Question-Answer

Professional Dialogue on Contemporary Issues in ELT and Learning

NELTA ELT Forum team has continued a question-answer section as done in the past issue to encourage our readers to actively participate in the contemporary issues in a question-answer form. In this section, we have presented experts’ ideas in the form of questions and answers. The answers to the questions are based on experts’ professional engagements, recent research works, and scholarships.

In this issue, we have tried to seek practical solutions from the relevant experts for four pertinent questions raised by NELTA members representing various branches across the nation. The answers include (a) use of technology to enhance ELT by Dr. Dawn Bikowski (b) ways and procedures of designing online classes for teaching English to young learners by Dr. Suman Laudari, (c) ways/strategies for engaging college students in online interaction by Mr. Sagun Shrestha, and (d) balancing teachers’ and students’ emotional wellbeing in remote/online learning during the pandemic by Ms. Sumnima Dewan.

How can technology support ELT? How can technology be used to enhance ELT? How can YouTube support ELT? How can teachers effectively facilitate listening and speaking skills development of their learners from their early grades? How can the above two core skills be effectively assessed?

– Mahesh Raj Chaudhary and Dharmadev Chaudhary

Response from Dr. Dawn Bikowski

Technology can be used in many ways to enhance ELT, but the important thing is to focus on pedagogy first. Technology is an outstanding resource and tool, but it supports good teaching—it doesn’t replace it. Start by first identifying what you want your students to be able to do—for example, discuss current events using the simple present and present perfect, or identify main points vs. details in a listening passage about the importance of education, or give a presentation about their family using the correct intonation speaking patterns. Then find the technology that will serve your learning objectives best. You’ll also want to consider your students and teaching situation—Do they use their smartphones or laptops? Do they have a reliable internet connection and a good data plan? What do they need and what interests them? With these ideas in mind, here are some ways that technology can facilitate language learning:

Rote Memorization: Language learning still requires memorization! Technology can help with some of these less-glamourous tasks, such as through virtual flashcards (Quizlet) or word collections (vocabulary.com). You can make the word collections, ask students to make them, or use ones that others have made. You can also assign students to do online grammar exercises to practice forms. Many are freely available online and can easily be found in a Web search. Or you can make your own quizzes in your learning management system (Canvas, Google Classroom). But keep in mind, for students to really take advantage of all that technology has to offer, they should go beyond using it just to help with memorization! Communication is key!

Collaboration and Communication: We now have so many apps and tools that allow for collaboration and communication—most of them aren’t for language learning specifically, but we can use them in our courses. Students can collaborate in their writing using GoogleDocs or something similar; they can create group presentations to present in a live videoconference call (such as through Zoom) or record them and share with their classmates (for example on https://padlet.com/); they can post pictures, text, or audio/video files on discussion boards; or they can work in small groups in breakout rooms and come back to share with the class. A great way to encourage collaboration and communication is through project-based learning, where students work for maybe a week or 2 on parts of a larger project, and eventually create and submit a final presentation, poster, video, or paper. Projects are great because they give students something to work toward as they collaborate. It makes the job of learning English for fun and engaging for them. Many teachers use apps such as WhatsApp, which are commonly used by everyone, to get students to talk with each other and practice their English. Whatever works! And we can’t forget online polling software (Kahoot!, PollEverywhere, Mentimeter), where students answer your questions either live during class time (online or f2f) or before class, but all results are saved and can be shared in real-time. Very useful to get a quick idea of what students understand or think. Students can answer individually or as collaborative groups.

Access to the World: With technology, students can get so much information and talk with so many types of people. You can invite experts to your class, for example asking an engineer to speak to your university students about how they use English in their jobs. This is very motivating for students! The expert can speak to your class via videoconferencing or can make a video for your class to watch. That way, you have that video for many students to watch! If you want your students to practice reading, you can write up an interview with an expert and have them read and discuss. You can find so many free books (text and audio) online—many books become more available after the copyright period has passed, so older literature is often easier to access at no cost. Graded readers can be found free online as well, organized by CEFR level and often with quizzes (see some options here https://freegradedreaders.com/). Students love music! You can use a site or app such as https://lyricstraining.com/ to motivate your students. YouTube is of course also full of authentic material. Just be sure you find the material for them instead of telling them just to choose whatever they want. It’s hard for students to make good video choices when there is so much out there. They also have access to useful tools and resources, such as online dictionaries and thesauruses (I love the visual thesauruses such as https://graphwords.com/) or collocation dictionaries (such as https://ozdic.com/). It’s best to teach students how to use these tools effectively for their own learning.

