Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 4; July 03

Teaching Online

Tiziana Arnoldi

I am a fan of computers. I wouldn't say I understand them, but I seem to get on with them quite well They help me keep in touch with my friends and family when I'm away, and whenever I have a question I can't answer, I ask the internet. I was also grateful to technology when I was offered a job in January teaching English online. I remember reading a Walt Disney comic when I was about 10, where Donald Duck and all his yellow citizens discovered that it was possible to avoid getting stuck in traffic three hours a day by connecting your office computer to your home, and thereby being able to carry out all your functions from the comfort of your beautiful living room.

It's not a new concept. Online learning has been around for a while, but only when you are involved in it can you get an overall idea what it's like.

The most obvious and immediate advantage is purely logistical. Students can take part in their lesson from their office a minute after the end of their working day, or from their favourite armchair and laptop, sitting in their pyjamas and with their face masks on. An “expert” online teacher (one that doesn't panic when something goes wrong) can do the same from his house, making sure the top half of the body is presentable, since you are supposed to show yourself on the webcam. I still have to go to the “school” for my lessons, since my boss worries about the quality of the audio and wants to be there should something go wrong.

It's good. It is something to try out. And it's pretty simple, really. Are you familiar with Netmeeting? If you live away from your dear ones and have access to the internet, you might do. You need a webcam, headphones and microphone, and a keyboard. You have a chat option, a whiteboard and a file share program. By opening Netmeeting you can access these tools. All functions are common to both the teacher and the student. My student can write on the whiteboard just as I can, unless I decide to block him out. The chat can be used to “cut and paste” texts.

It all very much resembles a “standard” face to face lesson, with the advantage of being able to save all your work (whiteboard included) at the end of the lesson. Nothing gets lost. I can write on the board and then rearrange what I have written to make it look tidier, prettier or easier to memorize, I can ask my student to rearrange the whiteboard according to his taste and logic, so that it becomes his notebook. I can change the colour of words, the size of them and jumble them up.

What you can't do is move about with the student, use flash cards as rapidly (it takes a few second for an image to reach the whiteboard on the other side), pull faces to show emotions, use your body to help memorization, and still today I can't use audio CDs from course books. The alternative is to give the student the CD and tell him what to listen to and when to stop playing.

Still, students really have to make an effort to listen and speak because body language is not present, which makes for really good telephone practice, and it makes communicating a bit more challenging, since you have to be exact with your words. Beginners (and others) can benefit from the whiteboard by drawing pictures using an optical pen, or the mouse, when things get hard to put into words.

I am now teaching EFL online about 20 hours a week. The start was fantastic, I felt like a pioneer, putting up with little technical problems stoically. I had to learn new skills, using the optical pen to write phonemic symbols, for example. The biggest downside is technical. The audio. It is vital for the audio to be of very high quality. Students need to hear my voice clearly, or they will struggle even more to understand and feel frustrated. I need to understand what my students say, for pronunciation especially. The hardest sounds to tell apart are /s/ and /f/. I have to really concentrate on what I hear, and sometimes there's a bad connection where all I can hear is a hiccoughing voice coming from space, especially when students launch into longer monologues. It's a shame when that happens as I have to ask them to repeat and I feel they might think I am not appreciating their effort.

So will online teaching become more popular? Judging by my students, it has a certain appeal. What they lose from me not being physically present, they gain in being able to have their lessons at more convenient times, and the oral skills are practised intensely. I can see it as extremely useful for anyone who regularly speaks on the phone. The visual back-up is vital though. It makes it a lesson, with a shared focus.

My boss is now also looking for alternative software, and this will allow us to open “virtual rooms” where there could be up to 4 students from any part of the world. I could be having a mixed class, just like the ones teachers in the UK are familiar with.!