Understanding Teenage Language Learners Online 1914010337, 9781914010330

Table of contents :
Introduction
1. Key takeaways for teaching teens online
2. Online safety and wellbeing
Third parties: who comes to your lessons and who does not
Learners’ data
Learner wellbeing at home
Learner wellbeing and workload
Teacher-to-learner interactions and appropriacy: using email
Learner-to-learner interactions online: audios and images
Learner-to-learner interactions online: screenshots
Teacher wellbeing
3. Managing your online classroom
The basic set-up
Allowing learners a ‘voice’
Keeping channels clear
Ready-made messages for classroom management
Dealing with late arrivals
Recording the chat
Muting and bouncing learners
General tech issues
Ready-made tech messages
Unresolvable tech issues
The tech bluff
Cameras on or cameras off?
Managing a large-scale shift to online teaching
Having tech support
4. Using the chat box to focus on language
Focus on language provided by the learner
Focus on language provided by the teacher
The ‘online language checklist’
5. Explaining things and getting a response
Basic plan for an online lesson
Getting a response at the outset of a lesson
Openers
Providing reminders
Explaining the main input
Going over exercises
Setting up language practice that is not an exercise
Written work: getting a response between classes
6. Activities and techniques that work well online
Information grab
Teaching collocation with YouGlish
Using private messaging for mystery compliments
Making the most of your webcam with ‘show and tell’ activities
YouTube streamer review
Exploiting the fact that your learners are already at home
7. Using clips, video and other digital effects
Techniques for using clips
Teacher-produced footage
Using online special effects
8. Evaluation and feedback
Evaluation and exams
Alternative forms of evaluation
Feedback: some fundamental questions
Redesigning report cards
9. Final thoughts
Bibliography

Citation preview

Understanding Teenage Language Learners Online: How to deliver motivating and engaging internet-based lessons so that your secondary learners want to practise the target language © Chris Roland. The author has asserted his rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) to be identified as the author of this work. Published by: Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd Blue Sky Offices, 25 Cecil Pashley Way, Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, BN43 5FF

Tel: 01273 434 943 Email: [email protected] Web: www.pavpub.com

First published 2021. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing of the publisher and the copyright owners. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Print: 978-1-914010-33-0 Epub: 978-1-914010-34-7

PDF: 978-1-914010-35-4 Mobi: 978-1-914010-36-1

Acknowledgements The authors and publisher are grateful to those who have given permission to reproduce the following extracts and adaptions of copyright material, photographs and illustrations. Photo/illustration credits: page 21: Images by Emilijae, OpenClipart-Vectors and Dion_dresschers from Pixabay; Image by Dagobert83 from Free Downloads; page 127: Figures 7.16–7.18: Snap Camera filters: Potato by Phil Walton, Infiltrator (an alien) and Halfway (a vampire) by JP Pirie Pavilion is the leading training and development provider and publisher in the health, social care and allied fields, providing a range of innovative training solutions underpinned by sound research and professional values. We aim to put our customers first, through excellent customer service and value. Author: Chris Roland Editor: Penny Hands Production editor: Louisa Robertson, Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd Publishing head: Kirsten Holt, Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd Cover design: Phil Morash, Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd Page layout and typesetting: Tony Pitt, Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd Printer: CMP (UK) Ltd

Understanding Teenage Language Learners Online: How to deliver motivating and engaging internet-based lessons so that your secondary learners want to practise the target language Also available from Pavilion ELT at Pavilion Publishing and Media An Introduction to Evidence-Based Teaching in the English Language Classroom

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For full details of all our books, English Teaching professional and Modern English Teacher magazines, go to: https://www.pavpub.com/pavilion-elt Visit: www.etprofessional.com www.modernenglishteacher.com

Contents Introduction ..........................................................................................1 1. Key takeaways for teaching teens online..................................11 2. Online safety and wellbeing.........................................................13 Third parties: who comes to your lessons and who does not........................13 Learners’ data.................................................................................................14 Learner wellbeing at home............................................................................14 Learner wellbeing and workload...................................................................15 Teacher-to-learner interactions and appropriacy: using email....................16 Learner-to-learner interactions online: audios and images.........................17 Learner-to-learner interactions online: screenshots....................................18 Teacher wellbeing...........................................................................................19

3. Managing your online classroom................................................21 The basic set-up..............................................................................................21 Allowing learners a ‘voice’..............................................................................22 Keeping channels clear..................................................................................23 Ready-made messages for classroom management......................................24 Dealing with late arrivals..............................................................................28 Recording the chat..........................................................................................29 Muting and bouncing learners......................................................................30 General tech issues........................................................................................31 Ready-made tech messages...........................................................................31 Unresolvable tech issues................................................................................32 The tech bluff..................................................................................................32 Cameras on or cameras off?...........................................................................33 Managing a large-scale shift to online teaching...........................................36 Having tech support.......................................................................................40

4. Using the chat box to focus on language...................................43 Focus on language provided by the learner..................................................44 Focus on language provided by the teacher..................................................47 The ‘online language checklist’......................................................................52

Contents

5. Explaining things and getting a response.................................55 Basic plan for an online lesson......................................................................55 Getting a response at the outset of a lesson.................................................56 Opener ............................................................................................................56 Providing reminders.......................................................................................63 Explaining the main input.............................................................................65 Going over exercises.......................................................................................68 Setting up language practice that is not an exercise...................................72 Written work: getting a response between classes.......................................79

6. Activities and techniques that work well online.....................83 Information grab............................................................................................83 Teaching collocation with YouGlish...............................................................85 Using private messaging for mystery compliments.....................................87 Making the most of your webcam with ‘show and tell’ activities................90 YouTube streamer review............................................................................101 Exploiting the fact that your learners are already at home......................107

7. Using clips, video and other digital effects.............................113 Techniques for using clips............................................................................113 Teacher-produced footage............................................................................121 Using online special effects .........................................................................126

8. Evaluation and feedback.............................................................131 Evaluation and exams .................................................................................131 Alternative forms of evaluation...................................................................132 Feedback: some fundamental questions......................................................136 Redesigning report cards.............................................................................136

9. Final thoughts................................................................................141 Bibliography.......................................................................................143

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Acknowledgements The encouragement that I have received from Kirsten Holt at Pavilion has been key in creating the volume you have here. Thank you once again, Kirsten, for your support. This is the third title of mine that Penny Hands has edited in recent years. I thank her for the care and consideration with which she has looked at the lines you are about to read. The online and hybrid secondary classes that provided the raw experience on which this book is based took place in and via three centres in Seville: ELI Triana, ELI Nervion and ELI Santa Justa. I would like to thank the directors at these respective centres, Jude McGovern, Carol Robertson and Kaylea Russell, and the centre secretaries, María Ángeles Aparicio, Paqui Carrasco, Ana Domínguez and Cecilia Cabañas for all their help throughout this period. Thanks to Elspeth Pollock, Director of Studies at ELI for the interview in Managing your online classroom (page 21), which will provide the reader with an insight into taking teenagers online at an institutional level. Thanks also to Miguel Miracaballos for his observations, which provide a look at online lessons from a technical support perspective. A big thanks to Steve Dumain for explaining to me the ‘mystery thanks/ compliments’ activity included in Activities and techniques that work well online on page 87. Thanks to my long-time buddy Andrew Banks for allowing me to mention him and include a number of photos in the ‘describe a friend’ show-and-tell activity on page 90. Also many thanks to my own students for helping me with the activities related to celebrity streamers, also described on pages 102–107. Special thanks to Jaime Romero and Naranjito for taking the time to provide write-ups for publication – I appreciate that, gentlemen. In this book, as in the last, I have featured a number of souvenirs and personal objects. Thanks to George and Susan Roland for the brassware from Sharjah, and to George for the egg he brought back from India. My ‘avoska’ string bag was a present from friends too humble to want to be named. You know who you are – thank you! The balaclava was knitted for me by my grandmother, Grace Marshall, many years ago. I am sure she would have been touched to know it would feature in a book nearly 45 years later. I do not set out with the express intention of including pictures of my family in my books – it just seems to happen. This time, thanks to Susan and Anthony – mum and brother respectively – for appearing here.

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Jukka Kilpinen runs Fataliiseeds.net, which is a Finland-based supplier of chilli products. I have been ordering seeds from him for years and would like to thank him for allowing me to feature some of his material in Using clips, video and other digital effects on page 122. A massive thanks to Ana Demitroff as well for generously sharing her own material on CLIL projects and giving me free rein to reproduce parts of it on pages 124–126. Thanks also to her student Irene Montero for the pictures of her very impressive Big Bang model and delicious-looking pizza! Thanks to Rosario Villalobos González and Manu ‘Jopeja’ Rivero for always caring and for always being there. And finally, thanks to Raquel Gorosito Villalobos for her company. Teaching, and to some extent simply living, in recent times has been testing, but I think we have come out stronger and better.

Dedication Susan and George Roland – Mum and Dad – the way you have both responded to challenges and adversity over the years is, has been and always will be an inspiration and example to me. Thanks so much for your support and encouragement over this busy writing period. There have been quite a few books in just a few years and I am running out of different ways to say thank you. So I am just going to thank you again: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Introduction A plunge into online language lessons with teenagers ‘Ana, tell me about your family.’ The thirteen-year-old learner appearing as a webcam video image in a small box at the top of my screen did not react. Instead, she stared back at me, tense and rigid, eyes wide like an animal frozen in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. Seconds passed. There was a barely perceptible shift of her shoulders followed by the subdued sound of very gentle typing. More seconds passed. Her head did not move and there was no change in her trance-like expression. Then she spoke: ‘My family is quite small.’ Silence returned and we were back in the same awkward stalemate as before. ‘Ooookay … thank you.’ This is possibly one of the strangest speaking exam situations I have ever been in, I thought to myself. Could she actually be using an online translator, as I watch, and with her webcam on? ‘… and can you tell me about your school, please?’ Again came the long pause. It was the sort of pause that if happening at a dinner with friends, would indicate something had gone terribly wrong. It was the sort of pause that at least one person in any group would feel compelled to try to punctuate with a joke. Here there was no joke, only Ana’s poker face and that ever so slight movement. The seconds that passed by were thick and heavy and I could almost hear them, just like I could almost hear her typing – without being a hundred percent sure. Is she going to answer the question? Should I jump in there and tell her that it doesn’t matter? Should I give her another question? Or would that make things worse? And then: ‘Our school building is rather old.’

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Introduction

There’s no way we did ‘rather’ in class. Is she about to say anything else? No ... I don’t think so. I think that’s it. ‘Thank you, Ana.’ I was testing Ana alone because her partner for the exam, Mae, had been unable to join us in the breakout room (a virtual classroom within a virtual classroom that is useful for pairwork – see Breakout rooms, on pages 72–77). At that very moment, Mae was floating around digital purgatory. When she did manage to arrive, Ana’s ‘exam’ was over. I ended the breakout room and the three of us returned to the main classroom, where more learners had arrived and were waiting for their assigned time slots. I had been online for three hours, testing and teaching, and had the best part of another three hours to go. As we were already behind schedule, I added Mae to the next pair of candidates, issued invites for her, Rafael and Javier to enter the breakout room and increased the time limit on the room from 10 minutes to a possible 20 in order to cover all eventualities. ‘Teacher, I can’t hear you,’ typed Javier when we arrived in the breakout room. On the previous Thursday, when we had trialled the rooms and equipment, he had been able to hear me just fine. I smiled, resetting my internal stress meter to zero. ‘Try refreshing the page. I will send you another invite to get back into this room.’ As Javier left the room, I uploaded the visuals for the exam. These included prompts for Have you ever …? questions and a series of comic-book-style strips for the learners to each narrate a simple story. For some reason, Rafael could not see the prompts. ‘Teacher, I can hear you now.’ That was Javier, returning from his refresh and speaking to me over the microphone. ‘That’s great.’ There was a scratching from the other side of my living room door. My real, physical, living room door. It was Cosita (translatable as Little Thing), my fourteen-year-old cat, trying to get back into the room. In many ways, my personal story of emergency remote teaching due to the Covid19 pandemic was the story of trying to keep that cat from walking across my keyboard and trying to keep his paws out of my mouth as I spoke to learners (as shown in the Figure on page 3).

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Introduction

Figure 1: We all have ‘local strains’ (see below). One of mine was this feline ‘helper’.

Cosita had already sabotaged one exam that day, so I had shut him in one of the bedrooms. My partner, getting ready to leave the house, and trying to do so without coming through to the living room and interrupting my classes, had inadvertently let him out. So now, as I tried to troubleshoot the reasons Rafael could not see the images, I had the sound of Cosita’s claws on one of the glass panels in the door to add to my collage of mental adversity. ‘Are you on a tablet or a PC?’ ‘I’m on my mobile.’ I suddenly realised why he had been having problems on and off all term. ‘You can’t do the exam on your mobile.’ I scribbled into my notebook No mobiles!!!! Cosi started meowing, and the scratching became more frantic as he used both front paws. ‘Is there a laptop or a PC you can use in the house?’ ‘I’ll try.’ ‘Okay, look, I’ll examine Mae and Javier now and I can examine you with Diego and Luis at 18:30. Okay?’ ‘Hello teacher.’ I smiled. That was Thiago, who was waiting in the main digital classroom. I realised then that I had the two rooms open and that my microphone was currently activated on both pages. Everyone could hear me.

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Introduction

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. Meow. I smiled again. ‘I’ll be with you soon Thiago. No, your exam hasn’t started yet. We’re just a bit behind. Just a sec, Mae and Javier.’ I got up and carried Cosita back to the bedroom. ‘Have you seen my keys?’ asked my partner. ‘Er no, but there’s a spare set in the kitchen. I’m putting Cosi in the bedroom, okay?’ ‘Cool.’ Back in the breakout room, I tested Mae and Javier. Next, I tested Thiago, Mateo and Carmen and then finally it was the turn of Luis, Diego, and the returning Rafael, now on his sister’s laptop. Just as I finished with the group, I received a message from my director. Apparently, Diego’s mum had phoned our secretary because his older sister had said that Diego’s speaking exam had been a disaster due to the fact that he had refused to activate his camera or to answer my questions. Actually, he was one of the best, I messaged back. He managed to use the past participle ‘swum’ from the present tense prompt in the ‘Have you ever …?’ questions, as well as using short answers ‘Yes I have’ and ‘No I haven’t’. He also used the past tense to tell his story. After replying to that message, I quickly reheated a bowl of noodles from earlier and wolfed them down before starting with a group of teen and young adult advanced learners. We finished a little bit late, so it was a quarter past ten at night when I was finally done. I had intended to go for a power walk but had nothing much left in terms of energy, so I ended up finishing off the rest of the noodles that were still in the pan and watching Netflix for three hours. Welcome, reader, to the world of teaching groups of teenagers online.

How this book is organised Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom

Understanding Teenager Language Learners Online is designed to complement my earlier publication Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom (Roland, 2018) to help readers relate standard classroom practice to the online context. You will find many of the ideas expressed in the earlier title on learner

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Introduction

agency, personalisation of language, classroom management and teacher– learner dialogue mapped over to an online context in this book. Throughout the volume there is an emphasis on helping teachers manage their online classroom by maintaining an open dialogue with their learners and taking into consideration their learners’ perspectives.

Applications for other language lessons

Although my own background is one of English language teaching (ELT), the vast majority of the strategies described here, especially those regarding classroom dynamic, will have their applications in lessons where the language being studied is one other than English.

Authenticity

Every strategy and activity that you read about here has been trialled and has worked in one of my own online lessons. Every student–teacher exchange is as close as I can get it to an actual exchange – the anecdotes and example exchanges between learners and teacher are all based on real classroom events. However, names have been changed, as well as a few other details, such as the time of the lesson (where times have been included to provide you with an idea of the pace of interactions). First language (L1) comments have been translated (with bracketed indications that this is the case) and very occasionally, conversations have been trimmed down, for example, where there were several threads of discussion going on at the same time, in order to better focus on the point being made. Not all the photographs that you will see are of the best quality. Again, this is because many of them have been taken from screenshots using my webcam during lessons when my main concern was class dynamic and learning. At other times I have recreated what my students were seeing by holding something up to a camera, allowing you to see what my students saw during the lesson.

Key ‘takeaways’

Those of you familiar with my other books will know that I like to start off with a positive or amusing anecdote to inspire the reader and introduce the area of teaching under discussion. So why did I opt to open here with one of my heaviest days towards the end of a term? First, this was to assure you that my intention is to make this volume ‘as real as it gets’. I do not imagine you have come to this book for the easy stuff.

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Introduction

I imagine you have picked up this book for a realistic discussion of the issues with some practical solutions – as well as maybe a little inspiration here and there. Secondly, to make the point that even as we struggle between competing pressures and various levels of tension, we can glimpse that inspiration. To illustrate this, I would like to go back to the short stretch of afternoon just described to unearth a few little gems in the form of takeaway principles. They are taken from the list on page 11 but here we shall find them sitting just beneath the surface in their original context. I have italicised them for easier identification. For a start, I was quite proud of myself for not ‘losing it’, to use the vernacular. Even when my stress levels spiked, I managed to guide Javier through his technical issues and, through a little diagnostic questioning, finally got to the bottom of the reason why Rafael and a number of the others had been having problems viewing certain material all term. I did not take my stress out on the learners. Rather, I kept on smiling. The first sign that something has gone wrong will be seen on your face or heard in the tone of your voice. Even though I was swamped with learner queries, those learners had not done anything wrong. They were not misbehaving. They were simply voicing their individual concerns. Rafael’s sister had the family computer at that moment and Javier’s dad was using the laptop he normally uses. Although their situations presented a problem for me, those youngsters did not choose to be in those situations. Mae, Thiago, Mateo and the rest of the class had no connection to Rafael and Javier’s issues and none of the children were responsible for the behaviour of my cat. In your own online teaching, you will have your own local limitations and strains. If working from home, your teaching space will also be your living space and maybe the living space of one or more of your flatmates, your partner or your children. You may have noisy neighbours. You may have to share a laptop. The internet connection in your house, building or street may be weak. Remember though, the strain is shared. What I mean here is that each of your learners will also have their own set of local limitations. The accumulated difficulty from those individual but unrelated situations collects in the teacher. The feeling can be very powerful. I should tell you that the learners in the class described above are all extremely nice people and, for the purposes of this introduction, I did choose the most difficult day with them. You will have those difficult days though. Most of the stress our learners cause us is unintentional. In addition, no one learner is responsible for your total level of accumulated stress.

