Learners in an Online Environment

Language Learners in an Online Environment

The following are my observations and suggestions towards examples of online teaching. The links to each video are included next to the video number. My suggestions and observations are supported by relevant research and articles in the literature which are all cited and linked at the bottom of this article.

Video 1: https://youtu.be/sKsOw7zBgcc

Overall, I thought this teacher did pretty well. In my own online teaching experience, I remember how hard it can be to teach young students online, distractions happen. She was really positive and encouraged all the students who participated which further encouraged other students to participate because of the positive learning environment (Kaplan, 2019). Even when some students spoke in English or struggled, she was very encouraging and asked kids to participate and all the students seemed to participate. I think another good thing was the use of visuals and movements. At multiple parts of the class, there were opportunities to draw, move and interact with other students. I think the first clicking game with multiple choice was a bit difficult since they can’t read the characters (they’re difficult characters). Maybe a way to help this situation is by adding the pinyin (English letters to help with Chinese pronunciation) so students could try to choose an option themselves. Another thing I noticed with this multiple-choice question activity is that it wasn’t clear to the students what was expected of them. The first question showed a clock and four options written in characters. The student seemed a little confused about what the expectation was. I think the teacher could have modeled a question first to show that the students were meant to say what shape the object was instead of naming the object itself. This would help with the overall scaffolding of the lesson (Witt, 2020).

It was interesting to see a math class taught in Chinese, the language students were learning as well. This is a demonstration of teaching language skills across curriculums. Students can draw upon previous knowledge and simultaneously pick up more language through their knowledge in their L1 (Kaplan, 2019). This type of strategy reminds me of the SIOP framework where language learning is happening through academic content.

The teacher mostly focused on listening and speaking in the lesson. I think for this age, that is appropriate. There were also some considerations for multiple learning styles. Visuals were used at different points throughout the lesson that could help support any visual learners. Students were encouraged to speak, and the teacher mostly spoke Chinese except for a few translations which would support them as auditory learners and learners of a new language. She also incorporated drawing and making the shapes using their hands, this could support any visual and kinesthetic learners.

In my own class, I try to use clear modeling and leveled scaffolding frequently. Since I work with young children who are learning a new language, it is important for me to use scaffolding to better prepare them to build on their knowledge as the class progresses. I also rely heavily on modeling. Whenever I introduce a new activity to my class or even reviewing an old one, I make sure to set up an example first where I will do it first, then a strong student with a good understanding and then everyone can try. Sometimes with really young students, you might have to model something 10 times before they understand and even then, they could still need additional support.

Video 2: https://youtu.be/wyFu7nMsb24

What stood out the most to me in this video was how engaging the teacher was with her students. She created a good environment and had good rapport with the students. This creation of the appropriate environment can truly change the language learners’ experience and growth (Kaplan, 2019). Right at the beginning of class, she sets up the environment, shows the class agenda and gets the students up and moving while remaining on the class topic. The ABC yoga can help students to move and stretch to wake themselves up for the morning class and can help them to focus on the class material and content once class has started. The teacher does a really good job of speaking slowly and grading her language too for the abilities of the students. For words that might be difficult such as author, she defines these using other words the student knows and can conceptualize. This can help build students’ vocabulary building and connection to the class. She also has students read aloud the instructions for the class and some of the writing prompts throughout the lesson. This incorporates both reading and speaking domains. This also serves to increase the students’ speaking time which in a language class is important to set up those opportunities. She also includes multiple different medias throughout the class. There are a lot of visuals, writing, pictures and drawings. Only at one point where she is explaining the materials needed for the next part of class did I think another visual representation could be helpful to show the materials needed to accommodate more learners. Another thing I noticed was the use of technology incorporated in the class that facilitated class collaboration. She used Padlet and google suite to engage the class and collect student responses (Breiseth, 2020). She used clear modeling and showed her own example for each of the activities she presented to the class and discussed multiple genres and examples to appeal and engage more students. She was also very clear about what slide was presented so that students could follow along on their own or could reference a specific slide if they needed to. I think this is a great way to be clear about instructions and also support ELL students (Witt, 2020).

In my own teaching, I like to think that I am upbeat and welcoming. I think I have a good connection with my students and they are happy to participate in my class. I usually have my students get up and move at the beginning of class because it really improves their focus. I also really pay attention to my modelling strategies. When I was first starting out as a teacher, I was always told off by lack of clear modeling and leveled scaffolding. I think because this was something I struggled with for such a long time and got lots of specific feedback about, it’s something that it at the forefront of all my lessons.