Content Creation: You can make content for your classroom, or you can ask your students to make some (individually or collaboratively). Try making videos (try screencast-o-matic, screencastify, or just use your phone or computer built-in recorder); word clouds to activate students’ schemata or help them predict the topic of a new reading (try http://www.edwordle.net/ or https://wordsift.org); texts and infographics (try https://www.canva.com/); or interactive presentations (try https://www.peardeck.com/ or https://nearpod.com/). Many students enjoy writing expressing themselves by writing their own poems (try the Android/iOS app Poet Assistant) and sharing with their classmates. Or they can use a journaling app or site to express themselves and share what is important to them (try https://penzu.com/). Bookcreator (https://bookcreator.com/) is a wonderful resource if you or your students want to make books, and they have many samples and templates to choose from.

Language Skill Development: Technology also offers many tools to help students learn English, a type of scaffolding as they develop their skills. Try showing your students text-to-speech online readers (such as https://www.naturalreaders.com/) or writing assistants (such as https://www.grammarly.com/). If you want to focus on listening, a very useful resource is Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab (https://www.esl-lab.com/), where students can choose their level and topics. Speech is natural, and key vocabulary and quizzes are provided. Also for listening/speaking, Flipgrid (https://info.flipgrid.com/) and Voicethread (https://voicethread.com/) are very useful tools where students and teachers can post audio for asynchronous discussions (meaning, not in real time). You can refer students to videos about pronunciation at Rachel’s English (https://rachelsenglish.com/) first and then ask them to make their own recordings.

When it comes to assessment, technology can help! Again, it all starts with your learning objectives. You can use multiple choice quizzes to automate your grading and even give automatic feedback. Often, students like to be able to take these types of quizzes many times to keep practicing. Technology makes rubrics much easier now. Many learning management systems (such as Canvas) have an option to build your own rubrics for any assignment; these are great at saving you time when grading, and helping your students know what you expect. If you don’t use one in your LMS, you can create them with tools such as https://www.quickrubric.com/, https://rubric-maker.com/, or http://rubistar.4teachers.org/. It’s best to provide students with the rubric at the beginning of the assignment, and then use it when you actually grade. Whatever technology you choose, just take it step-by-step and remember to focus on the teaching goals firs

About the Author: Dr. Dawn Bikowski is Associate Professor at Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, Monterey, CA.

What are the ways and procedures of designing online classes for teaching English to young learners?

– Krishna Kumar Khatri

Response from Dr. Suman Laudari

Before answering the question, it is essential to note that pedagogy is more important than technology because tech is just a means, not an end. When the focus remains on pedagogy, designing online classes for teaching English can be unpacked with more ease. When designing learning, for example, at the primary level, the first consideration must be on the learning outcomes. Even if you don’t have time to make a detailed lesson plan, at least ask yourself why you are teaching a lesson. What is it that you would like learners to achieve by the end of the class? What do learners need to produce to showcase their learning? Once you consider those questions and their answers, you will then be able to design your online classes. For instance, if you are teaching a story and the learning outcome is to get students to practice pronunciation and reading strategies, you can design a series of activities where students need to read aloud. If your students have access to at least a mobile phone and are attending online classes, you can use the platform you have been using (for example, WhatsApp, Messenger or Google Classroom) to assign those tasks to your students. If you use a messaging application to reach out to your students, send the task with explicit instructions, maybe as a voice message, to the students or their parents. Ask students to complete the task and submit it in Messenger. Because the task is to get students to enhance pronunciation and reading strategies, you can ask them to record themselves reading two paragraphs and send it in Messenger. If you are using Google Classroom or another similar learning management system, ask students to upload it there. Depending on the age of students, students may need parental assistance. So, you may want to send information to the parents as well. Also, depending on student age and access to technology, you can extend the lesson by asking students to give feedback to each other. An example of peer feedback in the primary level could be “I like your reading because….”

As you can see in the example above, when you are aware of the learning outcomes and activities to achieve those outcomes, you can design your lesson flexibly and deliver using the technology that you can access with ease.

About the Author: Dr. Suman Laudari’s career in education spans more than 16 years as a teacher, teacher trainer, academician, and more recently as a learning designer. Dr. Laudari’s PhD research and more recent work concern digital capabilities of academics in higher education, learning design, and seamless use of technology in teaching and learning. Currently, Dr. Laudari is a learning designer and technology specialist at Institute of Interactive Media and Learning (IML), University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia.

What are the ways/strategies of engaging college students in online interaction? Describe them.