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Introduction

The above ideas feed into a greater and more general principle. At the top of my list of takeaway principles for teaching teens online is this: Preserve your learners’ dignity. That means making sure they do not feel humiliated or otherwise invalidated. We want our learners to leave our online class with their confidence intact and with the sense that they are valued and appreciated both as learners and as people. An hour after his speaking exam, I received a brief email message from Rafael. It said: ‘Thank you, teacher for rescheduling my speaking exam.’ For me, that was massive. It showed a child at the start of his teenage years who felt he had been treated fairly taking it upon himself to return the gesture. It demonstrated a healthy growth of other-awareness and personal responsibility through our shared experience of lessons. After all, what is the aim of our language instruction if it is not to help our learners express themselves usefully in English? In the case of Diego’s supposedly ‘disastrous’ speaking exam, not only had I been listening closely to him (as any teacher conducting a speaking exam should) but I had also made a note of some of the key areas of his performance – which enabled me to confidently reply to the query. Again, focusing on language and keeping a record of what your learners are able (or not able) to say or write are two more principles that you will see reiterated in this volume. Even in the case of Ana and her probable use of Google Translate during the speaking exam there were some plus points. For a start, I had to recognise that at least she had shown a certain initiative and determination to survive what otherwise might have been a gruelling interview. Most importantly though, it gave me the prompt I needed to draw up an action plan for her own learning. This took the form of a personalised scheme of work based on ten minutes a day over the summer months of July, August and the start of September, which I forwarded to her mum. My point here is that there are some wonderful things to be found in online lessons with teens. The medium is not always easy, especially when teaching groups, but the aim of this book is to help you to operate optimally, within the various tensions and challenges thrown up.

Safety online

The safety of our students is paramount. In Chapter 2 you will find guidance on some issues regarding the protection of learners.

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Introduction

Teaching live online: set up, management and support

Chapters 3–5 look at the basic elements of an online class, with topics such as managing your online classroom, dealing with stress and supporting learners. Here we look at the basic workings of an online class, ensuring correct student use of microphones and chat boxes, micro-strategies to improve lesson dynamics, and ways to focus your lessons on language. We also look at how to work through tasks inclusively so that various abilities are catered for, how to select tasks that are suitable for the age range you are teaching so that your learners do not struggle on tasks and feel overwhelmed, and how to provide your students with the necessary support they need to ensure the success of the tasks.

Creative online teaching

In Chapters 6–8 we look at adapting traditional tasks and making the most of the online medium. They cover task design and lesson dynamics, particularly how to get a response from teenage students during the lessons, and the use of clips in class. The emphasis is on low-tech, low-prep lessons with maximum results with the aim of making lessons enjoyable for both teachers and students, whilst keeping them productive. As I try to make clear with all the methodology that I publish, I am not describing fixed lessons for you to follow – like a recipe in a cookery book. Rather, what you will find is a discussion about activities, and ideas for more activities using real ones as examples. This, I think, is the best way to help teachers create, adapt and fine-tune their own lessons.

End of chapter tasks

As in the main book, each chapter of this volume concludes with points for reflection and several suggestions for practical follow up. These are headed Things to think about and Things to try respectively.

Evaluating online lessons

The final chapter discusses how teachers might evaluate and provide feedback on student performance. As many schools switched to live online teaching due to the Covid19 pandemic, existing systems of evaluation and feedback such as exams and reports were often mapped across to the new medium as they were. However, what works well for a face-to-face setting does not always work as appropriately for an online one. Adjustments need to be made. Therefore, Chapter 9 offers some provisional thoughts on the area. It suggests several new ways in which teachers might look for evidence of successful online learning and may also be of interest to school owners, in-

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Introduction

house trainers, curriculum designers and materials writers wanting to adapt some of their systems.

Downloadable resources

This section contains a list of printable resources referred to throughout the volume. These supplementary files appear as numbered Downloadable resources which the reader will find signposted along the way: 1. Teaching hybrid classes 2. Ready-made messages 3. Webcam exemption request forms 4. 30 opening questions to start your lesson 5. Streamer review criteria These are available online at https://www.pavpub.com/understanding-teenagelanguage-learners-online-resources. The first one, Downloadable resource 1: Teaching hybrid classes, is actually a complementary chapter for those of you who are teaching a mix of learners face to face and online all at the same time – we have created it as a downloadable resource because the very nature of teaching hybrid is thought to be transient, possibly just to be used during the time of Covid19 restrictions.

9

1. Key takeaways for teaching teens online ■ Preserve your learners’ dignity. ■ Keep smiling: the first sign that something has gone wrong will be on your face. ■ Avoid venting on your learners. ■ Remember, the strain is shared (see the Introduction, page 6 for explanation). ■ Make your lessons about the language, and regularly revisit language points. ■ When the going gets tough, refocus on language, not dysfunctional dynamics or personalities. ■ Keep a record of language items you have given to your learners. ■ Keep a record of the chat box from your lessons. ■ Use multiple channels to reach your learners and to allow them to reach you. ■ Encourage self-expression. ■ Encourage teens to regulate their use of mics and chat instead of disabling those functions. ■ Value demonstrations of responsibility and professionalism. ■ Include regular task stages that require a response from your learners. ■ Create a sense of consequence to tasks through follow-up activities. ■ Do your best classroom management or damage limitation between classes. ■ Make use of ready-made messages. ■ Employ standardised or novel responses to recurring frustrations. ■ Use an ‘I-see-your-side’ perspective (see Managing your online classroom, page 32 for an explanation). ■ Try not to treat online teaching as a straight replacement for face-to-face teaching. ■ Remember that sometimes you have to give a response to get a response. ■ Use audio feedback to correct learner writing.

11

2. Online safety and wellbeing There are three areas where we need to ensure that our learners experience only appropriate and non-damaging interactions. These are with third parties, with ourselves and with each other. We will look at each of these in turn. In Structuring Fun for Young Language Learners Online (2020), I have already covered a number of points concerning online saftey, but will reiterate and expand on some of them here as there are a number of issues with teen classes that warrant a little more attention. This chapter is not meant as a comprehensive guide to online security, nor will we be looking at extreme breaches of security or cases of highly inappropriate behaviour. Rather, we will look, for the most part, at day-to-day issues as experienced by the average teacher. We will, however, start with one of the more serious issues – uninvited guests.

Third parties: who comes to your lessons and who does not If you walked into your physical classroom and there was an adult sitting there amongst your teenagers, unannounced and unknown to either you or them, this would constitute quite an unusual situation. We would hope such an uninvited guest would either not get through the school doors or past the school secretary or admin staff. Their presence would certainly be flagged up by the director, other teachers or the learners themselves. The difference between this situation and its online counterpart is that a physical intruder’s position would be significantly compromised and the potential fallout for them would be serious and damaging. Their physical departure may be hindered and the police called. At the very least, they would have been seen in person, and could be followed leaving. A description might be issued and there could be repercussions for them in the local community. Online, it seems that unwanted visitors can come and go more easily, popping into a session on the other side of the country or globe. For this reason, we need to run our lessons from a secure platform, protected by passwords that

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2. Online safety and wellbeing

are not accessible to third parties. Your learners should have usernames by which they are easily identifiable, and if anyone enters your classroom unexpectedly, the first thing to do is to shut that lesson down, instructing your learners not to re-enter until contacted by yourself or the school by alternative means. Spending time online with the intruder present, getting angry with them or asking them to leave would give that intruder more time in which to be disruptive, to interact with learners or to glean personal information about them. As of yet, I am pleased to say that I have not experienced any breach of security in my classes, and I believe this will probably be the experience of most teachers. However, just as all schools have a fire alarm emergency evacuation procedure, it may be a good idea to establish an online evacuation procedure and to make your learners and their parents aware of this.

Learners’ data All the same rules for confidentiality and customer information that apply to face-to-face lessons apply to online lessons. Because snippets of online lessons are very easily captured by screenshots and recording devices, and those snippets are easily relayed, online teachers need to be additionally cautious. Occasionally, one sees teachers posting screenshots of their online lessons on social media, complete with the faces or even names of their learners. Unless the correct consent forms have been completed by those learners and their legal guardians, posting such screenshots runs counter to the guidelines set out by most data protection and privacy laws in place around the world.

Learner wellbeing at home Another thing to avoid is putting your learners at odds with their immediate surroundings – that is, with their families, the people they share space with. Some of the tasks outlined in this book involve learners interacting with family members. However, it is important to remember that those family members may be busy, so we should not insist on such interactions. Teachers should also not be too critical about background noise. It may be that your learner shares a room with a brother or sister, or that the only place in the house where there is a decent WiFi signal is in the living room, where Grandpa also happens to be watching his favourite soap opera.

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Similarly, if you can hear mum and dad having a strained discussion about a couple of items on their latest credit bill statement, that might not be the right time to ask a learner to request quiet in the rest of the room or house. In fact, requesting that learners ask their family members to be quiet is seldom a good idea. A household might not have a great internet connection, or a learner might be vying for the use of the good laptop or webcam in the house with a sibling, or waiting till mum’s or dad’s work computer is free. So nagging them too much about tech issues during a lesson may again put them in a difficult situation. In short, try to steer away from anything that sets up tension between their English class and their situation at home.

Learner wellbeing and workload I recently said to one of my most responsible upper-intermediate groups: ‘I’m currently putting a little book together for teachers and it’s about giving online lessons to teenagers. Do you think there’s anything I should mention in it?’ The message they wanted me to convey, almost unanimously, was the following: If your learners are working online because of emergency measures, then you need to remember that they may be receiving tuition for all their subjects remotely. There is a tendency on the part of teachers – not just English teachers but all subject teachers – to try to compensate for what they might perceive of as a lack of face-time, interaction or quality instruction, by setting more homework than they might normally do. Exacerbating this is the fact that during periods of lockdown, some learners’ class time with their teachers may be trimmed down and replaced with self-study-style programmes. In such a case, self-study blurs with homework and the result is a crushing sense of overload. One of the most active and motivated members of that class stated: ‘I’ve almost stopped enjoying learning.’ I think this learner perspective is very much worth bearing in mind when planning out programmes of study for the day or week. For homework, short consolidation tasks are probably going to be more useful than having the learners complete pages and pages of gap-fill tasks.

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Teacher-to-learner interactions and appropriacy: using email Over the last five or six years, I have increasingly relied on email communication with my learners. Most of them, even those I teach in a faceto-face setting, now send me their writing assignments by email and, I will mention in Evaluation and feedback (on pages 131–139), when it comes to correcting their work, the majority of my feedback now takes the form of audios that I send to them. In addition to traditional writing assignments, the other out-of-class tasks I set generally involve learners sending me audios of themselves either answering speaking prompt-style questions, reading out revised versions of writing tasks or talking me through new vocabulary lists. This is because, as mentioned above, the role I see homework having has increasingly become one of consolidation. For all of these exchanges I use a dedicated email address, which I set up specifically for the task several years ago. I have received over 2,000 emails from learners since that time.

Parental consent

Parents should be made aware that their son or daughter is in email contact with their teacher outside lesson time. This applies equally to a classroom management system (CMS) that has a messaging facility. Examples of CMSes are Google Classroom or Moodle. Parents can be notified of the school’s or teacher’s wish to have an electronic channel of communication with their child through either a paper-based or emailed memorandum, perhaps with a section that they can sign giving their consent, via phone call or directly at parents’ evenings or orientation meetings when setting up your online classes. About 20% of my own teenage students send me assignments from their parents’ email addresses, either because they or their parents are more comfortable with that or because the learner does not actually have an email account themselves.

Responding during working hours

While I have been known to put out the odd social media post late at night or to work on into the small hours if I have exams to mark or reports to write, I would strongly recommend that you avoid returning your learners’ work or replying to their emails out of hours. The centres that I work at are open till 10p.m., and that is my cut-off point. I do not reply to anything after that time. If your own school closes earlier, I recommend using that time as your cut-off point. If you are freelance, use the opening hours of bricks-and-mortar schools in your area as a guide. Even though email correspondence is asynchronous (without any direct internet connection in real time), this approach still feels intuitively more professional and correct. 16

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To demonstrate this, let us consider the reverse for a moment. Imagine that it is somewhere between 11 and 12 at night. A parent of one of your teenage students pops into their son’s or daughter’s room on the way to bed themselves, to say a last goodnight and to suggest it is high time their child turned off their screen and got some rest as well. ‘Oh, but I’m looking at my English assignment. My teacher sent it to me just now,’ they protest. A very reasonable question on the part of the parent might be ‘Why?’ For one, it paints a picture of a teacher either desperately backed up with work, struggling with their sleeping cycles or sadly lacking any sort of personal life. In addition, even if the teenage recipient of the mail is sleeping, the notification ping or whistle may well wake them up and they might even feel obliged to respond.

Sticking to asynchronous interactions

My advice is also to avoid real-time synchronous exchanges with your learners such as texting, WhatsApp, hang-outs or video calls outside of class time. Apart from the obvious inappropriacy of an adult spending online time socialising with a teenager, such exchanges can make a learner think that they have a closer relationship with their teacher than they do, or more of a connection with that teacher than their classmates. It may also make them feel special. Once back in class, they might try to test, cement or show off this newfound affinity or specialness by being too ‘pally’ with the teacher, exempting themselves from tasks, using swear words or making distracting references to conversations that went on beyond the class.

Learner-to-learner interactions online: audios and images There are a number of things you can do to encourage kindness between your online learners and increase trust between learners and their teacher when it comes to what is being shared with the class. Firstly, you can make sure that you never play audio or video material that a learner has sent you as an assignment to the rest of the class as this might embarrass them. This includes recordings made by learners who are unknown to them. The clear message that your learners will get from this is If the teacher respects the right to privacy of other learners, including those not present in class right now or even unknown to me, then he or she will respect my privacy too.

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While you might insist on webcams being on for lessons, try to avoid maximising any single learner’s image – by that I mean going full screen with it – in a way that might allow the rest of the class to scrutinise that image and/or comment about it. Recently, in a hybrid class, where I had half of my learners in the physical classroom and half at home, one of the online learners was wearing a gothic-style neckscarf-cum-facemask, with a skull image on it. The learners in the room wanted a better look at the scarf. ‘The others would like me to make your webcam image larger here so they can look at your scarf. Is that okay?’ I asked. It was and I did, but the situation had been handled with sensitivity and that learner’s approval had been sought.

Learner-to-learner interactions online: screenshots If a learner takes a screenshot of your online lesson, it will often contain the webcam images of one or more of their classmates. Where learners are at school, using their institution’s equipment, it is possible to set up security so that each key struck and command given is recorded. Screenshots could thus be prohibited and learners made accountable for breaking that rule. However, if they are at home on their own machines, it will normally be impossible to tell if and when a learner has taken a screenshot from a lesson. This is because there is no communication between their operating system and the platform they are on. With home-based learners, then, we enter into realms of trust and awareness. It is important that they realise the importance of respecting each other’s right to privacy. They might be able to take screenshots of the lesson and of each other but we do not want them to do it. There is currently no failsafe solution to this, but just because we cannot enforce the rule 100%, there is nothing to stop us stating that screenshots containing other learners’ images are forbidden – just as taking photos of other learners in face-to-face classes or recording audios or videos of them without their consent is also forbidden. You could explain that if you become aware of any images from your lessons being stored or shared, there will be follow-up consequences. You might want to include a pep talk about the issues involved at the start of a course and even to have learners sign a form agreeing to abide by confidentiality terms. If you become aware of any screenshots taken during class time, politely insist they are deleted, just as you would if a learner had taken a photo of a classmate in a face-to-face setting. 18

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On occasion, you might want your learners to have a record of what is on the screen, for example, if it is a language summary or some recorded input. On these occasions you can either ask everyone to turn off their webcams so people can take a screenshot or you can maximise the central part of the screen where the desired information is before they take the screenshots. In a hybrid setting, if I have learners in the classroom, I maximise the part of the screen I want them to record so that no faces are visible. Then I allow them to take photographs with their phones. Another solution is to make any documents that you display as visuals downloadable for your learners.

Teacher wellbeing Having considered learners’ wellbeing from a number of angles, let us finally turn to ourselves. Online teaching can be intense as you try to monitor the various channels of communication, keep responses coming back from learners and acknowledge those responses, too. In the physical classroom, you also get to move about, whereas online, it is easy to finish a six- or eight-hour stretch of teaching having maintained more or less the same posture throughout. To help diffuse some of the intensity, it is a good idea to plan for some moments of downtime for yourself. This is one reason I like to use clips and pre-recorded footage. It enables the teacher to take a back seat for a few minutes. Another thing you can do (something that I consider quite reasonable when learners are on a task) is to explain to them: ‘I’m going to give you three minutes on your own to complete this task. During this time, I will be off-camera and muted. If you have any questions for me, drop them into the chat box and I will pick them up in three minutes’ time.’ This gives you time to pop to the bathroom, boil the kettle for a cup of tea, have a bite of a sandwich, fetch a portable heater, an extra cardigan or a hot water bottle in the winter months, do a few stretching exercises, simply stand up and move around the room a little, or spend a couple of minutes looking out of the window to change the distance at which your eyes are focusing. These are all essential and basic human activities, which become more important when you take away the normal movement a teacher would enjoy in a face-toface setting, and when you consider that the breaks you might normally get between lessons tend to disappear as you clear your table, connect to your next digital classroom on the platform and upload whatever slides or documents you have prepared for that lesson.

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I do believe this small survival strategy is perfectly reasonable – if employed in sensible moderation – and that teenage learners, parents and schools need to appreciate that sustained and uninterrupted time spent sitting in one place is extremely wearing on teachers. The important thing here is that the teacher has stated that they will not be available to answer queries for a specified time, but learners know that their queries will be looked at shortly.

Professional development Things to think about

■ Have you experienced any breach of security in your online classes, or any inappropriate learner-to-learner interactions? What was your reaction and what was the final outcome? Would any of the measures discussed in this chapter have helped? ■ The microculture of each group will differ. Think about some of your own groups. How far do your learners trust you not to play their audio recordings to their classmates (if you work with audio recordings) and how comfortable are they speaking in front of each other? ■ What is the longest stretch of time that you spend in front of a screen teaching without a significant break? How do you feel about a two- or three-minute ‘time out’ for the teacher, as discussed in the chapter?

Things to try

■ Check that any shared machines you use do not have pre-stored passwords for your online classes and ensure that the access codes learners use to attend your lessons are not published in a public place. ■ If you do not have an emergency evacuation procedure ready for the unusual case of an uninvited third party accessing your classroom, think through the steps that would suit you or your learners best. Are learners aware that they should leave the room as quickly as possible, and do you have contact details for their parents to send new access codes to afterwards? ■ If your school does not have a guide for learners when it comes to respecting people’s right to privacy (i.e. not taking screenshots or recording each other), think through the main points that such a document might contain. Then discuss your ideas with colleagues/your learners.

■ Talk to your learners about their recent experiences of online teaching, especially with regard to fatigue and workload. As a result of the discussion, you may wish to make adjustments to your demands on them.

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3. Managing your online classroom In this chapter we look at the layout of an online English class and how to keep things moving in an orderly and productive way.

The basic set-up Figure 3.1 shows a generic model of what the screen of your digital classroom will probably look like. Some of the elements may be in different places on your screen. For example, your learners’ webcam images may appear down the side of the screen and your chat box may be floating about. In addition, there may be extra menu bars and icons.

Figure 3.1: The basic elements of an online classroom

In terms of functionality, the general set-up of most online platforms consists of four main channels through which you can communicate with your learners.

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First, there is the audio channel, your microphone (B). Second, there is a chat box into which you can enter text (D). Third, there is a video image of you via webcam (C) and fourth, there is a central display area, where you will be able to show presentation slides, pages of digital books or video clips (E). This channel will sometimes act as a whiteboard as well. On some platforms, you will need to upload files and documents to be shared on your central display area. On other platforms, you will have the option to simply ‘share screen’, which will mean allowing learners to directly view one of the windows that you have open on your computer. Your learners will also have access to these four channels to some extent. If properly equipped, they too will have microphones and will also be able to type into the chat box. They will also be able to appear via webcam (A on the diagram) and, on occasion, to share their own screens or to write or draw on the main display area. However, although there is a level of reciprocity here, it is not an equal relationship in terms of how free each party is to make use of all these channels or the control or access each has over them.

