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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783093779 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Channel View Publications |
| Publication date: | 07/30/2015 |
| Series: | MM Textbooks , #12 |
| Edition description: | Second Edition |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.85(w) x 9.65(h) x 0.75(d) |
About the Author
Natasha Anthony is Director of the International Language Laboratory and Assistant Professor of Russian at Hudson Valley Community College in New York. She also teaches graduate online courses in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the Universityat Albany, State University of New York. Her research focuses on Computer Assisted Language Learning and, more specifically, on the use of synchronous and asynchronous oral components in online language courses.
Read an Excerpt
Teaching languages online
By Carla Meskill, Natasha Anthony
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2015 Carla Meskill and Natasha AnthonyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78309-377-9
CHAPTER 1
Teaching languages online: the essentials
* This initial chapter discusses the fundamental concepts involved in online language teaching and introduces the approach and format for the proceeding chapters.
* With the focus in this and subsequent chapters being on active teaching in online venues, foundations of task design and their orchestration via instructional conversations are established.
* The chapter supplies definitions for the four online language learning environments and their affordances.
* Fundamentals of designing task toolkits for online language teaching are outlined and illustrated.
What this book is about
Available time
Instructional time
Task design
Management
Content/Sequencing
Assessment
The four environments
Blended learning
Learning community
A sociocultural view of language teaching and learning
Why online?
Traditional forms of f2f classroom discourse
Instructional conversations
Conclusion
End-of-chapter activities
References
Teaching languages online: the essentials
There is no question that teaching and learning languages online is growing in popularity. The reasons for this growth are many. Chief among them is the matter of convenience. Rather than traveling distances short and long to participate in face-to-face (f2f) courses, people wishing to study a new language have only to turn to their computer or mobile screens at any hour of the day or night and access instruction. The forms that this instruction takes are many and varied; some depending on instructors, some depending on standalone instructional materials and many a combination of both. Moreover, many language educators who teach in the traditional f2f classroom are making good use of online tools and materials as complements to their courses as places where students can practice and study outside of class time. In short, the amount of instructional activity taking place in cyberspace is enormous and, as we hope you will find in this text, enormously exciting.
Those who are skeptical about online learning tend to point to the loss of the fast-paced, stimulating interaction that takes place in live language classrooms. It is true that the timing, and with it the dynamics of interactions is radically different. However, as we explore throughout this text, there are numerous affordances that can, when exploited by excellent instruction, mitigate the absence of live interaction. Indeed, since we first began teaching online several years ago, students report that where they once enjoyed the lively pacing and adrenaline of live classes, they were finding the timing aspect in online forums more to their liking. This seems especially true for learners who are less outgoing in live contexts; the luxury of time and quasi-anonymity work in their favor. Language learners who otherwise do not react well under the pressure of real-time comprehension and production in live classrooms particularly enjoy online language learning.
What this book is about
This text lays out methods and their rationale for optimal uses of online environments for effective language teaching. It primarily addresses professional language educators, those new to the field, those with experience in traditional classrooms and those who teach partly or fully online. Our three foundational premises are as follows.
* Language learning is made up of primarily social/instructional processes.
* Online environments can be used well socially and instructionally.
* Teaching well in online environments requires skilled instruction.
We therefore focus on the kinds of teacher instructional moves in conversation with students, what we call, along with Tharp and Gallimore (1991), 'instructional conversations' that in our work are proving highly effective for teaching language in online environments. Before expanding further on these three foundational premises for our approach to online language teaching, we will address some essential practical matters that concern the mechanics and logistics of online teaching: time, management, learning goals and assessment.
Available time
Online teaching and learning can take place as it does in f2f classroom synchronously, that is in real time, or asynchronously, whenever it is participants choose to interact. Both of these teaching modes require conceptualizations of time that are quite different from traditional meet-four-times-a-week planning and participation structures. At the beginning design stages, the development of online instructional elements is time consuming. In the long term, however, the fact of having all materials and structures in a single place is a time saver. In regard to the actual teaching/contact time with students, online teaching is often viewed as requiring more time than face-to-face as instead of having contact with students three to four times per week, one is having contact every day. And, as mentioned earlier, students who would otherwise shy away from actively participating in f2f contexts are more than likely contributing more and more often for reasons we will discuss shortly. This in turn compels instructors to be more actively and continuously responsive throughout the term. Although instructors are quick to point out these time investments, they are also quick to qualify these by citing other areas where enormous amounts of time are saved. We mentioned having all one's course materials in once place. In addition, there is the matter of convenience. Many online instructors log onto their courses when it suits their schedules; not at 11:00 am every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but rather some days, evenings or mornings as their schedules permit. Traveling to and from a physical classroom, parking, meals away from home, even clothing and childcare can all be factored in to counterbalance the time investment in online education. Most instructors who calculate and consider the shifts in how their time is spent testify to the increase in the quality time they can spend teaching well in exchange for time spent on activity extraneous to actual instruction.
