Teach English in XiAnfeng Zhen - Bayannao'er Shi — Bayan Nur

In 2018, the Chinese online education industry was valued at 36 billion US dollars and is projected to grow over the coming years (Li 2019). The future of teaching English will inevitably include online learning and this will, in turn, have an impact on teaching the language. In this paper we will discuss how teaching English in an online environment is affected by physical location, materials, equipment, and course structure. In what follows we have in mind a teacher working remotely for a large online education company in China. To begin with, we will examine the implications of the most salient difference between online teaching and teaching in the classroom–the physical location. Firstly, businesses do not need to pay for rent or any physical materials that may be involved in teaching. Rather, they provide the teacher and student with a reusable IT infrastructure. Therefore, the potential amount of virtual teaching happening simultaneously is far greater than is physically possible. In the case of adult learners, online teaching combats the erratic attendances typically seen from students like business people due to their busy schedules. They have the possibility to book a lesson at any time in the comfort of their own home, at the office, a bar, etc. Teaching times are flexible and the only requirement is a mobile phone or computer. Young learners at times require a guardian to supervise them during the lesson because the teacher is not present in the room; this is especially true when they are very young. This can be a disadvantage for several reasons. The child may find it increasingly difficult to relax due to there being two people essentially monitoring their performance, the added pressure elevates the affective filter which is not conducive to effective learning (Krashen 1981). More importantly, parents sometimes find the need to provide the child with correct responses in order to please the teacher and do not wish to see the infant make errors. This, unfortunately, prevents the teacher from correctly gauging the linguistic capabilities of the student and neither is the student actively involved in language production. Due to the lack of real materials in the virtual classroom, it would be prudent to discuss how online teaching changes this aspect of teaching. Visual aids decrease teacher talk time and can outperform most attempts at verbally explaining vocabulary. In the case of a real classroom, the teacher must prepare the visual aids in advance, however, modern virtual classrooms are set up so that visual aids are always three clicks away and so can be presented to the student almost immediately. This is a serious advantage in creative communication where the emphasis is placed on fluency and the teacher is not in control of the content of the language being produced. If and when the student misuses vocabulary that could not have been anticipated by the teacher, pictures are easily accessible to elucidate their meaning. Furthermore, gifs are another new technology that the teacher could use to explain vocabulary related to actions that would otherwise be difficult like ‘pull’ and ‘push’. Another piece of equipment that the teacher must pay close attention to is the camera. Eye contact can be used in the real classroom to indicate who is to speak, ensure students understand, and to check that everyone is participating. Unfortunately, the use of the eyes is phenomenologically different in the virtual classroom and the technology precludes the aforementioned uses. Adult learners usually do not wish to be seen, and your ears will be the only sense that can indicate student understanding, stifling the teacher’s ability to monitor the success of an activity and rendering the ability to observe at a distance obsolete. Although unnatural, teachers need to learn to look at the camera that is filming them as this gives the impression that you are looking directly at the student you are talking to. The drawback, of course, is that the teacher now cannot look at the student’s face, if it is available at all, in order to judge whether the student understands what she is being taught. The microphone should be of reasonable quality and preferably one that does not pick up too much noise outside of the room the teacher is in. Good microphones will typically be plugged into your device via a USB cable. In terms of using the microphone when speaking, a teacher must adjust the timing of his speech relative to the delay in the connection between the students. Responding to a student immediately, as you would in a real classroom, will usually result in talking over the student. Having a conversation flow effortlessly online can be an art form in its own right. The interactive whiteboard that some companies provide for teachers online can alleviate some issues that inevitably arise when using real materials. As teachers, we cannot expect our students to bring their own materials such as paper, pens and the like, and in the online classroom, we completely circumvent this problem by using the whiteboard. The whiteboard can be interactive on both the teacher’s and the student’s side which means that children can draw and color. Lastly, concerning the course itself, the student has the ability to customize the content she will be learning typically through a needs analysis. In large companies, the teacher does not issue the test: at times an algorithm pairs students and teachers with similar interests. This creates a kind of negotiated syllabus, whereby the student has some control over the content of the course and will be further motivated to participate, shifting the emphasis to a more student-centered approach (Xiaoyan 2010). In conclusion, we have discussed certain features of online education platforms that have an impact on the way English can be taught. These are by no means an exhaustive list, but serve to show how online teaching is different from that of a physical classroom. Word Count: 982 References Krashen, Stephen. "Second language acquisition." Second Language Learning 3, no. 7 (1981): 19-39. Li, Huo. “Companies Betting on China's $36 Billion Online Education Market,” September 25, 2019. https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-09-25/Companies-betting-on-China-s-36-billion-online-education-market-Kh2vFhw328/index.html. Xiaoyan Xie, Why are students quiet? Looking at the Chinese context and beyond, ELT Journal, Volume 64, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 10–20