Allowing learners a ‘voice’ Access to these channels of communication is heavily weighted in favour of the teacher. The teacher has the ability to mute learners’ microphones (and indeed the prerogative to ask them to mute themselves). The teacher may be able to block learners from using the chat box altogether. Not all learners will necessarily have their webcam activated, although the teacher may wish that they had (an issue we shall consider below). In fact, sometimes, it may be that none of them have their webcams turned on. Finally, it is only when the teacher, as host of the online lesson, upgrades a learner to ‘co-presenter’ that they will normally be able to share a screen or write on the virtual whiteboard.

Figure 3.2: Communication channels that are open to both teacher and learners

Figure 3.2 summarises this asymmetrical relationship. As we can see, the teacher’s access to each channel, in black bold, is guaranteed. The extent to

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which learners are normally free to use these channels to express their own messages is represented by various shades of grey, the lightest representing the most limited access. The fact that we are dealing with an unequal dynamic is a very useful point to keep in mind. Even when we think that we are allowing our learners plenty of agency, they may still feel that their voices are being suppressed. After all, whatever time and space we do give them to speak or type, that time and space has to be divided amongst all the learners in a group. My advice, therefore, is to always try to allow your learners more voice, even when you think they have quite a lot.

Keeping channels clear At the same time, the teacher needs to retain overall control of the classroom. There needs to be order and structure to the use of microphones. If the chat box is full of ‘noise’, it is next to useless. The quickest way to maintain or regain control of a class in terms of sound is to mute all your learners’ microphones. The surest way to guarantee that there is no silliness in terms of chat box entries is to disable that function (if you can), or to forbid your learners from typing into the text box. Similarly, if your learners are distracting each other via webcam, or if they are scribbling wildly on the central whiteboard, blocking access to those functions will also remedy that. However, if, at each turn where we may encounter possible tangential behaviour, our reaction is to further limit the sphere of our learners’ freedom of self-expression, then sooner or later we will end up in a place where they are able to do nothing – leaving us to broadcast monologues to a digital room of people who lack the capacity to react or interact. Such a scenario would not constitute a well-managed or well-behaved digital class. A well-behaved digital classroom is one where everyone has their microphones activated but chooses when to speak carefully (an intermediate point might be to use the ‘hands up’ function that some platforms have, whereby a learner can signal that they wish to speak, much as they would in a classroom). Similarly, a well-behaved digital classroom is one where everyone is free to type into the chat box but does so responsibly.

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The ideal is to get your online teenage learners into a position where they can make decisions which benefit themselves and the group in terms of learning. If I appear to be labouring the point or if it seems that I am getting a little philosophical, then please forgive me. I do believe, though, that a teacher’s position on this matter will greatly influence how their classes feel – and that the position just outlined is the way to move classes forward as a collective. So, given this ideal, this place we want to get to, a good start might be to share your endgame, in terms of classroom management, with your learners. The following mini-speech may serve your purposes well: As the teacher, I would like to give you all as much freedom to express yourselves as possible. For this to happen I need you to use the microphones and chat box responsibly. Before you say or type anything, please ask yourself: Is what I am about to say or write going to help the English class? Is it in English? Is it about English? Will it help me or the others to learn something? Will it help the teacher?

Ready-made messages for classroom management In terms of managing classes, I find it incredibly helpful to have a series of prewritten generic messages open in a Word document in another window (first mentioned in Roland, 2020). They can be used in two ways: 1. At the start of a class as a general reminder This is an example of what I have termed ‘fronting discipline’ in the main book Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom (Roland, 2018). This strategy is particularly effective because right at the start of class, nobody has done anything ‘wrong’ and so no learner is on the defensive. Also, if it is the first thing that is typed into the chat box, it tends to be seen by everyone. 2. At the point of need during a class It can be time-consuming to type an admonition into the chat box. The act of composing the message requires concentration. Having the messages ready and open in a Word document allows me to copy and paste one into the chat box when needed, repeating the message several times if required. I regularly make the point that our best classroom management is often done between lessons. Imagine that towards the end of a class, several of your learners leave the digital classroom before you have finished giving

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your final instructions for the homework. In that very moment, you will struggle to get those learners back. At the start of the next lesson, however, you could make sure that this message is awaiting your class: Dear learners, At the end of last lesson, some of you left early. This meant that you missed my final set of instructions. For this reason, some of you did the wrong piece of homework and have lost marks. Please remember that the lesson does not finish until I say: Thank you, have a wonderful evening and see you next time, or something like that. As you see, leaving early can affect your grades. I am also obliged to record your attendance on the register – this includes lateness and leaving early.

If you do, you are unlikely to experience the same problem a second time. As you see, the pre-written message is composed using simple, straightforward language. It may seem direct (though always respectful); however, by keeping the message direct and simple, you will find that your learners are better able to understand it. For very low-level teens, I may also have a version ready in their first language(s) (L1(s)), which I feed into the chat box after they have had a chance to look at the English version.

The need for ready-made messages concerning the chat box

Here is a real exchange that took place between the members of a young teen group during one of my classes: [17:31] Mateo: jajaj [17:32] Pablo: Jajjaa [17:32] Jose: JAJJAJAJAJAJAJAJJAAJJA [17:32] CHRIS ROLAND: Maya can you hear me yet? [17:32] Thiago: She’s not there [translated from L1] [17:32] Jose: CAN YOU REPEAT [17:32] Thiago: jjjjjjjajajajajajaj A random bit of loss of control [Original message in English as it is] [17:34] Mateo: ífh`v0ifhviporhvp98shgp8t9yv’9r F in the chat Typical silliness [Original message in English as it is] 25

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Here you can see a mixture of English and L1 with a couple of quite impressive snippets in English such as ‘random bit’, ‘loss of control’ and ‘silliness’. The ‘F in the chat’ is a reference to the practice of players typing an F in the chat box of the combat simulation game Call of Duty, to pay respects to other players that have died. These days learners often use it to comment on something that has gone wrong in general. Variations might be: -An F for me. -F -f -FFFF -F [+ ‘in the’ appearing as L1] chat You will get to know the idiosyncrasies of your learners’ typing from interaction with them during your lessons. It is worth remembering that everything comes from somewhere and, whether you deem it relevant or significant to your lessons or not, it will provide some information. Here we also see examples of ‘jaja’, which is my Spanish learners’ version of ‘haha’. We can also see, creeping in with this group, a tendency for one learner to mimic another, making the mimicked utterance a little longer by holding down a key and typing a string of that same letter. Later in the lesson this happened: Pablo: Thattttttt [translated from L1] Maya: Seriously!? Pablo: Thattttttt [translated from L1] Luis: That, so what? [translated from L1] Jose: THATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTT [translated from L1] [18:01] Maya: THATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT [18:02] Mateo: thatttttttttttttt [18:02] Pablo: Thatttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt [18:00] [18:01] [18:01] [18:01] [18:01]

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[18:02] Mateo: THATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT Here you can see how, in the space of just a minute or two, the class dynamic gets derailed, with a number of learners dragged into the pattern of typing longer answers and anything the teacher types as likely as not to get missed with all the chat box ‘noise’. (The original L1 word for ‘that’ was ‘eso’ with the long strings of T’s actually being O’s.) Here, as elsewhere, I find this message useful: IMPORTANT: Hello everyone! We need to keep the chat box clear. Lots of emojis or long lists of letters make things messy and distract us all. To improve the quality of the class, I need you to be responsible with your messages. Most of you are doing brilliantly here. For those few that are not, please remember that I sometimes keep a record of the comments, and these may be referred to in future correspondence or when deciding or discussing your end-of-term grades. Thanks!

This is actually my third and strongest version of the same message. In Downloadable resource 2: Ready-made messages, you will find all versions, beginning with a gentler reminder of general chat box use, which I often use at the start of a lesson as described above. Friends: To maintain the quality of the class, and for the benefit of everyone, I would like to ask you to use the chat column only to respond to the teacher or to make comments that are directly related to activities. Thanking you in advance.

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In this resource, you also have a number of other generic messages, such as the one for leaving class early, which you may want to adapt to your own context.

Dealing with late arrivals One or two late arrivals are to be expected, but occasionally the micro-culture of a group will take a turn towards this being the norm. In such cases, you may have four or five, or even the majority of the class arriving late, which will eat into your class time and negatively affect what you can productively do with the first five or ten minutes of class. Staying with the class of young teens we have been looking at for a little longer, I would like to share with you a strategy that I use for late arrivals. It consists simply of announcing in the chat box the time of each late arrival. Here we join the class as teacher and learners begin to converse. There is also considerable communication over the mics, but here we have only the chat box transcript. Alvaro: hello CHRIS ROLAND: On time! Well done Alvaro. CHRIS ROLAND: Thiago was 1 minute late. Carmen: Hello CHRIS ROLAND: Hello! Carmen was 2 minutes late. CHRIS ROLAND: Juan and Alvaro were on time. CHRIS ROLAND: Jose was 3 minutes late CHRIS ROLAND: Mateo, Pablo, Diego were 3 minutes late. Alvaro: low [this, and the responses below, are answers to my spoken quiz-style questions] [18:54] Diego: tall [18:54] Jose: high [18:54] Alvaro: high [18:54] Juan: high [18:54] Pablo: high [18:54] Mateo: spensive [18:54] Diego: expensive [18:55] Pablo: spensive [18:55] Mateo: expensive [18:55] Jose: expensive [18:55] Alvaro: expensive [18:55] Diego: I’ve forgotten [trans from L1] [18:51] [18:51] [18:52] [18:52] [18:52] [18:53] [18:53] [18:54] [18:54]

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[18:55] [18:55] [18:55]

Juan: cheap Diego: cheap CHRIS ROLAND: Maya was five minutes late.

Here, there is no ‘telling off’ as it were. I was doing nothing more than stating facts. However, this serves two purposes. It tells your learners that you are aware that they are arriving late – that you ‘see’ each one of them. Overall, I believe the message is reassuring. It means you notice their absence, which suggests that you value their presence. That is, you want them in your class. It also constitutes a written record, either temporary or longer-term, if saved (see below). The learners might not know exactly where their logged arrival times are bound but one thing is for sure: they are unlikely to be held accountable later for something that is not recorded, whereas where a record exists, they might find this being referred to.

Recording the chat Some platforms will give you the option to copy the entire chat box comments as an inbuilt function. If not, they can normally be manually copied then pasted into a Word document. I then like to label each file with the name of the class and the date. I would strongly recommend doing this for a number of reasons. First, as discussed above, it will provide you with something to refer to if follow-up actions are required in connection with learner misuse of technology or misbehaviour. Equally as important, it will provide you with a record of language items asked for by learners and provided by you via the chat box, and serve as an overall reminder of what was covered last lesson or last week. This can be extremely useful when it comes to planning your next lesson. If there has been a local festival or a long weekend in between, for example, you might need a reminder of what vocabulary or grammar had been covered. Finally, when it comes to evaluating the overall success of a lesson, whether for your own self-reflection or as part of a more structured professional development exercise, looking over the chat box afterwards will help you gauge overall participation: which learners are answering most quickly, which ones are answering most often and which ones are not answering at all. It will also provide one indicator of evidence of learning, allowing you to see which language items and structures are successfully being learned and used in the chat box by your learners.

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Muting and bouncing learners Occasionally you might have to take more drastic action and mute a learner or even bounce them from the class. I shall give you an example of each of these. One day, Sofia’s microphone was causing feedback, which she seemed to be unaware of. We were also just about to hit a key stretch of audio in the clip we were watching. Normally I get everyone to mute their mics before we start a clip, but Sofia had rejoined the class after having some connectivity issues. In this case, rather than pause the video and interrupt everyone’s listening, I muted Sofia from my end and mouthed the words ‘I’m muting you Sofia, okay?’ (as I was on a silenced mic myself). In another class, Elena, a younger learner, decided that she was going to clog up the chat box with text just for fun. She had found a copy of her elder brother’s English grammar exam on the computer she was using and began repeatedly pasting large portions of it into the chat box. On the particular platform that we were using I did not have the ability to block her from using the chat box, and the constant influx of content into the box was wreaking havoc with the rest of the class. I therefore ejected Elena from the class with a curt ‘Sorry, Elena’. By the time she found her way back into the room, she had settled down. If you do need to mute or bounce a learner from the class, my advice is to let that learner know with a short sentence that states clearly what you are doing and why. Something like this will do: Sorry [learner name] I’m muting you/ejecting you because [+ reason (in a half a dozen words)]. If you are ejecting a learner, it may also be worth stating: You can come back in two minutes. If you do not let the learner know what is occurring, they will often not realise that it was you who did it and simply unmute themselves or re-enter the classroom (if they have the option to do those things). They might also mistake your actions for a technical problem their end and start to come to you for a solution. By letting them know what is happening and why, you move one step closer to reconciling your learner to your system. We do this through dialogue and discussion. After all, what is an English lesson if not a conversation with the class?

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General tech issues The technology problems that your learners experience will depend on the platform you are using, their equipment and/or set-up as well as their user knowledge of both the former and the latter. What is certain, though, is that you will be their first port of call when it comes to looking for help. To start with, you may not know how to fix their problems but little by little you will begin to spot commonalities and patterns between various cases. To this end, I strongly recommend that whenever a learner has a problem and does manage to resolve it, you make an effort to find out what it was that they did to fix it and/or exactly what the problem turned out to be. It may take various questions to get this information out of them but this sort of data collection exercise is your preparation for the next learner who has a similar problem.

Ready-made tech messages As the Scottish philosopher David Hume stated (1739), it is through witnessing events that repeatedly occur in succession that we can ascertain cause and effect and establish rules about the world. In this case, we can take the knowledge that we accumulate from the processes described above and use it to compose a number of ready-made messages, just as we might do for classroom management issues. One of the most common issues that I have experienced is a feedback loop at the learner’s end. This phenomenon takes some effort to explain as a class is in mid-flow and your message is likely to be more poorly expressed if you are at the same time trying to keep the lesson going. This pre-written message describes the problem quite well: ________ [insert learner’s name], we may be getting some feedback from you. Are you using speakers? I think my voice is coming out of them and back to us through your microphone, creating a sort of loop. Do you have earphones that you can try this time or try next time?

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Unresolvable tech issues Sometimes you simply will not be able to solve a learner’s tech issues. In such cases, you might feel trapped between the need to help that learner on the one hand and the need to cater for the needs of the rest of the group by keeping the class going. It is indeed an awful feeling to ‘leave a learner behind’. I therefore have another pre-written message for occasions like this: ________ [insert learner’s name], I can see you are having equipment or technology problems but I do not think I can fix it right now. I can ask someone to call you or your parents to talk about the technical issues over the next few days. Would you like me to do that?

The overriding message here is that the learner still matters to the teacher and that help is on its way.

The tech bluff The previous ready-made message also serves well for the odd time when a learner is feigning a tech issue in order to deliberately disrupt the lesson or to avoid doing a certain activity or task. Obviously, you would never directly accuse a learner of doing this but whenever I have suspected a learner of exaggerating or inventing a problem, that very same message has normally resulted in a fairly prompt ‘It’s working now, teacher.’ This is an example of what I call the ‘I-see-your-side’ perspective. The offer of help in the form of a follow-up call indicates that we have our learners’ wellbeing as a priority. They have a problem and we want to sort that out for them. There is an additional dimension, though. If they are bluffing, then the lack of any real technological issue on their part is likely to become apparent at some point in the process of contacting and chatting with their parents. I will refer to the ‘I-see-your-side’ perspective again. In general, I use the term to apply to any classroom management strategy that is dialogic and that takes into consideration how our learners experience the classroom. This perspective may also include practical measures or procedures that, while of a benevolent nature towards the learner, will serve to challenge and test both behaviour which is unnecessarily lax and the overuse of excuses.

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Cameras on or cameras off? Over the last year, one question that I have been asked repeatedly by teachers from a number of countries working in a number of contexts is where I stand on having my learners activate their webcams. This is a big question because it touches on a number of issues. In short, my answer is ‘cameras on’ unless there is a very good reason. It is the firm belief of this teacher, trainer and methodology writer that in an ideal online set-up, everyone will have their camera on as a matter of course.

Reasons for having webcams on

This is more than just being able to see ‘what they are up to’. Being able to see your learners’ facial expressions allows you to gauge your input from moment to moment. Their nods and their frowns tell you whether your message is clear and whether instructions or explanations are being understood. You might not be able to see every learner’s face at the same time (unless you are in gallery mode) but the four or five faces that you can see at any time, as in Figure 3.1 (on page 21), can serve as an important sample of the whole class and will help you read how things are going. You will also normally have an arrow with which you can change which learners you are looking at during the class. In terms of security, being able to see the faces of each of your learners also acts as confirmation that they are who they are meant to be and that no other third parties have entered your classroom using their credentials. Another argument for having webcams on is teacher well-being. It is one thing to deliver a one-hour teacher training webinar, for example, to a hundred or two hundred attendees and not to be able to see the audience. What you have is basically a one-directional presentation and a few questions at the end via the chat box or a moderator. It is quite another thing to teach four or five hours of supposedly interactive language instruction where the only person you can see is a mirror image of yourself. This can take its toll on your sense of mental balance at the end of a morning, afternoon or evening. Our classes are supposed to be communicative language lessons. Learners’ faces are a major means of communication back to their teacher. The online medium has the capacity to show those faces. For me it is a ‘no-brainer’ and, in most cases, I believe there is no real reason why learners should not have their webcams on. Imagine if your learners walked into your physical classroom and proceeded to use their coursebooks to cover up their faces. I think that you would quickly tell your learners to put their books down and stop being silly.

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Reasons that webcams might be off

However, there are various other factors to take into account, and here I think we need to distinguish between two sets of opposites, which give us four types of class, as illustrated in Figure 3.3 below.