Students also enjoy the time savings of online learning. For many contemporary students, the time and logistics of traveling to a physical classroom according to a set schedule can be challenging. Students who work and who have families can study anytime and anywhere that suits their busy schedules. There are the larger life time issues and then there is the matter of instructional time itself.
Instructional time
In addition to available time (above), this text is particularly interested in instructional time; that is, the time that both instructors and learners have to carefully consider the form and content of their online postings in online venues. For learners, it is within this thinking, comprehending and composing time that active language learning is taking place. For instructors, it is within this thinking, comprehending and composing time that optimal instructional conversation moves can be devised given the current status of the class discussion. Both students and their teachers can, moreover, use this time to access any and all information they need to comprehend, compose and instruct. For students, the most obvious example might be taking advantage of online resources such as dictionaries, thesauruses and even native speaker friends in composing their posts. For instructors, they can access and in turn make use of background cultural information, artifacts, visuals, animated grammar explications and the like to amplify instructional conversation moves.
Task design
Like in the traditional f2f language classroom, a major part of instructional routines involves tasks in which learners engage with the aim of their practicing and thus learning target language forms and functions. A language learning task can be thought of as a structured activity that has clear instructional objectives, content and context that is culturally authentic and appropriate and specified procedures for its undertaking. Tasks are, then, activities in which learners engage for the purpose of mastering aspects of the target language under study. They range in complexity from brief language workouts (e.g. listen and repeat, listen or read and perform a grammatical transformation) to more complex activities such as role play simulations, group decision making, or sustained interactions with native speakers for problem solving. The essential element that defines language learning tasks is the purpose, objective or outcome of the task, an element that we will stress throughout this text. It is through a consistent focus on task objectives that teachers make productive use of instructional conversation moves to guide and enhance the learning.
The task toolkit is a convention that we use throughout this text. It is the set of language elements that make up the focus of a given language task. One advantage of online instruction in this regard is that these toolkits can be collected and managed in a course task repository and reused as needed. The information in the task toolkit should be as simple and direct as possible as it is to these language elements that instructors and students refer as they undertake and evaluate the processes and outcomes of the given task. Our convention is to place this boxed text in the upper right-hand corner of all screens as a consistent anchoring and referencing tool (Figures 1 and 2).
Roles for learners can be specified much as they are in the live classroom. In online environments, however, one can also provide links to background language and cultural information concerning the roles that learners are assigned. If, for example, a student is assigned the role of a bank manager in a bank robbery role play, links to target culture sites and information (video clips are particularly useful in understanding target culture social roles) can be included in the description of the particular assigned role. In this way also learners can have background about one another's roles so as to better attune their communication patterns with one another.
Similarly, in setting the scene for a language learning task, students and instructors have at their fingertips massive amounts of background information in multimodal forms. Taking the bank robbery role play task as an example, learners can see and explore banks and banking routines, even delve into famous historical robberies in the target culture as part of preparing to undertake the task.
Action expectations and action monitoring constitute the heart of powerful instructional conversations. As you will see throughout the text, this aspect of language learning tasks is where we believe the real teaching and learning occur. Learners are expected to comprehend and produce specified language correctly (action expectations) and instructors monitor accordingly. In monitoring these task-guided conversations, instructors seek out teachable moments – moments where learners need a push, a reminder, reference to the task goals and/or task toolkit, or probes of their understanding of target culture and context. These teachable moments represent rich opportunities in online environments in terms of time and available resources as we discussed above. We will discuss the goals and anatomy of instructional conversations more thoroughly at the end of this chapter and, subsequently, illustrate these throughout the remaining chapters.
Management
Managing ten to thirty students three or four times per week in traditional classroom settings is onerous. How does one manage the learning in online environments? As mentioned earlier, the sheer fact of having all of one's materials, all student work, all archives of what has taken place in one online location is a great time saver in the long term. Being able to revisit what has already occurred in class over time can be a powerful management tool in assisting with future instructional planning as well. Managing all of this information can be facilitated through the use of a Course Management System (CMS) whereby special tools are provided to track learners, their assignments, their participation structures and their contributions. Thus, the kinds of continually and automatically updated information about online learning activity can greatly ease the overall management of coursework that takes place online.