– Kamal Raj Dahal

Response from Mr. Sagun Shrestha

It may not be straight forward to delineate the ways or strategies of engaging students in online teaching and learning. However, I will attempt to discuss this concern based on my own experience, and the research we (I along with some other colleagues) have carried out and also by referring to some of my previous write-ups.

In the beginning, before starting the course, it can be a good practice to conduct a small survey to examine the learners’ level of digital literary which can inform the design and delivery of digital literacy training required for a particular class. Secondly, during the orientation session or any other session, a teacher needs to provide training on how-tos if they introduce any new digital tools (See Shrestha, 2020a) or some general information on how web tools will be used in a class provided that the web tools chosen to be used in the class are familiar to the students. There is a high chance that learners might struggle to use a tool, and as a result, he or she might lose interest in engaging in the course. Thirdly, it is also a good idea to inculcate both synchronous and asynchronous learning in an online course as far as possible (see Shrestha, 2020b) so that students can remain active both in live online sessions and in other online platforms used for teaching and learning, where responses will be delayed. To make the learners comfortable in attending online classes before beginning actual lessons, socializing with students can be helpful. Socializing can be done by talking about the weather or how they are and so on. A teacher also needs to think of having a variety of activities to break the monotony in online classes. A mere lecture might end up with boring classes. Shrestha et al. (submitted to the Journal) found that it is useful to have group work in online courses. Group work can always make the learners build a good interaction amongst themselves. To have interactive live sessions, it can also be a good idea to assign learners a pre-live session task or send them a video to watch beforehand and make them participate in a discussion during live sessions (Shrestha, 2021).

At times, a teacher might need to use a webtool in a distinct way than what it is designed for. For instance, the study by Shrestha et al. (2021) reveal that teachers of higher education used Messenger Group as their learning management system (LMS) in Nepal as it was common to them and other LMSs were not available. Even though Messenger is basically developed for social networking, the teachers in Nepal perceived the pedagogical affordance and capitalized that potential for their teaching and learning. I also think that a teacher should not force the learners always to turn on their web camera as the learners might not be comfortable to show their private places where they are staying for learning. Though while teaching, having all students’ camera on in a class can create an ambience of a live class for a teacher, students can equally have multiple issues, such as the one stated above or they may have a bandwidth issue, consequently, the potential interaction among students and/or a student and a teacher can be diminished. Finally, being concerned of learners’ mental well-being while conducting online classes particularly during the pandemic (see Shrestha, 2021) is a useful step so that the learners can feel that the teachers are always ready to help them resolve their any kind of issues which might potentially impact their engagement in learning.

References

Shrestha, S. (2020a). Online classes in Nepal: Can they manage the impact of crisis situation in academic institutions? NELTA ELT Forum. https://neltaeltforum.wordpress.com/2020/04/15/1955/

Shrestha, S. (2020b) How coronavirus has changed third-level education. RTE Brainstorm. https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/0324/1126056-third-level-college-university-technology-coronavirus/

Shrestha, S. (2021). Minimising Covid-19 impact on Nepal education: What can be done next? Online Khabar. https://english.onlinekhabar.com/minimising-covid-19-impact-on-nepal-education-what-can-be-done-next.html

Shrestha, S., Gnawali, L, & Laudari, S. (submitted to the Journal). Issues of participant retention in an online course for English as a foreign language teachers.

Shrestha, S., Haque, S., Dawadi, S., & Giri, R. A. (2021). Preparations for and practices of online education during the Covid-19 pandemic: A study of Bangladesh and Nepal. Education and Information Technologies, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10659-0

About the Author: Mr. Sagun Shrestha is a PhD candidate at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University, Ireland, and he is researching on affordances and challenges of using ICT in secondary school education during crisis settings in Nepal.

How can we balance teachers’ and students’ emotional wellbeing in remote/online learning during pandemic?

– Rejina KC

Response from Ms. Sumnima Dewan

During and post-pandemic, both teachers and students had suffered a lot emotionally and physically. Every day, they heard the news of someone’s death due to a pandemic. They panicked and were in uncertainty how long the situation would last. Running classes stopped suddenly and teaching and learning shifted from physical to virtual mode. It was quite a new situation for both teachers and students. They were not prepared. Both were obliged to adapt the digital teaching and learning. In the context of Nepal, it was quite difficult to implement virtual teaching, especially in rural areas. Many teachers and students did not have internet connectivity, not proper devices for online learning, they were not familiarized with the use of devices, and moreover, they had to face poor internet connection and power cuts. Socially and emotionally, they were isolated, and most of them went into depression in lacking interaction and communication in-person. They lost their confidence and self-esteem. The COVID-19 pandemic created a lot of problems and challenges in the field of teaching and learning. Slowly everything starts coming back to normalcy, however, the emotional wellbeing of the teachers and students was greatly affected in teaching and learning.