Planned non-emergency

Y

W

Obligatory

Extra/Optional

Z

X

Emergency substitute for face-to-face Figure 3.3: Online classes might take place under a number of paradigms

Let us look at the vertical axis first. At one end of the scale there are classes where the online medium has been chosen as an ideal option for all parties, outside of an emergency situation. If these classes are planned, then hopefully the teacher or their institution will have time to talk to learners and parents, and to make sure that everyone has the right equipment, that the electronic medium suits both parties and that everyone understands that activating your webcam is part and parcel of online lessons. At the other end there are emergency classes that have been set up quickly to replace face-to-face lessons, as was the case with a lot of teaching in 2020. Here, there is far less opportunity for everyone to get ready. Learners might not have webcams, depending upon their equipment, and they might not be very enthusiastic about the online medium. Looking at the horizontal axis, it is possible to distinguish between language classes that are entered into voluntarily and (whether paid for or not) are in some way additional to a learner’s mandatory education on the one hand and classes that a learner has to attend and that an institution is obliged to provide, by law, on the other. This distinction is significant for the following reason: if a

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class is additional and optional, a learner is likely to enter into it a) willingly and b) generally only if they have an adequate set-up in terms of technology. If a learner is forced online through circumstance, they, their parents, teacher or institution may not have been able to ensure they have the right set-up and user knowledge. It may also mean that the decision to put them into an online class has not taken into account whether or not they have a quiet place in which to be while attending their digital lesson (a place where private family discussions – or squabbles – are not taking place) and where there is a fairly neutral background that does not reveal private information they do not wish to share. When I talk about ‘the ideal set-up’, I am imagining classes that have been set up online and attended because that is a suitable and appealing option. This corresponds to class type W in Figure 3.3. Here, if learners have the correct equipment, a good place from which to join the lesson and have had the chance to agree to online lessons of their own volition, there is no reason why everyone should not have their camera activated. Such a scenario allows for orientation in advance: the teacher can get together with parents and learners and explain the main elements of an online lesson and the requirements in terms of equipment (including webcam activation) as well as the rationale for those requirements. Under this ‘planned and optional’ paradigm, if the learner is unable to meet the basic set-up requirements, you might suggest that the online medium is not the most suitable for their study and offer face-to-face classes. In contrast to class type W, however, most online lessons set up during 2020 in response to the global pandemic fell into an X or a Z paradigm, where institutions found themselves relying on the internet as a substitute for their usual face-to-face lessons. Under these circumstances, the overriding priorities were often learner retention in the case of private language schools and a continuation of normality and coverage of the national syllabus in the case of mainstream education. In this situation, none of the ideal requisites described in W above were guaranteed and a more flexible approach to learners having their cameras on or off was often adopted. Even where mainstream institutions have had some time to plan their first online or hybrid classes under paradigm Y, such as the summer months, some learners will inevitably still have issues with set-up or study location. Such a wide range of circumstances is going to require some flexibility. You might even consider drafting up a sort of ‘Camera Exemption Request’ form that learners or their parents can complete if they strongly feel they do not wish to activate their camera or even their microphones. I have provided an example of what this might look like in Downloadable resource 3: Webcam exemption request forms.

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Other reasons not to have a camera on

It is good to be flexible with webcam deactivation when there are genuine reasons why a learner might need this. However, I suggest that in the majority of recent cases where teachers have made webcam use optional, it has been as a benevolent gesture on their part in an attempt to be nice or gentle. I would also suggest that many would have found that this gesture backfired and was detrimental to the dynamic of their teaching. If you give a class of teenagers the option to have their webcams off, some of them will take that option. Group conformity factors can then kick in and soon you may find yourself looking at a blank screen with no faces at all. I repeat the point that online language lessons are much more difficult when the teacher cannot see their learners’ faces. There are some downsides to, and arguments against, having cameras on. Firstly, there is a residual stigma attached to being snapped or filmed, and we are used to sometimes objecting when a friend (or stranger) casually or whimsically points a lens in our direction. Secondly, there is a real need to be cautious of webcams and strangers online. And thirdly, from the perspective of personal freedom, we could argue for the rights of an individual not to be recorded and who knows, I might change my stance in the future and argue for that myself. However, for now I would like to point out that having your webcam on as an integral part of a structured and planned communication activity is not the same as wanting or not wanting to be in a friend’s selfie or TikTok clip, so webcam non-activation should be more thoroughly considered and more properly justified. I offer two final thoughts. First, I imagine there are hundreds of thousands of young people all over the world who would jump at the chance to have language classes or extra language classes (or perhaps any classes at all) online but cannot. Without preaching too much, this might be something worth reminding our learners of. Second, I have noted that even when all my learners have their own webcams switched off, the moment my video image disappears from the screen, they are very quick to tell me ‘Teacher, I can’t see you!’ The irony of this is also something that might be worth pointing out to them.

Managing a large-scale shift to online teaching So far we have been looking at the minutiae of classroom management within a group. In order to expand the scope of discussion and widen our perspective, we shall now hear about what managing numerous groups of teenagers online entails from an institutional perspective.

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For this, I invited Elspeth Pollock, the Director of Studies for ELI, the language academy where much of my own teaching has taken place, to participate in an informal interview. My questions are in bold and her answers in italics. 1. Could you give us some sort of idea about the scale of what you did in March 2020, in terms of the number of teens and groups you put online? It was nearly 5,000 students in total, of which I guess 3,000 were teenagers (including Cambridge exam levels B1–C1, who are mostly teens these days, too). Number of groups – hundreds. 2. As a manager, going into the online phase, did you have any special concerns? I decided to use the platform, at the suggestion of our IT provider, Big Blue Button (BBB) because I didn’t fancy the thought of making all our students create an account or have to wait in online waiting rooms or use a generic platform which might leave us at the mercy of a huge organisation. BBB allowed our students and teachers to access classes really easily via MY ELI, our central in-house platform. As we went into the online phase almost overnight, we were rushing, in complete ignorance of the hows and wherefores of what might go wrong. So there were few initial concerns, but many, many ongoing concerns and struggles once we started. 3. Could you tell us about a couple of interesting or key decisions you had to make? Our trainers made lesson plans for the first online lesson with all levels so our teachers would have something to start off with. That helped teachers worry slightly less. Then I asked our teachers to share their materials and lesson plans on our virtual staffroom and label them ONLINE – we had 413 documents which were shared during that time, which I think is incredible. We had existed with one server for 40 years – to go online [and share all this work] we had to buy 13 extra servers! The first day from central office we could watch how the first classes were going on our computers – there was a huge problem that learners were ending up waiting in a different virtual room to their teacher – creating vast overload on the system, multiple virtual classrooms and everyone was lost. So, I had to make the snap decision to get the programmer to deliberately crash the whole system or wait with the

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confusion while he mended it. We crashed the system and, to this day, not many realise that that initial crash was deliberate. 4. How happy were you with how things went? Initially, it was hairy. Incredibly stressful for everyone involved. I think our team did extremely well, certainly everyone gave it their best. Our secretaries in the 12 centres were overwhelmed with tech phone calls – we set up tech help with two full-time people, and it wasn’t enough. We drew up help documents to send to students. I found out one of our teachers had five years’ experience in online teaching with Young Learners (YLs) and I asked her to give two training sessions – she had never done anything like this and she went for it, she was great. Our trainers, myself included, had to think quickly, research online classes and try to give training sessions to help teachers without much idea ourselves of how to go about it! 5. Were there any unexpected difficulties? Ignorance is bliss. There were many. Above all, the fact that learners at home weren’t equipped to go online. Laptops, microphones, webcams, internet connection – what about a brother and sister who had class at the same time? Who got to use the ‘good’ laptop and who had to struggle with the old house computer? Could it be used on a mobile? If learners don’t have the equipment, they get frustrated, angry … there was a lot of frustration. There were also difficulties in student and parent expectations as to what online classes are. Luckily the online stuff they seemed to be receiving from their schools was just worksheets with occasional tutorials, so in comparison, our classes were in a league of their own. Teenagers will pretend their webcam isn’t working that day. Or their audio. We rang a lot of parents to check. 6. Did you have to make any adjustments as you went along? We made many adjustments to the BBB platform, allowing things like breakout rooms only after having been a couple of weeks online. This was deliberate because we didn’t know whether the 13 servers could handle the extra needed for breakout rooms. We personalized the initial BBB page with the school’s logo. We made lots of adjustments to our teaching – teachers were amazing. Planning took hours and hours – mostly done on PowerPoint.

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Everyone on the staff was essential – a team effort. We had to deliver coursebooks that had been left in classrooms to learners’ homes, buy teachers equipment like webcams quickly, deal with multiple enquiries, listen to problems and give people (teachers and learners and parents) time to talk about their issues. It was constant and we had to react quickly and with positivity. It was a lot of reacting instead of being proactive. 7. Did the three-month shift to online teaching have any impact on studies and teaching within the institution once classes shifted back to a face-to-face format? I digitalised all our in-house exams and our teenagers were sent these exams to do in PDF format. That again caused a bit of a stir because, as we knew before, no one reads instructions! These exams were in a reduced format, although they tested all the skills (which I felt was very important because we did not reduce the price for online classes and our customers needed to receive the same quality of service and attention as before) – the knock-on effect from this is that some learners this academic year are weaker than they should be. We had about 100 fewer PET for Schools students than usual – which was a shame because of the 350 that did do the exam, 97% passed. We managed to maintain standards in all the Cambridge exams, which was amazing. We are keen to keep using Google Classroom for written work with teenagers – it works well. Also it will be set up if we have to go online again. There is a whole new way of teaching with masks – another challenge for teachers and learners alike. We all learnt a lot and some responded to the challenge better than others. We are all still a little unsteady I think, a little tense, nervous – although we can all add online teaching to our CV skills. 8. If you were to set up a large-scale online teaching operation from scratch (i.e. not specifically as an emergency measure), is there anything you would do differently, or are there any systems or procedures you would put in place, given your insights gained over the last six months? Find out if your customers actually want online teaching first! Ask them about their equipment at home – give them time to set up.

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Don’t have siblings with online classes at the same time. Train teachers and give them as much help as possible beforehand. Be aware that online teaching for hours on end is stressful and tiring – and bear this in mind when drawing up teacher timetables if possible. It’s a team effort – make sure you have your team pulling in the same direction, all ready to help with whatever. 9. Do you have any final advice for the reader? Online classes with teenagers can be entertaining for the teacher and students – they are quick to participate and can help you with tech problems! Classroom management is tricky if a teen is having a moody day and refuses to switch on their webcam. But the quizzes and polls that can be done usually bring them round. Bear in mind parents can often be lurking in the background when classes are online, but teenagers can usually get round that by closing their bedroom door! Set up tech support.

Having tech support I would like to thank Elspeth Pollock for taking the time to share her experiences with us. It just so happened that a week after the interview above I met up with an old friend and IT man, Miguel Miracaballos, who I had not seen for some months. It turned out that he was one of the people doing most of the tech support callbacks for the groups described above. He had even called up one of my learners. Given the fact that Els’s final comment is to state the importance of tech support, I took the opportunity to run a couple of questions by Miguel, which, I believe, will be of particular interest to centres thinking of going online. 1. How many calls did you make? I personally made about nine calls a day, with the average duration being 45 minutes per call and the longest call being two hours with the same parent. The volume of calls dropped as parents started to learn how to fix problems themselves and as I familiarised our secretaries with how to advise parents themselves.

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2. Did you notice any patterns in the problems, and if so what were the most common ones? We had about eight problems that regularly occurred. The most common ones were when users had denied the platform access to/use of their microphone unintentionally and later had to change the settings on their browser or machine to re-enable it. The easiest issue to resolve was where users had unknowingly pressed a key situated between F1 and F12 (which they often did not know existed) that had turned off either their mic or their camera. There were some compatibility issues with our platform and the Mac operating system. Users of the generic Mac browser, Safari, could occasionally not get audio once they returned from breakout rooms. Some learners lost internet connection because of the massive traffic on it during lockdown. This was an issue that the internet providers themselves had to fix. Another issue was when learners were using their parents’ company computers with fixed settings. This meant they could not make any changes, such as the installation of different browsers, without the help of the respective company IT departments. 3. What advice would you give a school owner, director or teacher thinking of online classes? It depends on the platform chosen. For us it was easier to contract our own servers but for smaller schools without a full-time IT person on the payroll, it might be easier to use a platform such as Google Classroom, which has its own tech support and online help forums. 4. Did you notice any issues that teenagers in particular had? The fact that the teens had a computer in front of them was much more of a distraction for them than it was for younger children, as they tended to use it to chat with each other, play games or open up other apps not related to the class. It is very difficult to control this as the teacher only sees the learner looking at their webcam, without being able to see what they have on their screen. Another interesting observation was that even though teenagers appear to know a lot about computers, in reality their knowledge is limited to that of end users and they normally know less about system settings than their parents do. On the other hand, if nothing went wrong, they were

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normally much more comfortable in front of a screen and very quickly got to know how the platform worked, including functions and tricks that the teacher had to put a stop to if they were not to disrupt the class.

Professional development Things to think about

■ If you are currently teaching online, how much of an opportunity did you get, prior to the start of your classes, to talk to your learners about what would be expected of them during the class, about the online platform itself or about their set-up in terms of equipment at home? ■ What arrangement do you have for providing technical support? Who calls or will be calling learners or parents? If it is you, when do you or will you set time aside from your teaching to do this?

Things to try

■ As classes proceed, make a note of any classroom management issues. Use your notes to start building up your own store of ready-made messages. ■ In a similar way, make a note of any technical issues that occur, especially ones that get fixed. Then use these notes to build up a catalogue of prewritten messages for troubleshooting. ■ Identify the class type your lessons will fall into (in terms of the W, X, Y and Z paradigms provided in the chapter). Think about what would be a fair and reasonable stance for you to have regarding learners turning their webcams on or not. Make this position clear to learners and parents at the start of lessons. Prepare a letter establishing your new stance if you wish to make a change.

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4. Using the chat box to focus on language I imagine that the question ‘How do I make my online lessons successful?’ is one that is at the forefront of most readers’ minds. The title of this chapter should give you a clue about the direction we are about to take in answering this. There are things that matter and things that do not. Whether you can include slick animations in your PowerPoint presentations or not probably does not matter much. Whether you can embed links and videos in your presentations or have to share or upload them in a more manual way probably does not matter much either. Whether you can transition smoothly to shared screens or whether you are slightly clumsy in locating and displaying or playing files is not a major issue either. It does not matter if you are working from a paper copy of the coursebook or a digital book that makes swishing noises each time you turn a page. It certainly does not matter if you are able to use camera filters to superimpose faces of cats or clowns over your own face or not – fun as they are! Your user knowledge of the various functions and capabilities of the platform you are on will increase over time, as will your operating speed. What does matter, though, is that at the end of the lesson, your learners can use English better than they could at the start of it. This will involve knowing more words and sentences. It will also involve having practised the ones they already know. It will involve being able to recognise those words and sentences more easily when heard or read, and having a fuller grasp of their meaning. That is really all that matters. Everything else is just a question of medium. This volume deals with the particulars of an online mode of delivery, but if we remember that any language class is simply a means to an end, we will not get overly distracted by or anxious about things that do not matter very much. The end purpose is language. Your guiding principle for successful online lessons is therefore: Make it about the language. If you do this and manage at the same time to preserve your learners’ dignity (and your own) then everything else will naturally fall into place. At the heart of most people’s problems with teaching teens online is that there are unlikely to be any real problems at all – only the perception of problems.

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What I mean by this is that most of the time there is no real obstacle stopping us from focusing on language during our lessons. There is one additional important consideration. Your learners need to be aware that their knowledge of language is increasing. That means pointing out to them what they are learning and reminding them as you go. So how do you focus more on language in your online lessons? It is quite easy and involves adopting a series of habits rather than a radical new approach to your teaching. That is the first piece of good news. The second is that although the way we do this online is slightly different from the way we might do it in face-to-face classes, the online medium makes these habits easier in various ways. One major way in which it does so centres around maximising our use of the chat box.

Focus on language provided by the learner Let us begin with what happens when a learner has entered some text – a comment or an answer to a question we have asked – into the chat box.

Flag up systematic errors

The first thing we need to do is to acknowledge the response and react to its communicative content. After that, we can flag up any systematic errors. It may sound counter-intuitive, but my first step here is to make sure that my learners know that I value their errors as valid and useful contributions to the lesson and an aid to me in my teaching. I tell them: Each error that you make will be beautiful in its own way, because each one has its own very special reasons for being. Errors are true to themselves and perfect according to their own logic. Maybe you wrote ‘costumes’ instead of ‘customs’ because you remembered one instead of the other and that’s fine, you’ll get them unmixed sooner or later. They are pretty similar, let’s face it. Maybe you wrote ‘waht’ or ‘wehn’ because you were typing fast and got the vowel and the ‘h’ mixed up, and that’s fine too. It’s an odd ‘h’ which we don’t pronounce anyway. Maybe you typed ‘dirty’ when you wanted ‘dirt’ because you learnt dirty when you were in primary school and that’s the word form that has stuck. There are always reasons for errors – confusion between words, word or letter combinations we prefer or remember better, our own private spelling systems, associations we make, or where we are running on the logic of our first language, but the logic of the language we are learning behaves differently in that particular case. THESE LAST ONES are the errors I can really help you 44

4. Using the chat box to focus on language

with because if you make that sort of error, probably so will another learner who shares your language. So by helping you and pointing that out, we can actually help other people in the class to avoid that error. I share a variation of this pep talk with all my teenage classes. Once we destigmatise errors, we can use learner utterances (spoken and textual) and systematic errors as a resource. For me, they are like presents. I appreciate my learners when they get the language right. I appreciate them equally when they get the language wrong. The trick is to dissociate the systematic error from its utterer or author and start to talk in general terms – even though we can all see who made the initial error. Here, it is important to work on the micro-culture of your groups, and towards non-defensiveness. In addition, I will thank the learner for their contribution – without any trace of irony or sarcasm. One reason that chat box contributions are easier to work with than spoken learner utterances is that they have a level of permanence – the language we are talking about remains in view while we talk about it. In this respect, the online medium gives us an edge over face-to-face teaching.

Use learner contributions as examples of good language

In a similar way, you can draw the rest of the class’s attention to an individual learner’s chat box entry when they have used an impressive, low-frequency word or a phrase that the class have only recently seen, or when they have composed a sentence in an artful way. By doing so, not only do you give acknowledgement and credit to the learner who produced the sentence, but you also (re)share that language by opening it up to the class. Providing a verbal commentary to what I can see in the chat box, I normally say something like: ‘Everyone, look at how [learner’s name] has used this expression.’ or: ‘Well done for using that phrase. Everyone else, please make a note of that. It’s good language.’ or: ‘People, can you see which word/phrase [learner’s name] has used to say…?’ or even: Teacher:

That’s a great phrase. Where did you learn that?

Student:

From last year’s teacher.

Teacher: Well good on them for teaching it to you and good on you for remembering. Everyone, …’

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Occasionally, teachers I work with ask me ‘If you are drawing attention to individual learners and praising them, do the others not get jealous or start teasing them?’ My honest answer is ‘Not if you do it in the right way and not if the class atmosphere is a healthy one.’ The trick, I believe, even while pointing out a learner’s systematic error or praising them for a good phrase or sentence, is to make it more about the language and the group than about the individual. Where a teacher is unable to highlight such things without negative comments from other class members, we can reasonably say that a level of toxicity has crept in which will need addressing and challenging, as a priority, in order for the group to work optimally. This can be done through a series of whole-class discussions, startof-class reminders and/or a swift follow-up with the full weight of the measures at your disposal, including directors of studies and parents where necessary. In general, though, I have found it almost universally to be the case that when all learners are regularly called on to contribute in class, everyone wants to be corrected with sensitivity and everyone appreciates some recognition.

