UPDATE: CONCRETE YouTube Channel “PROACTIVE ESL” created as part of the project, here:
PROACTIVE ESL with Teacher Andy
As well as “Business English and “English for Academic Purposes” online courses at www.edmodo.com
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Blended Education Model for the Improvement of
ESL Speaking and Listening Skills via Zoom Meetings/Webinars.
Andrés Melo Cousineau
January-March, 2020.
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SECTIONS
A. Introduction
B. The basic two-pronged project
C. The interconnection to curriculum
D. Other benefits and risks
E. The Question of Motivation
F. The Question of Assessment
G. Other experienced blended-teaching application samples: EF
H. Disrupting the blended model: The Humanities´ original disruptive essence
I. Technology: hardware and software.
J. Sources and bibliography
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A. Introduction
As I have been an in-class ESL teacher for many years, one who is also a photographer and permanently up-to-date with technology, I have always been interested in seeing the possibilities related to teaching languages beyond the physical classroom, be it through hybrid, blended or flipped classrooms. In other words, continuing to traverse the ¨brick to click¨ adventure, as they say. Especially in the learning of languages, the use of the internet has become an everyday fantastic possibility. Some of my personal favourites, among many: “Mango” https://mangolanguages.com/ and “Tandem” https://www.tandem.net/ . For a more complete directory see here: http://c4lpt.co.uk/directory-of-learning-performance-tools/learn-a-language-online/
I myself have used the online learning options not only at Coursera, having finished three courses already (including learning Mandarin!), but also several at Udemy (for drone photography) and many more at the amazing The Great Courses (including many directly related to the role of the Humanities in education and cultural understanding). Moreover, I have been lucky to have learned multiple languages in diverse periods of my life and have been able to do so using diverse methodologies and technologies. This has taught me best how to be a better language teacher. A flipped kind of teacher! LOL.
I particular, I see the disruptive possibilities for current ESL classes by using online teaching as a form of emphasizing oral active (speaking) and passive (listening) production given that many students feel that both speaking and listening to English are some of the most difficult skills for them. Just today I heard once again, after having heard so many others, how a student repeated, “my English is broken”, and at the very same time added seriously, “but I have a very good teacher”. I am sorry, great teachers do not have students who end up seeing themselves in this way. Learning English thus becomes a source of frustration. But learning is definitely the highest joy available to humans. This is why I told him to tell me how you would say “My English is not broken” in Tibetan, for he was exiled from Tibet. He immediately offered the translation. I told it to repeat it to himself out loud. He got what I was saying to him, and laughed.
So we do need disruption. Disruption is necessary. Technology can be another avenue for such disruption. However, technology on its own can never be disruptive. This is why disruption is generally praised while avoided in reality. Few “talk the talk, AND, walk the walk”. As Bates puts it:
“teaching and later distance education, to a force for radical change in our educational systems – but radical change based on the full potential of e-learning is something that still has yet to occur on any significant scale”. (Bates; my emphasis)
And this disruption is not merely progressive or futuristic. True disruption moves beyond technology, Otherwise, we moderns would be the only disruptors in history! It also involves seeing that perhaps the truest education is the recovering of certain forms of understanding which are now lost to us. The original disruption is the disruption of the soul. Coming from the Humanities, one need only think of the original disrupter, Socrates. Everyone knows his name, few read him. And even less so read him in the original Ancient Greek. Learn Ancient Greek, disrupt yourself. Talk the talk, walk the walk.
B. The basic two-pronged project
More specifically, my project is twofold;
First off, to create a set of more permanent online lessons geared towards understanding why it is in fact so difficult for some students to speak and listen to English, for instance, by focusing on:
a) pragmatic pronunciation and fluency issues such as the “schwa” and issues such as the difference between “stressed-timed” languages and “syllable-timed” ones (or, another way of putting it, focusing on “thought groups”) which I believe are crucial to overcoming the sense of failure many students have in themselves,
b) the use of specific grammatical areas such as “tag questions” or “phrasal verbs” or “past progressive”, and many others, which students “LEARN”, but cannot actually produce in their communicative interactions (what the specialists, and there are tons of specialists, call “acquire”). For instance, you can have a billion apps on “phrasal verbs”, but not a single student be MOTIVATED to learn them. You can complete the sentence: “She is a teacher, isn’t she?” in a textbook or exam, BUT NEVER be able to produce a SINGLE tag question in a conversation.
and finally,
c) communication-focused topics such as c.1) those used in Business English classes —and their conception of realia and real-world assessment— which include “communication”, “presentation and body language”, “leadership”, “ethics”, “multiple intelligences, and many others, or c.2) the fundamental communicative functions which are the core topic of what is known as “Survival English” (“Buying Things”, “Giving Directions”, “Ordering in a Restaurant”, etc.). The Mango app EXCELS in this regard,
All of these, most of which we have already prepared over the years, would be set up by using screencast software such as “ScreenFlow” for the Mac in combination with other software such as Keynote, PowerPoint, iMovie (see “Technology Section” below.) and linking the finished video vlogs as specific lessons on YouTube to reach a larger audience —not of TESL experts— but of frustrated ESL students.
Secondly, and this is the real concern of this piece of writing, to use technology to engage in 1-to-1 classes (or, very small groups of maximum five such as those used in Business English environments), by means of a video conferencing technology called “Zoom”; a technology which can also be linked to broader Learning Management Systems (LMSs). In this sense, this second focus is very different from the huge MOOC courses whose audience, by their very nature, is extremely large. In contrast, mine seeks more of a 1-on-1 interaction so that the speaking and listening skills can be focused on an individual case. (or perhaps, in some cases a maximum of five students). But even for larger groups, this would apply as well, if scheduled correctly and using one’s imagination.
Rarefactions: by Andrés Melo Cousineau 