e., the traditional, onsite classroom setting.

An essential realisation and a starting point to the discussion is that in teaching languages online, the screen becomes the classroom, that is, the space where teaching and learning take place (Huang, Spector, &Yang, 2019).

In the online language-teaching context, the screen and, more specifically, the platform interface via which a session is delivered, is the place from where all the action begins and where all session participants return after the action is finished. As such, the screen is central to the discussion of approaches and methods in teaching languages online as it reflects the teacher’s philosophical and methodological assumptions, technological expertise and sets the mood and the tone of the whole course (see Chap. 4). Compared to the physical classroom, the online teaching space is less linear as class participants use links, external resources and multitask during the sessions. An effective learning space must be user-friendly, aesthetically stimulating, practical, but most of all, intentional. I use the word ‘intentional’ to highlight the essentiality of conscious and purposeful decisions made by the teacher regarding the layout of the screen, which in turn reflect our methodological standpoint and awareness of the environment in which we operate. Cluttered, overpopulated screens, for example, could be a sign that a teacher is unaware of the cognitive load that they impose on learners, which may hinder the teaching and learning process (Clark, Nguyen, & Sweller, 2005). Consequently, the teaching space must be transparent in terms of layout, accurately reflecting teacher beliefs about how people learn languages better. Tools, resources, and session participants’ video boxes must be arranged in a way that facilitates learning as opposed to distracting learners (see Chap. 4). The new teaching space requires teachers to be fully aware of all these variables in order to deliver effective online lessons. Thus, online language teachers are now interface designers and media managers, additionally to their other roles (Ellis & Goodyear, 2016—see Chap. 2). With the above in mind, it becomes evident that mastering the space and harnessing its media will lead to more successful and effective online sessions. The section below attempts to shed light upon the online classroom media and their features by comparing them with those found in the traditional, onsite