Provide a language upgrade

I plan to touch on this point in more detail in future publications but will briefly explain the idea and give you a couple of examples here. For 20 years, I have been in the business of correcting teenagers’ sentences in English. That is, making the minimum changes necessary to make the sentences they have given me correct. So, for example, if a learner writes: I stayed with my friends. … I give them: I hung out with my friends. … because that is what I know they want to say. Here, I have done the least possible to make the sentence correct. It is still not a very interesting or informative sentence, though. Instead, at the point where that initial sentence appears in the chat box, you can also ask yourself: What else can I give them? With teens, this will often mean going a little deeper by asking a few more specifics (within the remit of open-class discussion), for example: ‘What did you actually do?’ ‘Who went where?’ ‘Did they come to you or did you go to them or did you meet up in a common place?’ This might result in you giving them sentences such as:

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I met up with my friends at the shopping centre. I went round my friend’s place to see her new console. A couple of friends popped round to see me. We wandered round town all afternoon. At other times, a corrected sentence may still not sound very natural. Imagine a learner has typed: Do schoolwork is something boring, most of time for me. Sure, you can correct it to: For me, doing school work is something boring, most of the time. … but it still sounds strange. If you distance yourself from the sentence for a moment and ask what a proficient user of English would normally say, you might arrive at: Most of the time, I find doing schoolwork pretty boring. Providing an upgrade means going beyond mere correction and fine-tuning our learners’ contributions. Again, the chat box is particularly suitable for upgrading language as the text there appears in snippets, in plain view of everyone, and the teacher can easily respond to it with reformulated text of their own as subsequent entries. We cannot flag up systematic errors, highlight good examples of language use and provide language upgrades every single time a learner enters text, but we can try to do each of these at least several times a lesson, or on a regular basis – or just whenever we remember.

Focus on language provided by the teacher We do not have to limit our language focus to when learners have entered text. The following strategies can be used when text has been typed in either by a learner or by the teacher.

Provide the word in both spoken and written forms

A learner may have asked How do you say ….? over the microphone and another learner or the teacher may have provided an answer in spoken form. At another moment, the teacher may be using the chat box to provide an answer to a question that nobody has been able to get right. In either of these situations, the teacher can make sure that the language item, be it a word, a

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phrase or a sentence, has both appeared in its written form via the chat box and been modelled in its spoken form via the mics. That way everyone gets to hear the item as it should be spoken and to read the item as it is correctly spelled. This simple strategy of doubling up, if employed regularly, will help learners map sound to text. It will help them with spelling, and it will help them to retain language items in their memory as there is twice the input stimulus. It will also help any learner who is struggling to keep up with the class as it means there is now a written record for them to refer to. To this end, if you are systematically typing in the answers to an exercise, it is also a good idea to label the answers as they are in the book by typing in the question number or letter that corresponds to each item before it. I find this a particularly useful habit to adopt with ‘tween’ (10- to 13-year-old) classes.

Explore word formation

Another thing you can do is to briefly explore different forms of a word. If you have just given a group the noun hope, you can point out that this is the verb as well. You can then ask: Teacher: So how do you think you make the adjective? Ana:

Hope as well?

Teacher:

Good try … Anyone else? Think about the word beauty.

Thiago:

Beautiful [chat box entry]

Teacher: With hope. Lili:

Hopeful [chat box entry]

Teacher:

Yeah! That’s, Lili. And the adverb?

Carmen:

Hopefully [chat box entry]

Teacher: Now we’re cooking! And the opposite? When you have no hope? Think about use and worth and point. Jose:

Hopeless [chat box entry]

With other words we can ask how to make the opposite with a prefix. Exploring word formation just for a few moments like this is a way to include informative language work, and to add challenge, even if the initial form of the word, such as hope in the example above, is known. A quick intervention of this kind need take no more than 10 or 15 seconds – and I do recommend keeping it short, even if you are enjoying yourself. You can always give the same treatment to another word a little while later. The idea is to add value here, not lesson stages. These short occasional slots will accumulate over time.

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You might do one, two or three during a single lesson. That will make about six or nine during the week. In a term of 10 weeks, that could easily make 60 additional micro-slots and 180 over a full academic year – which is potentially a considerable amount of enrichment.

Cover sound and spelling systems

As well as doubling up with both mic and text, as discussed above, you can also focus more explicitly on the sound of a new word. Yes, your learners will have heard it once when you said the word, but did they catch which syllable the stress was on? Does the word contain a diphthong which might be ‘off their radar’? If a particular sound does not exist in their L1, it is highly possible that they are not hearing the sound exactly as you are saying it. A bit more modelling over the microphones and two or three repetitions could make all the difference. The same is true where a word contains a silent letter. There are obvious examples such as climb and know, but there are also less obvious ones, such as Christmas and sandwich. Did your learners notice the silent letter when you modelled the word, or are they going to try to pronounce that letter, albeit softly, when it is their turn to produce it? It takes just a second to ask them ‘Hey, did you hear what the silent letter was? If so, type it into the chat box.’ If there is more than one letter that is not pronounced, such as in a word like vegetable, you could ask if they can hear which letters get ‘gobbled up’. There is no need to introduce terms like reduction or elision from your Diploma course or English degree. Especially when looking at the different forms of a word, as recommended above, you might draw the learners’ attention to how the syllable stress shifts from one form to another, as it does, for example, with refill (verb) and refill (noun), useful for when they are next trying to get an extra drink in a burger bar in London or New York. You could also draw their attention to interesting cases where letters change their sounds such as in anxious and anxiety (anxious = ank-shus, anxiety = ang-ziety). Again, your online English lesson is not a Certificate or Diploma phonemic awareness input session, so there is no need to spend any more than 30 seconds on such a feature. Nonetheless, you can cover it quite adequately by saying ‘Listen to the two words and tell me which letters change their sound and what other letters they sound like.’. You can also draw attention to spelling, even if it is another very brief comment such as ‘Yes, the answer to number four is success. Please now look at that, double c and double s’ or ‘That’s right, the answer is careful and please note the single l at the end.’ There are words which you will have seen

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large numbers of learners systematically misspell for as long as you have been teaching. A comment here and there like this is simply pre-emptive language work.

Provide a number of quality examples of the item in context

For learners to be able to take on board a new language item effectively, they need to be provided with a number of quality examples of that item in use. A teacher can help them understand how, when and why the millions of people who are already successful speakers of English select that item and drop it into their conversations. Several well-chosen snippets containing a word or expression as it is most typically used will give your teens an idea of the position that language item takes when it is placed in a sentence. It will help them see the grammar that typically glues it in there, such as the verb tenses that typically surround it, verb patterns, noun agreement, modality, prepositions and participles. It will show them which other words users tend to match it up with, in terms of collocation. In addition, it will show them the types of sentences that item appears in, the function it performs and the message it conveys. All this information can be used by your teenage learners (if they are paying attention and if they remember) to serve as a blueprint when constructing their own sentences that include that item later on. Imagine that the word shade has just come up and a learner has asked you if it means shadow. You can explain that we normally use shadow when we are concerned with the specific shape of the dark silhouette which appears on the ground, floor or wall, and we use shade when we are contrasting areas that are in full sunlight with those that are not. That would be a fine explanation. When you provide a couple of examples, however, you really consolidate the difference. Below, the teacher’s audio commentary via the microphone is provided in grey within square brackets and their text entries in boxes: [So we often talk about sitting in the shade or standing in the shade, as in this sentence] - I was sitting in the shade of a tree sipping a glass of lemonade.

[or if you’re waiting for a bus on a really hot day with your friend]

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- Why don’t we stand over here in the shade?

[If you’re looking for a place to sit down for a while, you might say] - Yeah, I’d love an ice cream. Let’s see if we can find some shade.

[and when discussing crazy temperatures] - It was 40ºC, in the shade!

Again, this is where the online medium favours us. Turning to the whiteboard in a face-to-face lesson and writing up each of the four examples just given, whilst also providing a spoken commentary (which may mean intermittently turning back to look at the class) all involves big movements, which are time and energy consuming and, to a certain extent, may disrupt the main flow of your lesson. In contrast, typing them into the chat box during an online lesson takes very little effort. You will not have to change position or posture and can continue with the central content of your lesson almost seamlessly.

Make a note of new language that has come up

By the end of any lesson that includes the above elements, you should have a number of new items and examples in your chat box. Some of these items will lie outside the main core vocabulary of your coursebook or syllabus, and if they are not seen again, may get forgotten. Before you end the digital lesson, it is a good idea to go back to the start of the lesson’s chat box entries and scroll down, making a note of the new items that you wish to recycle in future lessons. Alternatively, you could copy the entire contents of the chat box into a separate document, so you can scan over them and pick out a handful of items to revise with your class at the start of the next lesson. Another option is to scribble down new language items in a notebook at the side of your computer as you go. This will enable you to include a quick recap as the closing phase of the same lesson.

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The ‘online language checklist’ Throughout this chapter I have shared with you the key points that I try to bear in mind myself in order to deliver productive online lessons that have a strong focus on language. To help me (and now you) keep track of these key points, I put them into the following checklist, which acts as a quick-reference sheet and a reminder of good practice. As I mentioned previously, you do not have to do all of these things all of the time, but rather return to these questions regularly. You can either use it to help you plan lessons or to have by the side of you during lessons.

The online language checklist When a learner types in the chat, react communicatively but then ask yourself: 1. Is there a systematic error I can correct? 2. Is there some good language I can draw everyone else’s attention to? 3. Can I offer them an upgrade – something a little more advanced or natural? When you give learners a new word, ask yourself: 1. Have I typed the new information into the chat box so they have both heard and seen it? 2. Can I cover the opposite with a prefix? 3. Can I cover some other aspect of word formation? 4. Have I covered syllable stress, vowel sounds and any silent letters? 5. Have I offered them an additional example or two so they can get an idea about usage? 6. Have I made a note of the new language so I can bring it up again later?

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Professional development Things to think about

■ In this chapter we have looked at managing two basic elements of our online lessons – the interplay of the chat box and the teacher’s verbal commentary via the mic – to maintain a strong focus on language. Before looking at the chapter, is this what you might have imagined my answer would have been to the question ‘How do I make my online lessons successful?’ If not, how convincing do you find the arguments here and, moving forward, what questions do you still have regarding successful online teaching? ■ How many of the techniques described above do you already make use of either in your online lessons or your face-to-face lessons with teens?

Things to try

■ During your online lessons, use the chat box to flag up and treat the various features of language discussed in the chapter, such as word formation, tricky spelling, systematic errors, teacher-given examples of target language in use, and occasions when learners use impressive language items correctly. If there are any areas that you do not feel you cover as fully as you might, start with those. ■ I have actually placed a copy of the ‘language checklist’ described above, in its handwritten draft form, next to my keyboard as a reminder to myself to keep coming back to a language focus. Try having this book open with the checklist visible as you teach until some of it becomes habit. ■ If you are teaching a language other than English, review the chapter, its suggestions and the ‘language checklist’. What aspects of the language that you teach are particularly tricky for your learners and require your constant attention to redirect your learners to them? You may wish to design your own checklist, or reference sheet, fine-tuned for your context.

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5. Explaining things and getting a response In the previous chapter, we looked at using the basic elements of the digital classroom to keep a solid focus on language, and to guarantee that our online lessons result in learning. In this chapter we look at task design as well as at the small details that will make your instructions more effective and the activities you run more productive. Again, my point will be that successful online lessons with groups of teens do not rely on expert knowledge of apps and programmes but rather on understanding your teenagers’ experience of the tasks you set them from moment to moment. First, though, let us look briefly at one possible pattern, in terms of sequencing and stages, that your online lessons might follow.

Basic plan for an online lesson For a regular online lesson where a group of teenagers are following a coursebook or set syllabus, I suggest the following: 1. Greetings 2. An opening personalisation stage 3. Announcements, or ‘menu of the day’ 4. A revision activity 5. Main language input stage 6. An exercise or two 7. Some language practice that is not an exercise 8. A clip (see Using clips, video and other digital effects on pages 113–129) 9. A recap of new language and the setting of homework. As you can see, I like to keep my online lessons quite simple. The various stages listed above will be covered in this chapter and the next, but always with a view to engaging your learners, whatever the stage may be.

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5. Explaining things and getting a response

Getting a response at the outset of a lesson During the first few minutes of your lesson, your message should be: I see you. I’m pleased you’re here. I value your presence in the group and wish to communicate with you as a person and on a human level. Yes, you have coursebooks and syllabi to cover, but your lessons will benefit even from just a few minutes of this sort of interaction. You can encourage it by inviting your learners to tell you about what has transpired in their lives since you all met up for the last lesson or to tell you about their life experiences in general.

Openers To this end, I have a number of pre-written opening questions (which I refer to simply as ‘openers’). At the start of a lesson, after I have greeted the first few arrivals, I will copy one of these into the chat box. Here is an example: The part of the day that I look forward to most these days is … I will often start by giving an example myself, and then ask the class to continue. I also sometimes embed some target language in the question. In the opener shown above, it was the phrase look forward to. Below, you will find a set of responses from an intermediate class of teens aged 13 to 16. [16:08]  CHRIS The part of the day I look forward to most is a) my ROLAND: fresh orange juice in the morning, b) sitting with Raquel in the conservatory and c) watching a few funny clips before I go to bed. [16:08] Inma: The night because it is when I have a pace and I relax for the all homework [16:08] Celine: when I finished all my homeworks for today [16:08] Maria: The part of the day that I look forward to most during lockdown is after dinner, because is when I have free time, cos I must do a lot of homework during the day [16:08] CHRIS peace [I have already provided a spoken reaction to  ROLAND: Inma’s entry above and a spoken correction. Here, I am doubling up by spelling out ‘peace’ in the chat box as well, and I go on to type the phrase below.] [16:08] CHRIS … when I am left in peace ROLAND:

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[16:08] Elena: I look forward to most is the night, because I can play videogames, read manga and watch anime [16:09] CHRIS homework [Here, I am reminding Celine that homework ROLAND: does not tend to take the plural. Over the mic I explain that you can say ‘pieces of homework’ if you want.] [16:09] Maria: me too Inma [16:09] Lili: The part of the day that I look forward to most during lockdown is after have dinner, when I don’t do homework [16:10] Maria: everybody look forward the night [16:10] Andreu:  The part of the day that I look forward to most lockdown is when i taking my nap or when i playing ps4 [16:11] Maria:  today there isn’t nap [Here Maria is referring to the fact that the class starts at siesta time. Another learner asks what nap means over the mics and is told ‘siesta’ by one of their classmates.] [16:11] Andreu: yes, after the class [16:11] Maria: hahahahahahaha [16:11] Andreu: :) [At this point, I am providing spoken correction to Lili by pointing out it is after having dinner and to Maria by pointing out that everybody takes the 3rd person singular, so it is everybody looks forward to.] [16:12] Andreu: when do you usually get up chris? [16:13] Andreu: do you work in the morning? [16:14] Andreu: I cant survive a day with out nap [16:14] Maria: hahaha [16:14] CHRIS wake up = eyes open [Here, I am responding to Maria, ROLAND: who has asked me the difference between wake up and get up] As you can see, the question has generated both teacher–learner and learner– learner communication. It has provided plenty of material to work with in terms of correcting systematic errors, and it has prompted several questions from the learners to clarify lexis for them. Other openers that I regularly use are: ■ On average these days, I sleep for … ■ I normally get woken up by … ■ The best phone conversation that I had last week was … ■ The best episode of anything that I have seen in a long time was … 57

5. Explaining things and getting a response

One of the advantages of using openers like this is that the second, third, fourth and all other subsequent learners to enter the classroom will be joining an ongoing conversation, not an awkward silence where the teacher is waiting for everyone to arrive before starting. You may find it necessary to repaste the opener into the chat box a number of times (for learners who have forgotten what the question was and for fresh arrivals who want to know what is going on) as it will scroll up out of sight as the chat box fills with answers. If you choose or write your opening question to coincide with the theme of the rest of the lesson, it can act as what Jeremy Harmer (2007) calls an ‘engage’ stage. This will help prime learners’ conceptual schemata related to that theme so that their ideas flow more easily during the next few activities. Continuing with Harmer’s model, a discussion based around an opening question like this could equally equate to an ‘activate’ stage, allowing learners to use all the linguistic resources at their disposal to answer the question – a mini-workout for their English, if you like. The most important thing, though, is that they should be given a chance to use their English to talk about themselves, and that there is some communication between people in the class that goes beyond looking at neutral sentences about other people, real or imagined, that the coursebook or syllabus has provided. In Downloadable resource 4: 30 opening questions to start your lesson you will find a list of lesson openers, including the ones above, that you can use use to paste the chat box at the start of lessons if you need to.

Juggling multiple responses

An accomplished juggler is able to keep many balls, hoops or skittles in the air at the same time. A teacher can employ a strategy that mirrors this trick. It involves using the microphone to verbally pose rapid-fire follow-up questions in response to learners’ chat box entries. While one learner is typing their answer to the verbal follow-up question you have just asked, you, the teacher, have already moved on to read the next chat box entry from another learner and are asking them a question via the microphone too. With a little practice, you can increase the speed at which you process chat box entries and deliver your spoken questions so that at any one time, four, five or even six learners are typing their responses – just like the juggler who in our analogy might have four, five or six balls in the air at any one time. As an example of this, the following is an adapted discussion I had with a class of young adultlearners, whose average age was 19. Despite having an advanced level in English, they were a ‘shy’ online group, who were quite reticent, so I 58

5. Explaining things and getting a response

really had to ‘dig deep’ to lift the dynamic. The opener was I have spent most of the day … . The learners’ contributions below were given via the chat box. Anything in grey italics is a question that I asked via microphone. [20:32] Juan:  I’ve been studying all day. [What have you been studying?] [20:32] Rozita:  I’ve been just watching fashion stuff online and then sketching. [Were you drawing what you saw on the screen then? What exactly were you sketching?] [20:33] Juan: a subject called flight mechanics, because I have an exam on Friday. [I had a Korean student who was an aeronautical engineer. Is that a related field?] [20:34] Juan: yes, right, more or less. About the movement of a plane and this type [Are you ready for it?] [20:34] Juan: I hope to pass the exam hahaha. [20:35] Sebastian:  Hi! [Welcome Seb. What have you been doing today?] [20:35] Sebastian:  Studying all day long [What were you studying?] [20:35] Rozita:  outfits that I have been thinking about for some time not inspired from any designer in particular. [Rozita, sounds like you’ve been catching up on stuff then. Magic. What materials are you using for the designs?] [20:36] Sebastian: A subject about hydraulic machines. [Wow, man, you’re going to have to throw me a lifeline there. I have to confess, I don’t really know what a hydraulic machine is. I mean, I certainly couldn’t define one.] [20:36] Rozita:  You mean the fabrics of the clothes? [Yes Rozita.] [20:36] Sebastian: A pump is an example of hydraulic machine. [So how would you define a hydraulic machine then?] [20:37] Rozita:  I haven’t studied fabrics yet so I don’t really know names but something soft or silky sort of… [Rozita goes on to expand over the mics.]