In order to help prevent or reduce the emotional stress of the teachers and students in online teaching, here are a few easy and practical tips and suggestions:

Pre-class: About 10 minutes before the class begins, try to do some mild stretches and exercises such as relaxing, yoga poses, etc. First close your eyes and lie down on the bed or sofa and focus on slowly inhaling and exhaling. All these can help you relax and feel rejuvenated for the class.
During class: Ask your students to do slight stretches and breathing exercise before beginning of the class. So that they can slowly release their mental stress and be ready for the class. Tea- black, green, lemon, jasmine, etc.- have soothing properties during your class, you can slowly sip any one of these teas, plain without milk and sugar. Also, ask for students to take more liquid/water during class. It can help you and students feel calm and lessen anxiety, stress levels.
Post-class: Staring at the laptop screen or smartphone for long hours can increase stress level. After class, please try to get at least a ten-minute break. You can do some mild stretches and exercises again as mentioned above, walk in the garden, etc. And ask students to do a similar exercise after class. The idea is for both to refresh the mind and body.
From time to time, organize virtual meeting, advocacy and counseling to parents that will help to increase more interaction and know about the student’s wellbeing and their mental state. Their home environment plays a great role in wellbeing and building support for the entire family.
In remote online learning, the teacher should provide less workload with more tasks/activities like drawing, language games, project work, peer or group work, etc. Because digital devices have created distance among them and teachers, these types of activities will involve them in interaction and bring them close. Also, these support students’ social, emotional, and mental health during distance learning. It will help them for scaffolding of their mental state initiating with a one-to-one conversation or a small group discussion. Moreover, it will synthesize ideas to bring balance in remote online teaching and learning for both.
Teachers can be a role model for interpersonal development. Teachers can use metacognition awareness through digital instruction. Rich instruction and interaction support the students’ learning and boost elasticity and keep them out from the impact of stress and trauma.
Common greetings, sharing opportunities with students will help to build trust, synchrony and support them to build peer relationships. They are important for developing a growth mindset, self-efficacy, social awareness, and self-management. If their wellbeing improves, then everything will be in balance.

We cannot control external factors that could cause you stress such as poor internet connectivity while teaching online, but we can certainly undertake personal measures to help you feel calm and relaxed. Find below general practical steps one can take to prevent or reduce stress, thereby enhancing one’s wellbeing:

Ask yourself- are you alright/happy? If the answer is no, take 5 minutes to reflect and list out on paper, very truthfully, the reasons contributing to you not being fine.

For example, I am usually stressed because I am having difficulty balancing work and personal life.

Now, reflect further-For example: To balance my work-life, I need help. But am I willing to seek help? If no, why not?

In my experience as a wellbeing coach, I have seen such persistent self-reflection bring about wondrous changes in a person’s life. It is possible. One only needs to start.

Moving on to more practical steps, food is key to being happy and healthy. There is no doubt that that food is instrumental in managing stress levels.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner- First, look at your plate. Does it have all the nutrients?

It’s a simple exercise of remembering-

Protein
Carbohydrates
Fat
Vitamin & minerals

Try to eat just enough and not in excess. And never make the mistake of starving yourself.

Two liters of water are fundamental to staying healthy. If you feel tired, irritated, and stressed, and bloated often, drinking two liters of water every day will help address such issues.

The basic exercise is imperative for your wellbeing. For example,

Walks- steadily increase your time duration.

For example: if you can easily manage 30 minutes, increase to 45 minutes.

Stairs- go up and down the stairs as many times as you can. Focus on your breathing and movement.

Wellbeing is a journey. The above-mentioned few practical steps are the basics that could help start your journey.

When you are well and happy, you will project that positive energy be it on-site or in remote/online teaching. And this will in turn help lift the spirits of your students. Your commitment to your wellbeing will inspire them to follow suit.

After all, we lead by example.

About the Author: Ms. Sumnima Dewan is a well-being coach. With degrees from University of London, Harvard, and Cornell, she has been providing tailor-made well-being classes to working professionals under 50. She is also a key trainer of Personal Development (Leadership) course provided by White Lotus Centre, where she leads on components such as emotional intelligence and work/life balance. She can be contacted at sumnimaadewan@gmail.com