Video 3: https://youtu.be/r0aokiKAP4o

The main thing that struck me about this class was how disinterested the teacher seemed. Though there was some rapport with students, the teacher and the students seemed bored. I think in some cases, the students seemed more interested in the content than the teacher! I understand from my own experience that teaching online and staying positive on that platform can be difficult but for the sake of the students, this is something that I really think should be addressed. I think that for this age of student, having the super positive outgoing personality might be a bit much but this teacher seemed very cold. Another thing I noticed about this class was the lack of modelling. A couple times in the class, she would ask the students to go to a specific activity without showing or even saying how to get to it. This led to a lot of student confusion and some disruptive behaviors. I think it is especially important to model things online and even more so when students are expected to go between different platforms (Witt, 2020). Another thing I would recommend for this class is using some more visuals. At some points there was no visual or even clearly written instructions for what was expected of students. At a couple different points in the class, students didn’t seem to be doing anything and seemed uncertain of what to do. I think these situations where students are confused and therefore just idle create situations that are difficult to handle if a student starts acting up. There was also a point where a student asked to go to the bathroom, and he wasn’t allowed to go. I read once that we should treat our students in class with the same respect that we treat our co-workers and so that really stood out to me. I said in my annotations as teachers our job is in part to accommodate students and provide supports and solutions. If I was a student in that context, there’s no way I would be able to focus in that situation. I think that a more appropriate response would be to let the student go to the bathroom, especially since the content right after was a review of something already covered. If additional support is needed, the teacher could ask the student to refer to the recorded class or submit a quick note on whatever content was covered but those weren’t given as options. I also think that while she did a good job bringing in a real-world example with the example of the covid vaccine, the main example was a PB&J sandwich. There are a lot of ways that could have been used to incorporate something pertaining to the student’s own cultures or they could have written their procedure to make a dish they make in their families. This would still work on the scientific goal to write procedures here, but it would incorporate the students’ cultures (Kaplan, 2019). There were also multiple points where peer feedback could have been used more so it didn’t feel like the teacher was consistently saying ‘no’ (Miller 2020). Many times, she could’ve answered a concept checking question that students could respond to and peer correct if needed and those opportunities were never given for students to participate in that way.

In my own teaching, I really try to focus on my students speaking and interacting with each other. Because I worked at an English Training Center before, we really focused on gamification of our lessons and I have carried that into my current teaching practice. I think that this allows students to support one another and gives more kids opportunities to talk and teach their peers. I think ELL students especially benefit from this type of interaction

Video 4: https://youtu.be/NdPuKYmB61Y

My first impression was that he spoke in a really calm way, and I think he thought about slowing down to fit the needs of his students. He also showed vocabulary words accompanied by photos to serve as supporting examples of the students’ culture. This was a great way to tie in their culture to the class. He also refers frequently to past covered content. I have found this to be super important when teaching my own students and it’s something I wish my teachers had done when I was in school. This can help to help create connections and build on past knowledge which they needed to use for the project they created at the end. Lots of really good cross-cultural references were also made in the grammar part of the lesson. The examples shows the students’ culture and the teachers’ culture which I thought was really cool (Kaplan, 2019). In the dialogues section, the dialogues were shown on the teacher’s screen and made good use of sentence frames and referenced the grammar patterns taught. In the video, the teacher also shared helpful resources to help guide students and well as provided sentence starters to help in the writing process. Finally, he showed good modeling and gave examples and supports for each activity. He incorporates multiple types of media to connect with students and had students comment to each other giving an opportunity for peer correction (Miller 2020). My one suggestion or question rather is, how much are the students actually participating? I noticed this whole video was mostly the teacher talking so I’m wondering if the students got to actually speak to each other or shar ideas in that way. Maybe a breakout room could address this. Other than that, I thought this lesson was fairly reasonable given the student population. He covered reading, writing and listening and assuming there was some kind of student speaking activity, he would’ve covered all four language domains though that wasn’t shown in the video.

In my own teaching, I try to get a lot of input and spoken participation from my students. I frequently ask questions to get their ideas and as long as we stay on topic, I let those ideas guide parts of the class. For this class, I think during the vocabulary section he could’ve asked students for their input and examples from their own cultures and experiences (Kaplan 2019).

Overall, I saw bits of myself in all these videos, both in good strategies and bad habits, to be completely honest. I think the online learning experience can be really difficult for language learners. I take my Chinese classes online and I can follow along really well but I’m also 24 years old and speak, read and write Chinese at a higher level. So, is it fair to have these expectations on young students who know less of the language to follow along with no visual supports or use of multiple forms of media? No. I think of my own students and my own online teaching experiences, and they are drastically different from my online learning experiences. Because all my teaching experience is with young children learning English especially while they are still learning their first language, visuals and multimedia resources are really important for me to include to let the students breathe a little bit while taking in new knowledge. I also put a lot of focus on scaffolding both within each lesson and throughout a unit. This was something I struggled with a lot though starting out. Before working in a school, my only teaching experience was in swim coaching and lessons, so I treated them as the same. What I failed to realize though was that I was scaffolding then too. With my young students, we had to get them comfortable with the water, comfortable with putting their heads in the water, teach them how to breathe, how to kick, how to move their arms and then how to put it all together. In the same way, if I’m teaching a student to write a letter of the alphabet, start by identifying the letter, trace the letter with help, trace the letter themselves, then write the letter. I also have been fortunate enough to include my student’s L1 in my class. Because of my knowledge of Chinese, I can understand their questions and needs and support them in Chinese if needed. I think that is a really good strategy that simplifies life for everyone that frequently gets ignored. I also think that the engaging ways teachers use to teach their classes online now are getting so advanced, technology is such a great resource it’s eye-opening to see and hear about all these technologies being used in the classroom. I’m excited to keep learning more strategies to help me as a teacher and most importantly to help, support and inspire my students.

References:

Alrubail, R. (2016, July 7). Equity for English-Language Learners. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/equity-for-english-language-learners-rusul-alrubail.

Breiseth, L. (2020, November 13). How to Expand ELLs' Access to Technology for Distance Learning. Colorín Colorado. https://www.colorincolorado.org/article/distance-learning-ell-technology.

Kaplan, E. (2019, April 12). 6 Essential Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/6-essential-strategies-teaching-english-language-learners.

Miller, S. (2020, April 27). A Strategy for Giving Corrective Feedback to ELLs. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/strategy-giving-corrective-feedback-ells.

Witt, D. (2020, July 13). 5 Effective Modeling Strategies for English Learners. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/5-effective-modeling-strategies-english-learners.