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[20:37] Julieta:  Just homework. [For which subjects?] [20:37] CHRIS satin? [In response to Rozita’s description] ROLAND: [20:38] Julieta:  A piece of work in biology about evolution and history homework that my teacher said it was badly done. [20:38] Sebastian:  I don’t know really, I only know that they are machines that work with fluids that are not compressible, for example water. [Badly done Julieta?! Poor lass! What did your teacher say was wrong with it?] [20:39] Julieta:  He said that I didn’t put too much effort and that there were things missing. It was about Spain at the beginnings of the 20th century. Although the number of exchanges might look daunting at first, in an actual lesson it is remarkably easy for you, as teacher, to provide these verbal followup questions as text comes in from your learners and the whole thing can proceed quite naturally. Learners answer as and when they hear a question directed at them. When a lot of entries come in at the same time, you may have to backtrack, and even ask a batch of follow-up questions. When doing so, you will need to establish, by name, who your question is directed at. The reader does not, of course, need a lesson in how to formulate follow-up questions. My purpose here is to show you how, with a certain tenacity and an upbeat pace, and by employing both text and audio, you can fire off various follow-up questions and connect with and energise a class. The resulting communication is similar to the type of interaction a learner might get in an online chat, only that they are sharing the person they are chatting to with classmates. For each learner, this set-up means that they get a quick response. They also get the opportunity to expand on their first answer to a greater extent than they would if the teacher were asking one learner at a time, and everyone else had to wait their turn.

Breakdown by percentage

A more elaborate version of the opener is what I call a breakdown by percentage. In April 2020, I used this for the first time with my classes. I posted this short paragraph, which I had prepared beforehand, into the chat box at the start of a lesson:

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I spent 20% of my Easter holidays staying up late watching episodes of Netflix series, 30% oversleeping because I had gone to bed so late the night before, 5% thinking about going to the supermarket, 5% actually going to the supermarket, 10% talking via Facebook or email, 10% talking in the conservatory, 10% doing language exercises using an online app (Russian, Portuguese and a little Arabic), 3% chasing mosquitos, 2% feeding my cats, 2% playing with them, 2% changing their litter and 1% taking the rubbish out.

I briefly talked my learners through this, expanding on a couple of points, especially the plagues of mosquitos that I believed were coming from a stagnant pool in the flooded subterranean car park beneath our ground-floor flat, and the fact that I had started over a dozen series but found many of them to be using a high school drama series formula rather than actually being about the topics of vampires, zombies or apocalypses that they were made out to be in the descriptions. A brief talk-through like this not only helps make the breakdown itself feel more authentic but allows you to address any queries. Here, for example, I was able to explain that my ‘conservatory’ is basically a covered patio, patio being a word my learners know very well. I then asked my learners to prepare a few lines giving me a breakdown by percentage of what they had been doing. Here is an exchange between a class of intermediate/upper-intermediate mid-teens and me. Again, I used the juggling technique described above, where I fired a number of follow-up questions at them as we went. Once again, the italic grey font entries are my mic-only responses. [16:00] Lauren:  homeworks: 40% taking photos: 50% mobile phone, tablet ... 10% [So that’s ‘homework’, always in the singular Lauren. And who were you taking photos of? You and Maya? Her little sister, also my student.] [16:01] Lauren: yes, myself and my sister [16:01] Elena:  I spent my Easter holidays: 20% talking on the phone with friends, 20% doing exercise, 30% watching series in Netflix, 15% sleeping and 15% doing homework

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[16:01] Sofia 1: sleep 10%, do sports 30%, cooking 20%, watch series 10%, use the mobile phone 20%, paint 10% [That’s great Elena and Sofia. Sofia, we normally use the -ing form when we break down activities like this. So, you two have both put ‘series’. Can you recommend one to me because, as I mentioned before, all I’ve been finding is rubbish. Have a think; I’ll come back to you in a second.] [16:02] Thiago:  I spent my Easter holidays: watching Holy Week processions until midnight 30%, Playing FIFA 25%, sleeping/eating 25%, doing academy/school stuff 20% [Which processions, Thiago? Ones from last year? [He was referring to the Holy Week/Semana Santa processions that take place in Seville.] [16:02] Thiago:  Yes [With you in them?] [16:03] Thiago: Some yes and some no. [16:04] Alicia:  I spent my Easter holydays reorganising my bedroom 10%, sleeping 25%, doing homework 2%, helping my sister with her homework 10%, seeing processions of the last year 35%, seeing Netflix 8%, eating 20%. [Alicia that’s great. ‘Holiday’ with an ‘i’. Nice to see you helping her – what subject by the way?] [16:04] Sofia 2: I spent my Easter holidays doing homework 15%, watching Netflix series 25%, sleeping 20%, dancing 10% and listening to music 30% [Sofia 2, was that in connection with the dance classes you were telling me about before the holidays?] [16:05] Ana:  Sleeping 45%, watch series 30%, eat 15%, use the mobile phone 10%. [So we say ‘using my mobile’ phone rather than ‘the mobile phone’, Ana.] [16:05] Sofia 2: Yes, dance classes. [So, for all you chaps who were watching Netflix, what can you recommend me? (The girls came back over the mics to recommend Casa de Papel, or Money Heist as it is internationally known, which I did watch a month or so later and thoroughly enjoyed.)] [16:06] Mateo: Sorry I’m late

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A breakdown by percentage activity like this can also be about what learners did at the weekend (if you are teaching them on a Monday), or what they did over the week (if you are teaching them on a Friday) or simply what they did yesterday! I hope, with the two examples of juggling exchanges from openers and the breakdown by percentage, you will be getting a feel for the takeaway principle that, in order to get a response from your learners, it is simply often a case of first responding to what they have already given. As you get more comfortable with this back-and-forth style of interaction, you will be able to involve a greater number of learners for a longer period of time. In both of the example interactions transcribed above, there were significantly more learners involved, but for the sake of clarity and brevity, I have distilled the conversation here.

Providing reminders After an opening communicative activity like the ones above, I like to roll into a quick revision phase where we test our memories on either the core language of the previous lesson or on additional language that cropped up that I have noted down.

An example of revisiting last lesson’s content

The examples below come from classes with intermediate and upperintermediate teenagers (B1–B2). Here, you can see that I am first providing a textual prompt via the chat box before my spoken definition. The words tested were all from our previous class. Again, my spoken commentary over the microphone is provided in grey italics. [16:02] CHRIS p________ ROLAND: [This means to spoil someone, give them everything they want.] [16:02] Maria:  pamper [Good one.] [16:02] CHRIS s_________ ROLAND: [This is when you ask a lot of people about something, possibly using a questionnaire.] [16:06] Maria:  survey [On fire today Maria.] [16:06] CHRIS v_____ a_______ ROLAND: [This means a wide selection.] 63

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[16:06] Elena:  vast array [Rock and roll!] [16:06] CHRIS i_______ ROLAND: [This is to have too much of something or to have, take, enjoy etc. something you shouldn’t or don’t need.] [16:06] Lili: indulge [16:06] Elena: indulge Alternatively, if exploring word formation, you can provide the base word in the chat, then specify which part of speech you require. You will see that here I have given additional examples along the way to provide context, as discussed in the previous chapter: [11:03] CHRIS Star ROLAND: [Abstract noun please, ladies and gentlemen.] [11:03] Carmen: Stardom [Great stuff, yes, as in …] [11:03] CHRIS Gladiator launched Russel Crowe to stardom. ROLAND: [This contextualising example could be typed in or spoken. Here, I am making sure the learners see the example again. In this lesson, I am at home on my own keyboard and able to type fast. At other times, in order to keep the revision stage pacey, examples could just be spoken.] [11:04] CHRIS arm ROLAND: [… quantity please] [11:04] Mariana: arm armful [That’s right. As in …] [11:04] CHRIS He was carrying an armful of comics. ROLAND: [11:05] CHRIS fist ROLAND: [… quantity] [11:05] Ricardo: fist fistful [11:06] Dana:  puñado? [L1 for fistful] [You got it my friend. In fact, one of my first computer games was called …] [11:07] CHRIS Way of the Exploding Fist ROLAND: [Check it out on YouTube talkthroughs. It was on the … [11:07] CHRIS Spectrum ZX 48k ROLAND:

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Announcements and menu

At this point of the lesson, you may want to make any announcements, including issues relating to administration, exams, timetables, dates, etc. If you want your learners to show you anything in terms of performance or conduct, now is a good time to highlight the target behaviours, too. Another useful habit is to provide a brief summary of the work to be covered at this point, including page and exercise numbers, explaining that if anybody has connectivity problems, this is the material you are going to be covering, and that they can continue to work through the material by themselves if for any reason they are unable to rejoin the class for any stretch of time.

Explaining the main input The main input task will nearly always involve the learners looking at something or listening to something – that is, processing some language. Here, once again, you can use the principle of creating consequences for the things that they do. As with everything in the teenage classroom, if your learners are required to produce a response that demonstrates whatever function you have asked them to perform, you increase the chances that they will apply themselves to the task.

Getting to the right page

If you want learners to turn to page 54, for example, first you can ‘triple up’ by (1) saying ‘Please turn to page 54’ over the mic, (2) showing the corner of the page where the number is to the webcam and (3) typing that number into the chat box. In addition, you might say: As soon as you have found page 54, please type ‘54’ into the chat box so I know you are ready. While it is true that a learner could just type in the number without actually turning to the page, I suspect that if you are prepared to go to the trouble of complying with that request, then you probably care enough to turn to the actual page in the book. In my experience, these two requests combine to form a mini-event which gets everything moving more quickly. My learners have always been ready to start working from the stipulated page more quickly when I employ this micro-strategy. The following sort of request works even better: ‘Please turn to page 54 and type in the first word that you see on the page.’

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or: ‘Please turn to page 54, look at the photo and type in which of the three people in it you think would have a personality most similar to your own.’ In the first and especially the latter case, learners are now likely to turn to the new page if only out of curiosity. Obviously, you will need to adapt your requests depending on what photographs there are on your target page.

Turning text into audio

If you want learners to produce evidence that they have processed text, you have at your disposal classic strategies, such as comprehension questions, but you have a few new strategies too. Since the learners are already online, with microphones and an internet connection, you can ask them to record themselves reading a text and to send it to you as a sound file the moment they have finished. At the time of writing, I have used this technique with three different groups of upper-intermediate learners in the same week. During the lesson itself, I did not have time to listen to the recordings, but I did have time to send each a ‘Received! Thanks!’ email of acknowledgement. For the learners, it gives them a tangible outcome to the task of reading the text. Of course, it is possible to read a text aloud but to have processed very little of its meaning. In order to combat this, ask learners to read the text but at the end of every sentence to say ‘Okay’ if they understand the sentence, or ‘Not really because I don’t understand the words …’ if they don’t. By doing this, you are giving the learners an entry point into the text and encouraging them to start thinking about the meaning of what they are reading. One default assumption in ELT is that every action performed by your learners requires a reciprocal action of the same type by the teacher. It does not necessarily. Some teachers might wonder ‘If each of my learners sends me a voice recording, stopping after every sentence and telling me the words they don’t understand, how on earth am I going to process all that audio? How do I respond and in what format?’ The point of this strategy, though, is to get the learners to reflect on what they understand and do not. Therefore, it is not necessary to go over each audio with a fine-tooth comb. Once everyone is back together in the main digital class, you can ask them ‘So, please have a quick look over the text again and type into the chat [or ask me] the words that stopped you understanding the meaning of any sentences.’ In this way, the audios they made before act as a primer.

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At some later stage, however, I do try to listen to the audios. I normally put them on in the background while I am engaged on a task that does not require a deep level of processing. While I was pulling photos off my phone to prepare a workshop, for example, I listened to the above-mentioned audios. This is useful because it allows you to respond to any major pronunciation issues you pick up as well as to respond to any questions or comments the learner makes directly to you during their audio. For example, my email response to one of the audios in question was: Well done Noelia. I’ve just listened to that. There are two points to remember: child is singular. children is plural. childrens as a noun, doesn’t exist. And we pronounce building as if it were bilding. See you later! C

Here again, you are employing the principle of consequence. If, as a learner, you know that your last audio was listened to, you are more likely to put effort into generating another one.

Audios and trust If you ask your learners to record an audio, one thing that will matter to many of them is that you do not play that audio in front of their classmates. They will often be happy to speak during open class but there is something about hearing themselves, or the idea of the class hearing them, that bothers them. (This is mentioned in more detail in Online safety and wellbeing, pages 13–20.) So, I make it a point to explain that I never play other learners’ audios in class, not even learners from another group who they do not know. That way, if they see that I respect the confidentiality of other learners’ audios, they can feel safely assured that I will respect theirs, too.

Turning text into summary

Another way to help learners through a text is to ask them to read it and to highlight or underline the two or three most important sentences in each paragraph. They can then share these with the group or in breakout rooms. There is a plethora of techniques you can use for helping your learners process text. One book, which someone recommended to me, and that came in very

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useful early in my teaching career, was Talking Texts by Randal Holme (1991). Although it was written before the internet was a common feature of our everyday lives, many of the techniques will transfer to an online context.

Going over exercises A fair portion of a teacher’s time with learners is spent going over exercises. I will highlight a few strategies for doing this online, followed by some possible responses for when you get no reaction at all.

Maintaining maximum clarity and group cohesion

While going over an exercise question by question, with students each providing an answer in turn, it is very possible that not every student’s contribution will be heard by everyone else. If Paula tells the class that the answer to Question 4 is Option (b) – ‘always’ – and if the teacher says ‘Thanks, Paula, that’s correct,’ and moves on, there is a good chance that everyone will hear or read ‘What was number 4?’ from another student over the course of the next minute or two. This is especially true if Paula’s microphone is a little crackly or if you are going over the exercise at a reasonable pace. At other times, if the class is not paying attention you may also get ‘What question are we on?’ To solve this, you can create a paper trail, or ‘text trail’, that lingers in the chat box area and provides residual support. Just before you nominate a student to give an answer, type the number of the question in the chat box, without hitting return. The student then gives the answer and – once the correct answer is confirmed – you type it in and hit Return. As well as hearing the correct answer, everyone then has the question number and the correct answer as reference. As an alternative, you could type nothing yourself but instead, after having confirmed that Paula’s answer is correct, say ‘That’s great, Paula. Can you please type that into the chat box and put the question number in front of it? Thanks’, before moving on to nominate the next learner.

Reducing time spent going over exercises

Going over an exercise question by question is useful because a) it puts you in touch with your students, showing you which answers they got correct and which they did not, b) it gives us the chance to clear up any queries they had about each question and c) it gives them another opportunity to think about their answers and to make sure they have the correct ones. Sometimes, however, you may wish to limit the time you spend going over exercises, especially when there are other things you can be doing, such as actually talking to your students. If you already have the answers to the exercise, you

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can display them on a shared or central screen and ask the learners to correct their exercises themselves.

Detecting learners who are struggling

If, while going over an exercise, you notice that a certain student has gone a little quiet, it could be that they are struggling. In such cases, a quick ‘Are you okay there?’ over the mic can show that you are still thinking about them. You can also ask them about the question that has just been answered by saying ‘Did you get number 4 correct? No? Okay, no problem. Do you understand what the correct answer is now?’ Another technique, just as you start to go over an exercise with a class, is to ask one of the weaker students which question they think they have the correct answer to, whether it is number 1, 2, 3, or whatever. You then allow them to answer that question, where they have a fighting chance, and then resume going over the rest of the exercise in chronological order. Alternatively, you could continue to let other students choose which question they want to answer until they have all been answered.

What do you do when you do not get a response at all?

The next two strategies have as their basis the following principle: In the face of a recurring challenge, a standardised response on the part of you, the teacher, can help to defuse your frustration. It will become clearer exactly what I mean by this as you read.

The Wake-up Rooster I imagine that many teachers working online recently will recall having spent a considerable time asking things like this: ‘[Student’s name], are you there?’ ‘[Student’s name], can you hear me?’ ‘[Student’s name], can you give me the answer to number __ please? [student’s name]?’ Sometimes, it can feel as if a learner has disappeared on you, or has fallen asleep, especially if they do not have their webcam activated. As a general rule, if I have called on a learner by name and there has been no response, I will say their name again, wait for a few seconds, then say their name a third time. If I still do not get anything, I will move on to another learner. I would prefer not hold up the lesson flow or sacrifice the dynamic for one learner who may have drifted off or who may be having genuine connectivity problems.

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However, for a number of possible reasons, sometimes you do need a specific learner to answer a question. If this is the case, or if I have been getting no reaction from a certain learner over a period of time and suspect this is due to lack of attention, I reach for the Wake-up Rooster. This plastic toy makes a squeaking sound. I move it slowly to the centre of my webcam and proceed to punctuate my nominating with squeaks. For example: ‘Jorge [squeak] Jorge [squeak] Jorge [squeak].’

Figure 5.1: The Wake-up Rooster

This is all I do with the toy but it normally gets the learner’s attention. I would like to make clear that here I am not making fun of the learner in question or trying to taunt them. I do not pick on just one learner, and there is no negative follow-up. The Wake-up Rooster is simply a novelty item intended to take some of the monotony out of non-responsiveness. If you have not got a squeaky rooster, then any sort of a horn, bell or cat or dog toy that makes a noise will do. You might have a small gong, a tambourine, castanets or other instrument – barring perhaps a whistle, which might cause you and your learners auditory discomfort.

The Sorry Stick of Sadness Occasionally it may happen that a whole group becomes unresponsive and nobody wants to volunteer an answer or offer a contribution. As first discussed in my earlier title, Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom (Roland, 2018), you can avoid this sort of situation most of the time by calling on specific learners – that is, nominating them, rather than fielding

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questions to nobody in particular. Nonetheless, there will still be times when you will field an open question to the group – either out of choice or out of habit – and out of those times, there will be a small number of occasions where you get nothing back. In isolated cases, my normal practice is to simply provide the answer myself and move on or to wait until I do get an answer. If I feel that such a reaction is starting to become the norm, I may introduce my learners to the Sorry Stick of Sadness. The stick, a makeshift creation consisting of a kitchen roll tube and a pair of jiggly adhesive-backed eyes, starts to appear at the point where I have absolutely nothing coming back from a class. It moves slowly into full camera shot and, in contrast to The Wake-up Rooster, is accompanied by no sound, only a sorrowful expression on my own face.

Figures 5.2–5.4: The Sorry Stick of Sadness

With the version of the stick in Figures 5.2–5.4, there is an added twist. Once the Sorry Stick of Sadness is occupying centre-screen, it begins to rotate slowly, revealing a number of sad and crying emoji stickers on the other side to the eyes. This comic prop helps to alleviate the situation and jump-starts learners out of their state of lethargy. Again, for you, the teacher, having a go-to response in the face of a familiar but vexing situation can act as a catharsis. It does so by providing a conduit for unanswered energy which otherwise might turn into stress and tension. With this and the rooster technique, I am not suggesting that you turn your online class into a circus. I can assure you, though, that the use of novelty and humour on the part of a teacher is as real and as valid a technique as any that you will read about in this book.

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Setting up language practice that is not an exercise As well as doing exercises, students need to practise formulating sentences of their own. In this chapter, we have already seen some activities that will allow them to do so as far as writing responses go. In terms of speaking, there are two main options. The first option is to invite one student to speak while everybody else listens. If the rest of the class have enough self-control to do this, there is nothing wrong with such an approach in principle. In fact, waiting and listening to whoever ‘has the floor’, as it were, is a useful life skill and ideal preparation for later years when they will be sat in staff meetings, directors’ meetings, debates, assemblies or panel sessions. If one student is speaking and the others are truly listening – that is, if they have been given a task to perform based on what they are hearing or if the information is truly novel, relevant to them or interesting – then the situation may be workable. If not, we enter into more of what, in Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom (Roland, 2018), I called a bottleneck of action, where the majority of the group are simply waiting to have their turn. The second option, which is breakout rooms, involves all the students talking to a partner or partners at the same time and so should, at least in theory, increase the amount of language practised.

