Town
of Tisma, Masaya, Nicaragua - Photo by Jonathan Acuña
Planning
Synchronous Language Classes
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
School of English
Faculty of Social Sciences
Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Friday, June 29, 2018
Post 325
“Synchronous online classes provide
opportunities for students to practice speaking. This is especially important
for students taking courses online or in blended mode, where they have fewer
opportunities for speaking than in 100% face-to-face courses” (The Consultants-E, 2017) . Synchronous
sessions cannot be handled in the same way that we hold F2F classes with
language learners; the fact is that in a F2F session we teachers tend to do the
teaching rather than have students do the learning by themselves online. But
when it comes to talking about fully online language courses, pupils face
themselves with the need to be provided with chances to practice their speaking
and communication skills.
What is then an instructor meant to do
during his “live” synchronous working sessions with the learners? Part of the
answer to this question is linked to the kind of instructional design model
that is used to build up each practice session with the students. At the
beginning when my curricular design team was confronted with the challenge to
come up with an online ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) program, most of the
things we did was to collect activities that could complement the autonomous
online work our students have. With a bit of trial and error and then
redefining what we were doing to have students practice, I went back to my
books and started reviewing the scope of the ADDIE Instructional Design
approach to working with distance education and synchronous and asynchronous
courses. And as the model proposes, one has to come up with a
design/development structure to cope with ELF-practicing needs in a virtual
classroom (VC).
To give a more solid answer to the
above question about the instructor’s work in the VC with ELF students, an
instructional model for online practice was proposed. Since our learners do not
have a core course book, they access the material they must learn from the LMS
provided by the publisher we work with. Basically,
a sequence of steps was proposed to have pupils deal with the thematic unit
content they cover autonomously: 1) Review, 2) Controlled Activity, 3) Breakout
Room (BR) session, and 4) Extension Activity. The flexibility of the model
allows us to provide as many reviews as needed, and the same applies to
controlled activities or BR sessions. The one condition for all of these
learning activities as tasks is that learners are the ones doing the talking
most of the time.
Review
Activities
|
Since the course my students are taking
is fully online and with all resources for their learning on the course LMS, a
series of review activities were designed and developed to activate student
“prior learning” while working independently. For us this has been a way to
verify the right pronunciation of new lexical items or the correct use of a
syntactical point. These review activities are the backbone of the tasks that
come immediately after. And as mentioned before, to make sure that they are
their new knowledge is activated, we have these activities as part of the
lesson.
|
Controlled
Activities
|
The second step in our work on a given
thematic unit is the use of controlled activities to work with learners on
vocabulary and grammar. Controlled activities are simple ways for me, the
instructor, to know whether students can or cannot use the lexical items in
the correct context and how proficient they have become with structures
pertaining the thematic unit, things they have worked autonomously prior
their participation in the VC. It becomes a way to verify student
comprehension of new content and whether they are or not ready to start “playing”
with the new piece of language learned by themselves.
|
BR
Sessions
|
As it does happen in a F2F classroom
where we organize pair and group work to have learners practice what we are
studying, the BRs are of great importance for the sake of their learning; the
BR allows them to practice both lexis and syntax in a meaningful context
where -in the real world- they could be using their new knowledge. The BR
sessions for me have become the place for production activities we all
language instructors look forward to having with our students so they can
manipulate language in a meaningful context for them, a context that reflect
what they can encounter in the real world.
|
The cycle of review activities,
controlled activities, and BR sessions is repeated as many times it is necessary
within the class. That is, depending on the grammar foci included in each
thematic unit, this cycle repeats itself to have learners activate their
“prior learning” to benefit from all activities. For instance, if the unit
contains four grammar foci, there might me a minimum of two to three cycles
where syntactical points are grouped and practiced from “hand-led” reviews to
fully independent practice in pairs or small groups.
|
|
Extension
Activity
|
These activities are created to motivate
learners to go beyond the VC and to continue practicing English on their own.
An extension activity consists of an autonomous task where students are
prompted to use the language meaningfully and practically in various types of
sets of activities:
1)
Interviews to
people outside the VC and to report to the class even if these are in their
first language,
2)
Real-life reading tasks where learners are sent to read a native
speaker’s type of reading on webpages, to answer questions about content and
to activate their higher thinking order skills (HOTS). In class there is
usually a report/discussion about the topic, and
3)
Video-viewing tasks where students have to listen to a video
created for and by native speakers. Selective listening is encouraged to
provide specific details about the video information and questions to
activate their HOTS, too.
|
“It’s important to remember that
unless students get a chance to practice
using the language in realistic communicative situations, they are unlikely
to learn to use English effectively. So when we hold synchronous classes with students,
we need to ensure that they get plenty of
opportunities to produce English, in pairs and in small groups” (The Consultants-E, 2017) . What happens if
this “practice” does not take place in the virtual classroom? Learners are just
practicing with “static” language in the platform but does not get to use it
meaningfully for communication. As it can be concluded, planning synchronous
classes is a complex task that can be achieved if executed correctly.
References
The Consultants-E. (2017, June 29). Planning
Synchronous Classes. Retrieved from Train2Do:
http://www.train2do.com/moodle/mod/page/view.php?id=56701&inpopup=1