An element of management that can in large part determine the level of success for an online course or online component of a course is the setting of norms and expectations. Because learners are structuring their own time in these online venues, the amount and quality of their participation for optimal learning, and optimal grades, need to be clearly specified and pointed to throughout the term. Actual models and exemplars of optimal participation structures can be provided so that learners are 100% clear on the mode, purpose and level of quality expected. Reminders of these expectations can be visually present and pointed to throughout the term.
In addition to management, one of the most critical features of successful online instruction as reported in research studies is the online behaviors of the instructor. When students log on to their course site, they immediately seek out information on the instructor's recent participation. Likewise, anecdotal and formal research accounts point out that students attend most to the posts of instructors and less to the posts of other students. Consequently, being present and active in the online venue is a critical factor for successful instruction. This means logging on and actively instructing on a consistent, continual basis. Many online students have reported feeling 'abandoned' when instructors take a day off. Thus, part of the online instructional equation is to 'be present' even if it means announcing that you will be offline for the weekend.
Content/Sequencing
In structuring online content and activities, instructors can use a variety of approaches, just like in traditional f2f classes. If the course is structured around the content and sequence of a textbook, support materials and activities can be likewise sequenced. One of the most common uses of an online portion of a language course is to use online discussion spaces as a place for learners to engage in complementary tasks and activities that align with textbook units. In this way online portions are used to support and amplify the content under study. A fully online course can be structured in a similar manner. In many cases language textbook publishers provide online supplementary and support activities that can be incorporated and used to structure the online portion of a language course.
The breadth of any language course is, of course, dependent on its length of study and goals. The depth, however, when undertaken all or in part on the internet, is potentially limitless. Reference, background and expansion materials abound. Making good, sound use of these limitless content possibilities starts with examining the purposes and goals of the tasks and activities that make up the course. Websites from the target language and culture can be effectively repurposed and mined for use by learners as the basis of communicative language learning tasks. Examples of ways to make use of these resources appear throughout the following chapters.
Assessment
Micro-level
As language learning is a dynamic and multifaceted enterprise, one that is influenced by any number of individual and contextual factors, in this text we advocate the centrality of ongoing formative assessment of student learning. In this view, the two – instruction and assessment – are viewed as interdependent. As an instructor is evaluating learner comprehension and performance, it is on this evaluation that she bases the construction of her subsequent instructional moves, her instruction in effect. This marriage of instruction/assessment happens in instructional conversations where opportunities for authentic interaction in the target language are orchestrated and overseen by an instructor with specific plans and goals. Her responses to learners as they undertake instructional activities are responsive to her assessment of learner performance and, thereby, readiness in a given teachable moment. This is instruction that pushes a learner along his or her developmental trajectory towards mastery of the focal target language (Meskill, 2009).
Macro-level
Online venues are excellent ones for tracking learner progress. Whether you use a free and open communication forum or a sophisticated CMS, you will have digital records of student performance. These can be in the form of graded exercises, essays and other kinds of individual assignments. Assessments can also be made of the threaded discourse contributions learners have made while undertaking tasks and while responding to instructor prompts and guidance. These kinds of running records of learner growth and development in the new language take assessment to a new and quite powerful level as they supply archived information upon which to base subsequent instruction – something the most expert teachers would have difficulty tracking in f2f venues. These digital records, moreover, can serve as a guide for learners themselves to gain a sense of their strengths, weaknesses and overall progress. Collecting exemplary moments in class discussions and/or learning tasks and assembling these in a student-generated electronic portfolio is an excellent instructional strategy both in terms of student learning and in conserving instructor time for actual teaching.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Teaching languages online by Carla Meskill, Natasha Anthony. Copyright © 2015 Carla Meskill and Natasha Anthony. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction to the 2nd Edition 1: Teaching Languages Well Online: The Essentials 2: Language Learning and Teaching in Oral Synchronous Environments 3: Language Learning and Teaching in Oral Asynchronous Environments 4: Oral Venues Amplified via Text and Visuals 5: Language Learning and Teaching in Written Synchronous Environments 6: Language Learning and Teaching in Written Asynchronous Environments 7: Written Venues Amplified via Sound and Visuals 8: Continuing the Conversation Glossary of Terms IndexWhat People are Saying About This
This is a must-read for anyone teaching languages in an online environment. It is certainly my go-to book on the topic. Extensive revisions from the earlier edition make it an absolutely up-to-date resource.
In this second edition of Meskill's and Anthony's milestone contribution to the field, the authors describe the fundamental shifts in online teaching and learning over the past decade in the wake of social media, gaming and mobile devices. They consider the impact these techno-pedagogical developments continue to have on a conceptual and practical level on the roles and skills of new and established language educators. The work is enriched with many new models and illustrations designed to support research-based creativity and practice.