Breakout rooms

In most conversations about teaching teenagers online, it is not long before the phrase breakout rooms crops up. A breakout room is essentially a digital classroom within your digital classroom. You can open up a number of these mini-rooms, assigning two or more students to each. There, they will have a space where they can talk to each other, or text each other, without being heard by, or distracting, the others. Breakout rooms are therefore an ideal way to have students working communicatively in pairs or groups of three, as we would have them do in a face-to-face setting.

The underlying skills required For a number of years I have been arguing in favour of: a) teachers utilising and being allowed to utilise physical spaces beyond their classroom, such as spare classrooms, reception areas, the schoolyard, patio or other common zones by sending students off to practise or prepare something by themselves.

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b) teachers breaking the ‘lockstep’ nature of lessons (where everyone is doing the same thing at the same time) by ‘fragmenting’ their class so that different students are engaged in different tasks at any one time. Both strategies, which are covered in depth in Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom (Roland, 2018), involve teachers juggling student activity on a more complex level than they may be used to in any given part of a lesson. This involves the teacher dividing their attention and being flexible in the moment so that they can respond to the varying progress rates of the various groups they have created. It also involves the teacher providing structure to each group by way of clear task specifications. These are real skills, which can be purposely worked on and developed. They are the same skills that come into play when students are assigned to breakout rooms.

The importance of clear instructions Sometimes, a teacher will assign their students to breakout rooms and leave them there for five or ten minutes to complete a task, only to find at the end of that time that those students have done nothing. It has happened to me, and if you use breakout rooms for any length of time, it will most likely happen to you. The most common excuse students give when questioned about said inactivity is We didn’t understand what we had to do. In order to avoid this, you need to make your instructions crystal clear before the students go off to their respective spaces. There should be not a shadow of a doubt in their minds about what they have to do. In the early days of putting my own students in breakout rooms, I remember entering one room to check on a pair of intermediate students (neither of whom had functioning microphones at that time) only to read the following L1 conversation in the chat box between them: – What do we have to do? – No [expletive] idea. At this point of the proceedings, if the same situation occurs to you, there are only really two remedies. One is to enter each room in turn and explain the task once again to each pair. The other is to call everyone back to the main room, go over the instructions once more and then reassign them to their separate rooms. Neither of these options is ideal. I therefore recommend that you adopt what for me has become standard practice. That is, to break the task down into numbered steps and to provide these steps in written format in the chat box before they go off. This means that you can go over the instructions step by step and also have your students copy them and

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then paste them into their own breakout room chat boxes once in their respective rooms. This will save you all sorts of frustration and difficulty later on. A typical set of instructions, which I have used with several groups, is: Step 1: I will put you in a breakout room with one or two other people. Step 2: Once you are there, check that you can communicate with your partners – either by microphone/audio or by using the chat box. Step 3: I will join the room briefly to check you are okay. I will expect to hear you either speaking in English or typing in English via the chat box. Please do not stop communicating just because I have entered your breakout room. Step 4: Ask your partner/s all of the questions on page 107. Step 5: Record your answers in a DIFFERENT place to the chat box, because the chat box content will disappear when you leave the breakout room and it will be lost. Record answers either by copying and pasting to a Word document or by writing the answers down in your notebook. Step 6: Record answers to all questions from both of your partners if there is more than one. Step 7: Give good answers when it is your turn to be asked. Step 8: You will then leave the breakout room. Step 9: Homework. Take your partner’s/partners’ answers and turn them into a 100-word paragraph. Then send it to me. You have to invent a title and try to make the text coherent, not just disconnected sentences. This is the sort of level of detail and clarity that I have found necessary if there is to be no uncertainty later on. However, once my learners have got used to breakout rooms, the instructions tend to become a little more condensed. An alternative for the early steps might be: Step 1: Copy these instructions from the chat box now, before you accept the invitation to your breakout room. Step 2: Once in the room make sure that one of you has pasted these into the chat box there. Step 3: Next, check that you can communicate with your partners – either by microphone/audio or by using the chat box. If you are quick with a keyboard, you may wish to type the instructions into the chat box as you speak. Another option I like to use is to prepare these instructions before the lesson as a Word document, and then simply paste them into the chat box. You can also provide them as a downloadable file.

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Preparing your instructions before the lesson will also enable you to check the clarity of them yourself in a more measured way and in a calmer setting than the actual live class. Once you have gone over the instructions one final time, cleared up any learner queries and perhaps also concept-checked them, your learners are ready to take those instructions off to their respective rooms and start the task.

An optional two-minute chat time As well as students understanding your requirements, we also need to understand their predicaments. It may well be that when you assign a pair or group to a breakout room, it is the first time they have had a direct conversation with their partners in some time. This will be especially true if they are classmates who get on but who are not in each other’s close circle of WhatsApp, Instagram or Snapchat friends. Expecting them to get straight onto a task about a neutral topic in English without any preliminary chit-chat might be unrealistic. You may therefore consider including something like this in your early steps for their breakout room interaction: Step __: You will have two minutes to chat, in English or in [L1], about anything you want to before starting the task. This will give you time to say hello or to catch up on gossip. The oldest student in the pair/ group will be responsible for timing this ‘catch-up’ phase and making sure that after two minutes you switch back to 100% English and move onto the next step. Although a stage such as this may seem to some teachers counter-intuitive and an unnecessary slackening of our expectations and standards, I would suggest that there will be times when doing something like this will lead to a more productive lesson.

A round of cursory monitoring After you have assigned your students to their respective breakout rooms, they will each receive an invitation that they need to accept in order to enter those rooms. Once they have reached their rooms, an initial troubleshooting run is advisable. This involves joining the first breakout room, either via audio or actually entering the room yourself and saying: Hi chaps. Can you see and hear each other? If not, are you still able to complete the task using the chat box? Are you clear on what you need to do and can I leave you to get on with it?

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This quick recce is analogous to moving round the classroom and discreetly checking everyone is on task at the start of a face-to-face pairwork session.

Matching learners evenly For whatever reason, you will sometimes have a student or two who do not have the ability to speak via microphone. If a student without a mic is paired up with a learner whose mic is working, with the ‘mic-less’ learner communicating via the chat box and their partner via audio, the first learner is going to struggle to keep up. Typing is generally more work than speaking. Therefore, it is best to pair up students who will be communicating via text only together, whenever possible, or to pair a learner without a mic with one of your most capable but understanding students, and ask that student to communicate via text as well so that both are on an equal footing.

Persistent problems with breakout rooms On some occasions, when teachers tell me that they are having lots of problems with their students in breakout rooms, my answer is Don’t send them there, then. Sometimes the answer to a problem really can be that simple. I have seen teachers hellbent on using breakout rooms, either with groups that they know are not up to the responsibility or on systems where they will inevitably have tech issues. Imagine the scene. It is night time. A moth flies into a room through an open window. In that room there is a candle burning on a table. The moth is free to fly anywhere except into that candle flame. It could settle on the curtain, it could land on a set of shelves, or on a wardrobe. It could cling to the walls. It could even take a rest on the table itself. But it does not. It flies into the candle flame and it gets burnt. Just as you would not entrust a group of students who had repeatedly shown themselves incapable of working unsupervised to go off and do something on their own, there is little point in assigning students to breakout rooms who have a proven track record of doing very little or nothing there. The first and the second time you use breakout rooms, you are collecting information about the performance profile of individual learners. After that, just sending them off again and again is like being the moth in our analogy.

A question of teacher trust There is also a default principle that tells us that we need to put all our students in breakout rooms at the same time. Not so. ‘Going to a breakout room is a privilege’, you can tell your students. ‘Today [Student 1], [Student 2], [Student 3] and [Student 4] are going to go off and have a chat about something because they finished the breakout room task together last 76

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time and they were busy speaking English when I popped into their respective rooms to check they were okay. They have earned the right. [Student 5] and [Student 6], you were quite good last time so if you finish the work with me in the main classroom, then we can send you off a bit later and see how you do. And the rest of you guys that weren’t doing much in the breakout rooms last time, you can have another chance, but first you have to impress me in the main classroom.’ Again, this is another example of fragmentation: breaking the traditional model of everyone doing the same thing at the same time.

Consequence revisited Finally, we return to what I like to think of as the sweet science of consequence. If your students have to produce something (and show it to you) as a result of their time together in their breakout room, they are more likely to use that time productively. What we are doing is making them accountable for the unsupervised time they spend there. For this to work optimally, it is better if they know from the outset that they are going to have to present the results of their efforts to the teacher, in some way and at some point, so that they are motivated to work well at the start rather than be caught out for not working well at the end.

A case study Alejandro and Paula’s teacher has just put them in a breakout room together. They are students in an exam preparation class and, as reference material, each has a test book at home which they are working from and looking at. On the page they have been referred to, there is a scenario for speaking practice. In the centre they have a picture of a boy who is meant to be one of their friends. Around him there are pictorial representations of a number of possible presents that they could buy that boy for his birthday. Their teacher has put them in the breakout room so that they can have a conversation about which of these hypothetical presents would be best for the friend. However, when she joins the room a minute after they are supposed to have started the task, she discovers that they are not communicating with each other at all. Instead, there is silence. When questioned about this, Alejandro gives the reply ‘We weren’t sure what to do’, which Alejandro knows, and his teacher strongly suspects, not to be the case. In order to understand what is the case, the teacher needs to understand the teenagers’ situation by looking at it a little more closely. Although Alejandro and Paula would very much like to pass the external exam they are preparing for in the more distant future, there is nothing in the immediate ‘now’ that appeals to them about having a chat about an imaginary friend – in any language. For them it feels a little silly and forced. They will do it when they have to, for example, on the day of the exam, but at this point, if they can just say they have done it when asked afterwards, they will. Ú

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Alejandro also feels daft speaking English to Paula, who is in his class at school and in an after-school academy. They have always spoken in L1, and her English is a little more advanced. Nonetheless, Alejandro does start to speak in English about one of the hypothetical presents but gets stuck on a few key words. In fact, he has such problems formulating his opening comments that Paula on the other end stops listening and starts to look at a text message she has received from a friend. Alejandro was making some annoying comments in class today and Paula does not feel very much inclined to give him any more of her time. Sensing he has no audience, Alejandro picks up his own mobile and silence ensues.

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Solution If you can give Paula a reason to listen to Alejandro, then Alejandro will have a reason to keep speaking. That motivation for Paula could be the fact that the teacher is going to listen to or read some language that she produces as a result of listening to him. It is a ‘you-listen-to-him-then-I-listen-to-you’ kind of scenario and it can work in reverse to give Alejandro a reason to listen to Paula as well (though it does not have to: your task design does not always have to be perfectly symmetrical, as long as everyone gets to practise and gets an audience somewhere along the way).

This is what I term rolling consequence: it is another example of providing a response in order to get a response (in reverse, though, as the response the teacher provides will come at the end). The instructions might therefore be: Step 1: Find out what your partner thinks about each possible present. For each present, ask them whether they think it is a good idea or not and why. You should also tell them what you think about each possible present and why. This should generate at least one or two spoken sentences per learner for each option. There are five ideas for presents so that is a total of 10–20 spoken sentences. This should take you about three minutes. Step 2: You each then need to write a summary of the conversation, choosing your best comments and your partner’s best comments. An example of this might be: I don’t like the camera as a present because it is too expensive and my partner says most phones have a camera included in them anyway. Your written summary needs to have at least five good sentences. You will have two minutes to write your summaries. They do not have to be perfect in terms of grammar.

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Step 3: When you return to the main classroom, you will be asked to paste your summary into the chat box and/or mail them to the teacher. Both students now have a reason to communicate and a designated end goal with regard to output and outcome, with a guarantee that their efforts to produce language will be given attention. This sort of structure will help to focus them on the task, above and beyond irritations with, or lack of interest in, each other.

Written work: getting a response between classes As we have seen, response is everything. If a speaker has someone listening to them, they will keep on talking. If a writer has a reader, they will keep on scribbling. When you correct students’ work, first (and perhaps most importantly) you are providing a response that assures them that their efforts to produce language have an audience. Secondly, your feedback provides technical guidance for them on their use of language (which will only convert itself into something useful if they look closely at your comments and process them, or even better, act upon them by doing something with the corrections). Working online, you will receive students’ written work in a dizzying array of formats. Some will come in as Word documents. Others will come in as PDF files or as JPEG or PNG photos of handwritten pieces. I have even had some essays sent to me as moving video recordings. It is strange enough correcting moving text but one of them also had my voice in the background giving the instructions to a task. If you are teaching in a hybrid situation, seeing your students in a face-to-face setting one lesson and then online in the next, you may also have some paper-based manuscripts to add into the mix as well. The problem here is that each of these assignment formats requires a different sort of correcting. The handwritten manuscripts can be marked up manually. Word documents can be added to, with the teacher’s feedback in a different coloured font. Alternatively, you can use ‘Track Changes’ to provide more of an editorial-style commentary. PDF files and photographs are less easily annotated. As a marker, it is hard to get into your flow when you are constantly switching between these formats. The solution I offer here is one that I have found to be highly effective. It is not to annotate the assignments at all. Instead, you launch the voice recorder app on your device and read slowly through their work, out loud, providing spoken

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corrections as you go. So in effect, this is the same as if they were sat with you in class and you were going over what they had written there. It was in an article by Ken Hyland entitled Providing productive feedback (1990) that I first encountered the idea of providing audio feedback to written work (at that time on cassette). Hyland suggested marking the manuscript with a sequence of numbered points, and then addressing those points on the audio. However, this means you still have to mark the student’s document in some way. If you read out the whole text, pausing to talk about language points where needed, there is no need to do this. The student follows your reading, gets to hear their text read by a proficient user of English, and can pause and replay any sections that they need to. You can therefore speak at your natural speed and, where appropriate, offer them additional examples or options when it comes to how to express one of their points more effectively. For teachers who are a little less confident with correcting, this approach may take a while to get used to. Most of the time, though, I suspect it will be a case of trusting in yourself. I find it helps if you imagine that the student is sitting next to you and you are having an informal chat about what they have written, giving the most useful advice that you can where appropriate. If you come across a point that really flummoxes you, then you can always pause recording (rather than stop it) and restart it when you have formulated a response. I have been using audio feedback to correct written work increasingly over the last three years and it now makes up 90% of all my feedback on the work that learners give me. I most certainly find it quicker. At the end of each audio, I reiterate: Right, that’s great work. Please listen to the audio, make the changes on your original document, and then send me a photo or a copy of that and an audio of you reading out the finished piece. I save the audio file with the student’s name on it and the date or the piece of the work. I then return it to them electronically, pasting in a reminder to do the rewrite in my message as well. It is this final stipulation that will lead to learners actually processing the feedback so that the technical content of your guidance becomes assimilated.

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Professional development Things to think about ■ In this chapter you have read about the need to give a response to get a response and about the idea of rolling consequence. Is there anywhere in your teaching where you might make more use of either of these strategies? ■ Did the breakout room case study on pages 77–78 resonate with you in any way? Would the solution described work in your context? ■ How do you usually deal with non-responsiveness in your online lessons? Does it tend to disrupt the dynamic of your lesson or cause you frustration? Would the Wake-up Rooster (on page 69) or the Sorry Stick of Sadness (on pages 70–71) help to alleviate these situations?

Things to try ■ Build up your own bank of opening questions. Start by using Downloadable resource 4 and adapt/add to it. Then trial them, using one per class. ■ Draft your own ‘breakdown by percentage’ for last week. Use this as a model when trialling the activity yourself. ■ Think about the activities you plan to run next week in your classes. For those that are hardest to explain, try writing out your instructions in clear steps (regardless of whether you plan to use breakout rooms). Check your written stages for clarity, and then trial them in class. ■ If you have not tried recording audio feedback on your learners’ writing, pick your smallest group and try it out with them for a number of weeks. You may find it takes a little time to get used to, so try not to give up after just a week; rather, play about with the medium over the course of a term.

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6. Activities and techniques that work well online In this chapter we look at a range of activities and techniques that make the most of the fact that our online learners are actually connected and sitting at computers, and so can access net-based apps, sites or other features during the lesson with little difficulty. We also reflect on how to take advantage of the fact that they are at home most of the time, in contrast to being in the classroom, and consider how we might try to help them draw inspiration from their surroundings.

Information grab Imagine that the next reading in the coursebook you are using with an intermediate to upper-intermediate group of teenagers is about how a park ranger in Ohio manages to tackle a case of vandalism in the area of countryside he is responsible for. I am, in fact, basing this example on a reading from New Total English (Crace & Acklam, 2011). Imagine that before the learners even turn to the page where the text is, you give them the following staged instructions: Step 1: Open up a separate browser window on your computer. Step 2: Go to Wikipedia.org and change the language setting to English. Step 3: Type ‘Ohio’ into the Wikipedia search box. Step 4: Look at the entry for Ohio and locate one sentence that provides some useful information about the place. Step 5: Copy that sentence, then return to the main classroom and paste your sentence into the chat box. If there are any words in your sentence that you do not understand, run it through an online translator first. Step 6: Ready, steady, go! You will probably receive sentences such as these: Ohio /oʊˈhaɪoʊ/ is a state in the East North Central region of the Midwestern United States.

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Of the fifty states, it is the 34th-largest by area, the seventh-most populous, and the tenth-most densely populated. The state takes its name from the Ohio River, whose name in turn originated from the Seneca word ohiːyo’, meaning ‘good river’, ‘great river’, or ‘large creek’. At this point, it is probably a good idea to read out a few of the sentences that your learners have brought back. This will serve to a) acknowledge their efforts and provide a sense outcome, b) remind them to paste only single sentences which have been read and selected carefully, rather than whole paragraphs that have not, and c) concept-check some items in the sentences to encourage the learners to grapple with meaning. Once you have harvested the first crop of sentences, imagine you send the learners back to search for a second term on Wikipedia. Step 1: Return to Wikipedia.org. Step 2: Type ‘park ranger’ into the search box. Step 3: Look carefully at the entry and bring me back a sentence that you think contains useful information about what a park ranger does, for example, their job or their duties. This time, your learners’ searches will probably unearth sentences like: A ranger, park ranger, park warden, or forest ranger is a person entrusted with protecting and preserving parklands – national, state, provincial, or local parks. … which is the very first entry, or: Regardless of the regular duties of any one discipline, the goal of all rangers remains to protect the park resources for future generations and to protect park visitors. Finally, say to the class: ‘I’d like you to bring back a sentence that explains what the crime vandalism is.’ This will probably yield sentences such as: The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. or: Private citizens commit vandalism when they willfully damage or deface the property of others or the commons. Now, throughout the rest of the lesson, when the learners start to read the text you have waiting for them, they are already more clear about a) where the

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action takes place geographically, b) what the vocation of the main character is and c) how serious the issue is. The idea of pre-teaching vocabulary is one that teachers are familiar with, as is the idea of activating schemata in a cursory class discussion. What we are doing here does both of these things and goes a little further, too. Learners are being prepared conceptually by being given the chance to look for the additional background knowledge they need to be able to appreciate the text more fully. Whilst in all probability you will not be covering the same text that I referred to above, I hope this detailed example serves to illustrate just how useful an ‘information grab’ activity like this one might be. The trick lies in selecting the key words or concepts that will result in a solid background understanding.

