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I used to be an offline teacher but now I give lessons online, actually, I think these two ways are different a lot. First, I want to point out some factors about online classes. Now, for online classes, it’s a convenient and high-efficient way to teach oral English, as it breaks the limits of time and space. Student don’t need to spend one hour to go to offline classrooms from their company during peak time, they also don’t need to bear class rush when some classes are during peak time or given by a popular teacher. But, at the same time, this new form brings some new challenges. First, in fact, from my personal experience, most students they don’t want to turn on their computer camera, in this way, teachers can’t see students vision, and teachers can’t know what are these students really doing. Meanwhile, students know that teachers can’t supervise them through vision video, they may be distracted by other trivial things. So, online classes teachers should improve our “listening”—we need to have special ability to figure out whether the students are concentrated or not through students voice. Second, a lot of online classes are 1 VS 1 pattern. So, in one class, one teacher and one student should share the time together. For teacher, I think it requires us to do more class preparation before the class. Because there are not “some students”to do activate part together, also, there are not “some students ”to imitate sentence structure or grammar knowledge in turn. So, we teachers should prepare more appropriate questions or interaction activities before the class to guarantee our students still can get enough practice in one class. This also means, teachers may need to speak more than offline classes. Third, the evaluation becomes harder than offline classes. The reason is simple, because most of the time, we can’t see students’ vision video, so we can’t get information from their face or figure expressions. For example, one student may answer a question fluently, if we can only get the sound information, we may judge this student can handle this level’s English. But if we can also get vision information, we may notice the student tries to recite some answer from his or her memory from his or her unnatural face expression or rigid body language. So, teachers should be more careful and ask more question to get accurate evaluation. Last but not the least, I think network slowdown is also a situation we need to care about. Now, online classes break the limit of space. So, I have taught some students who live abroad. And the network slowdown shows the influence. Always, when I think that the students finish his or her answer and I continue my class by giving new questions or instructions, the students’ slowdown voice continues also. So, in this situation, I always interrupt students’ expression unintentionally. To be honestly, I don’t know how to deal with this phenomenon. Because if I wait 1 or 2 seconds after students’ last letter each time, and the students don’t have more words to express, the class rhythm can be boring and weird. But if I keep my rhythm, as I mentioned before, I may always interrupt students’ expressions. And I think this can affet their enthusiasm and confidence. These are some personal perspective upon online classes. 3 mentions things differ in online classes, and the last one, I think it’s my puzzle, I noticed this phenomenon, but I haven’t found out solutions.