Using the ‘simple English’ option for information grabs

If you are running an information grab activity with tweens or lower-level teenagers, instead of asking them to select English as the language setting for Wikipedia, you may want to direct them to the ‘simple English’ setting, which is a lot further down in the list of languages. This will provide more manageable sentences such as: Ohio is one of the 50 states in the United States. And: Vandalism is a crime that is done by destroying or damaging the property of someone else. You may wish to check beforehand that there is an entry for each of the items in simple English. In the case of the reading described above, you would need to change ‘park ranger’ to ‘National Park Service ranger’ to find an entry in simple English. Thanks to Raquel Gorosito Villalobos for bringing this feature of Wikipedia to my attention.

Teaching collocation with YouGlish For the next activity, I would like you to imagine that you are teaching a group of advanced-level learners in their late teens. The idiom hold your horses has just come up in some of your input material and a learner has asked what it means. At this point, you could tell them that it means wait, which would be perfectly correct. However, as with many phrasal verbs and idioms, the item is

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not synonymous with its simpler verb equivalent in all contexts. For example, you could say: I went to the post office and had to wait for nearly an hour to get served. … but you could not say: I went to the post office and had to hold my horses for nearly an hour to get served. You could tell your learners that ‘hold your horses’ means ‘Wait!’, which is certainly more accurate but even better if they can do a little bit of discovery learning themselves to cement this phrase. Here are the steps they should follow: Step 1: Mute your mic and open up another browser window on your computer. Step 2: Go to YouGlish.com. Step 3: Where you see the settings for All, US, UK, AUS in a row of boxes at the top, select ‘All’. Step 4: Type and enter ‘hold your horses’ in the search box. Step 5: Listen to the first section* of a clip where the phrase is used (you will see it in coloured letters in the subtitles below as well). Then hit the blue arrow icon (it is the deepest blue icon and is made up of an arrow and a vertical line) to listen to another section of speech containing the phrase. Step 6: Keep listening to different speakers using the phrase until you start to notice some patterns. Make a few notes about those patterns, such as what words often go before the phrase, what words often go after them and in what situations the phrase appears to be common in. Step 7: After two minutes, come back and share your findings with us. *You will see I used ‘section’ instead of ‘snippet’ or ‘stretch’ because the first time round this is what my learners will most easily understand. Later I explain that the incomplete sections of speech they have been listening to are called ‘snippets’ or ‘stretches’. When I first used YouGlish for this very same phrase, it had 66 corresponding entries. At the time of writing it has 103 with a couple of the newer entries actually coming from YouTuber-style English teachers with their own explanations of the phrase. When you read this, there may even be a few more entries. Continuing with our imagined scenario, it is likely that your learners will come back with observations like these:

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The words ‘but’ and ‘just’ often come before the phrase ‘hold your horses’, as do other synonyms for ‘wait’ such as ‘Whoa’ and ‘hold on’. The words ‘before’ and ‘because’ often follow the phrase. It is usually used as an imperative in the context of one person giving advice or instructions to another. At the end of the three to five minutes that this will take (your learners will become faster once they are familiar with the exercise), not only will they know the meaning of the phrase itself but they will have a better idea about contexts where they might hear it and how to integrate that phrase into their own sentences. Most often, YouGlish is used and promoted as a tool to aid pronunciation, and I have mentioned it in Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom (2018:129) for use in that capacity. However, it can also be used in the above way to inform learners about context (where and when a language item might be used), cotext (the words that surround that item) and collocation (the likelihood of other language items appearing with it). As a teacher, lover of languages or methodology enthusiast (all of which I assume you are, to some extent, by the very fact you are reading this), it is easy to get excited about programmes such as YouGlish. We still need to remember, though, that our teenage learners are not teachers and (most of the time) are not undergraduate linguistics students, so they may get tired if we ask them to analyse too much data. I have noted this when I have given a group a list of expressions and asked them to work through the items. Nowadays, rather than using YouGlish for an entire lesson stage or activity, I have found it to be far more valuable when used as an occasional tool for exploring one item, especially with higher-level groups. In addition to English, the programme also works for a number of other languages (at the moment there are 15 more) as well as the three versions of sign language through English (British, American and Australian sign).

Using private messaging for mystery compliments This activity comes from a colleague, Steve Dumain, and makes use of the fact that in addition to the public chat box, on most platforms we have the choice of being able to message each learner privately and they have the option of messaging us back.

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While staying as close as I can to Steve’s version, I have also tweaked the instructions in keeping with the style and structure of the tasks we have looked at so far. Step 1: I am going to send each of you a private message. The private message will contain the names of three of your classmates. Do not tell anybody the names. Step 2: For each of those classmates, you need to think of a compliment. That is, a sentence that says something nice about them. Here are some examples: Lucía: She always helps her partners, especially in breakout rooms. Tasha: She told us some funny stories from her horse-riding club. Paolo: He lets everyone know the homework and other information via our WhatsApp group. Step 3: If you prefer, you can write your comments as thank-you notes to those people: Lucía: Thank you for always helping your partners, especially in breakout rooms. Tasha: Thank you for the funny stories from your horse-riding club. Paolo: Thanks for letting us know the homework and other information via the WhatsApp group. Step 4: Remember, hurtful, rude, overly personal or sarcastic comments will not be accepted. Step 5: When you have written your three comments, send them back to me via private chat. Again, do not post them in the public chat box or send them directly to the people they are about. Step 6: I will then select some of the compliments/thank-yous and share them with everyone else. The idea of thanking a classmate can sometimes feel easier and less direct for learners than a straight compliment, hence its inclusion. You may wish to run the activity with just the ‘thank-you’ version of instructions and examples. The reason for asking each learner to compliment or thank three of their classmates is to guarantee that you receive a selection of comments to choose from so that everyone can experience something nice being said about them. For the next part of the activity, you can choose between three slightly different versions: 88

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■ Version 1 This is a very straightforward way of feeding back. You start from the top of your class register, name a learner and paste in one of the nice comments about them. This version is useful for when you have relatively little time and will hopefully provide the class with some pleasant ‘aah’ moments. ■ Version 2 You select and paste a comment into the chat box but you do not say which learner the comment is about, nor who wrote it. All the class then guess who they think the comment is about by typing one name into the chat box. The person who actually wrote the comment can also ‘guess’, either typing in who the comment was actually about or typing another name as a bluff. When everyone has tried to guess, the teacher reveals who the comment was about. ■ Version 3 In this version of the activity, you follow the steps for Version 2 but once everyone has tried to guess who the comment is about and the teacher has revealed who it is indeed about, there is a second round of ‘voting’ where everyone tries to guess who wrote the comment as well. The person who did write the comment can either abstain from voting here or again, can type in another learner’s name as a double bluff. If you are going to use either Version 1 or Version 2, you can include in your initial instructions the detail: ‘Your comments will remain anonymous.’ I would tend to use Version 2 with most classes, reserving Version 3 only for mature groups where there is a very positive dynamic between members. If you are going to use Version 3, advise learners during the instruction stage: ‘Later we will try to guess who some of the comments are about and who wrote them. As your comments will not be anonymous, do not write anything you might be embarrassed about later.’

A few final comments on the activity

I have run similar paper-based activities to ‘mystery compliments’ at the end of summer school classes and short courses with young adults. Here, the online medium makes managing this activity a lot easier. This is an activity that needs to be managed with care and sensitivity and your role as moderator is key; however, the fact that you can collect and vet the comments as they come in takes the pressure off you. You may wish to paste comments across to a Word file, where you have a list with each learner’s name – thus making sure that you have a comment for everyone. There is also nothing to stop you adding your own comments to the list, where you feel it is appropriate and

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where, for example, the offerings you have for one or more learners feel a little flat or lacking in authenticity or imagination. When it is managed well, and when your learners rise to the occasion, an activity like this can provide a positive close to a term or year.

Making the most of your webcam with ‘show and tell’ activities Another advantage of teaching from a computer is that your webcam allows you to show all your learners at once objects that: a) are small and would need passing around the classroom in a face-to-face context, which would take up time and affect the classroom dynamic; b) have too much actual value or sentimental value, or would be too messy for you to want to take them into your place of work; c) occur to you as you are teaching or just as you are about to teach, and that you are able to grab with ease because you are working from home. The following activities, which all have as their basis a ‘show and tell’ format, each exploit one or more of the above advantages.

Describing keepsakes and other objects

Years ago I used to run a very basic ‘show and tell’ activity based on clothes. To start with, I would show my learners pictures of four items of clothing that I was fond of: a pair of well-worn cowboy boots, a collection of jazzy secondhand ties from charity stores, some pointed slippers from Morocco and a grey woollen cardigan my nana knitted. I would briefly explain where they came from and why I liked them. I would then invite learners to each put together a short presentation talking us though their own four favourite items, either on a slide presentation or by bringing in the items themselves. Perennial favourites were football tops, T-shirts bought on holiday, scarves received as presents and purses and handbags sometimes used on a ‘loan’ basis from mum. These days, I prefer to open the activity up to ‘objects that I like’. This is because learners might already be in their bedrooms for lessons, and the idea of getting them rummaging through their wardrobes and drawers for clothing to hold up to the camera feels a little intrusive. Objects can include souvenirs, ornaments, old toys, gifts, other keepsakes that friends might have given them

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(e.g. pebbles or shells picked up from the beach) and even common objects in the house, such as their favourite cup, chair, tablecloth or houseplant. Some objects that I have used for this activity are shown in Figures 6.1–6.4.

Figures 6.1–6.4: My papier-mâché egg, brass ornament, string bag and balaclava

I try to include a mixture of presents, shared objects, childhood objects and inherited ones. I generally avoid very expensive objects or designer brands. As always, you should provide structure to the task design by specifying: 1. how many objects each learner needs to describe 2. how many words or sentences they should write for each object 3. what format they can use, i.e.: – a live presentation in front of the class with actual objects or slides

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– a pre-recorded video or audio played to the class – a pre-recorded video or audio sent only to the teacher – a written document (with or without photos) sent to the teacher 4. whether or not including images of the actual objects is optional (I recommend that it should be) 5. the sort of language you are looking for, guided by prompt questions such as: – What is the object? – What is it used for? – What is it made of? – Where did you get it? – Who gave it to you? – Why did you get it? – Why do you like it? The prompts encourage a mix of present and past tenses and would be suitable for a group of younger teens. For higher-level groups, you could include questions such as: What memories and associations does the object hold for you? Describe its feel, weight and texture. What else can you recall about the day you first received or saw this object? Has its significance changed for you over time? The aim of fronting the activity with your own examples is to capture learners’ imaginations but also to demonstrate the type of discourse they should be producing. My text for the objects above, for example, follows the same structure that I specify, in steps, for my learners. As with all show-and-tell activities, the aim is to encourage language production by allowing learners to personalise their output while at the same time trying not to force them into more self-disclosure than they are comfortable with.

Indian egg My father gave me this ornamental egg when he returned from working in India many years ago. It is made from papier-mâché, I believe. It is very light, anyway. I like the design and I even used it as the basis for a painting that I copied onto a piece of wood once. I especially like the wiggly gold lines and the orange circles on it. It has accompanied me to every home I have had since I was a late teenager. Ú

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Brass ornament This is a brass ashtray that was in my parents’ house in Sharjah in the UAE, where I was born. When my family returned to the UK, we had this and other brass ornaments that reminded them of their time abroad. Sometimes, I used to help my mum clean all the brass ornaments. I don’t use it for smoking because I don’t smoke. I don’t always keep it as shiny as it could be, but it has sentimental value.

Shopping bag This is a string bag that I was given by friends when I was visiting Yekaterinburg in Russia. There they would call this bag an ‘avoska’. It is reusable and it can stretch to carry quite a big load of shopping. I really like its deep green colour and it brings back memories of the trip, which was a very good one. Here, it has got a bottle of kvass in it, which is a drink made from bread!

Balaclava This is a balaclava that my grandma knitted for me when I was just four or five. I believe it was one of the last things that she knitted in her life. I used to like it because I felt like a knight in armour when I wore it. I even wanted to wear it when it wasn’t winter. It’s probably a good job my mum didn’t let me.

Going biographical with photos

Another way of using a show-and-tell dynamic involves old photographs. Most people I know switched to digital and stopped taking their photographs to be printed on paper about 10 to 15 years ago. I am therefore aware that the youngest readers of this book may only have childhood photos on paper and that readers in their thirties may have just their younger years up to their early twenties at most. The following activities will work for both paper-based and digital photos but again, there is something quite fun, and personal, in holding up actual photographs to the webcam.

An activity you can use once a year For this first activity, which is more of an elaborate lead-in to a main lesson, early photos will work just fine. It is an activity that you can use once a year and only if you happen to be teaching on your birthday. It requires very little in the way of preparation. You simply take a couple of photographs from your albums. I will describe exactly how this went with a group of ten to thirteen year olds. Hi guys! I’ve got a few old snaps here to show you. Look at this one:

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Figure 6.5: My fourth birthday

This was taken on the 13th of May, 1977. I’m with my mum, and the Batman cake on the table had four candles on it because it was my fourth birthday. There’s also a chocolate hedgehog cake – you can just see its chocolate button eyes. And look, I’m even wearing a tie!

Figure 6.6: My tenth birthday

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Here’s another, dated the … 13th of May, 1983. I’m celebrating my tenth birthday. I think you can see ten candles there. I’m there with my brother, and you can see my mum got me an ET cake. I don’t know if she made that one or ordered it.

Figure 6.7: My twenty-first birthday

And this last one is dated the 13th of May, 1994. That was my 21st birthday. - Teacher, you’ve got white hair [Lucia, learner]. - … and you were thin [Jorge, learner]. Yeah, don’t remind me about it! Oh, and the hair was bleached. We had a great day there. A mate came round and we spent the evening in front of a fire in the yard. Only problem was that my brother got salmonella because we didn’t cook the sausages properly. Okay, so let’s crack on and get the lesson started. What’s the date today? - It’s the thirteenth of May. [Paula, learner] - Teacher … [Dario] - Yo, Dario. - Teacher, is it your birthday today? [Dario]

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The sound of that metaphorical penny dropping on the other end of the line was hilarious. In two other groups that day, someone cottoned on slightly earlier. In fact, part of the fun here lies in seeing if you can get the photographs shown, and mention the date not once, not twice but maybe even three or four times without your learners catching on. To do so, it helps if you state the date quite quickly and without emphasis, brushing over it as an almost coincidental detail. It really is a lot of fun – for the teacher! The follow-up task here is: Step 1: Find a picture of you on one of your birthdays. Step 2: Describe the picture.

When was it?



What can we see in the centre of the photo?



Is there anything in the background?



Who else is in the photo?



What are you all doing?



How were you feeling?



Again, for higher-level learners, you can include:



Say what you had just been doing.



Say what was going on out of shot that we cannot see.



Say what you were about to do afterwards.

Using friends in photos Describing images forms a staple part of many curriculums, and at least one major exam board’s speaking tests, so you might want to do some practice on this with your learners. Sometimes, learners might be asked to describe or talk about a friend, either for the purposes of assessment or as part of their future studies. They may also want to talk about a photo or a friend in English, for example, when creating a caption to accompany a post on Twitter or Instagram. This activity starts off with a number of autobiographical disclosures from the teacher to serve as a model. My accompanying narrative goes something like this:

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Figure 6.8: My first example photo for the activity

‘This is my friend, Andrew, on the right in this picture. We’ve been friends for over 30 years. Here we are at a folk music festival in the UK. This photo was taken round about 1998, I think. We went to this festival a few times together and enjoyed it. We used to stand at the back because you could hear the music well there, but sometimes we’d move to the front to look at the players. I like this picture because it shows us and also the whole festival site.’

Figure 6.9: My second example photo for the activity

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‘This picture was taken round about the same time. We were in our mid- to late twenties. Here we are on a camel ride at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt. It was the first time we had been on camels and we weren’t sure if we wanted to get off them or stay on them a bit longer. I like this photo because it reminds me of an epic holiday.’

Figure 6.10: If the pictures you choose display different settings or moods, your model narrative will be more varied

‘This photo was taken about ten years later. At this time I was living in Barcelona and I was visiting Andy in the UK. It was a cloudy day in Lancashire and we had climbed up some stone steps to the top of a very steep hill, where it was exceptionally windy. We were happy here but also looking forward to getting some warm food inside us later.’ Another variation on the task would be to deliver your narrative first, in order to create a sense of curiosity, and then to show learners the subsequent photo. This would fall under what teacher trainer Jamie Keddie has termed ‘withholding the image’ (2009). It is important to remember that the teacher-centric lead-in here is only a very short introduction phase. It is not the activity itself and should only last five minutes or so. For the learners’ pieces, I recommend not making the photos obligatory. Instead, if they choose to do so, they can paint their pictures in words, as it were. Also, if they want to include a picture of their friends, you need to

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stipulate that they ask their friend’s permission (and also ask their friend to check with their parents that it is okay as well). Below, I have included two different task set-ups. One of them corresponds roughly to the length of a Twitter caption (280 characters, which works out at about three to four standard lines of text) and the other to a long Instagramstyle post (2,200 characters, which would work out at around 300 words or about half a page of typed text). While I might refer to these social media posts in the set-up, I will do so only to make my learners see the idea of word counts and limits in their English class from a fresher perspective. We do not actually post on social media in class time, as I feel this would be a greater distraction than benefit and I would not want to have to take on responsibility for Twitter and Instagram content uploaded during my lessons. It is also worth remembering that with both these social media platforms, there is a minimum age limit of 13 for users to have an account. You can see below that I have reframed the word count as if it is more of a challenge to get all the task specifics done within the count – which is a skill in itself. ■ Shorter task.

Step 1: Describe a photo which has you and friend in it. Say: – where you were; – what you were doing; – why you like the photograph. Try to do all this in no more than 280 characters or 40 words.

■ Longer task

Step 1: Choose three photos which have you and friend in them.



Step 2: For each photo say: – where you were; – what you were doing; – why you like the photograph.



Step 3: After describing the photos, include another paragraph explaining: – where you met; – how often you see each other; – what interests you have in common; – whether you are similar in terms of personality; – what you like about your friend.



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Of course, these photo-based activities are not the exclusive domain of online lessons, but they do work very well in an online context. The aim of fronting such an activity with your own presentation is to a) capture the imagination of your learners, b) prompt a response from them by providing your own example, and c) model the format and style of what you want them to produce. In addition to serving as a model of the activity, your initial presentation is also valuable language input in itself. You can choose to load it up with target vocabulary and structures that learners have just studied, are studying or will be studying from the language syllabus.

Using ongoing projects for show and tell

This activity takes advantage of the fact that we are working from home to show learners an activity in progress. We are also going to model a ‘How to …’ article and have our learners follow up with one of their own. The following is a purpose-written text that I showed my learners:

How to make a sourdough starter If I told you that there’s something bubbling in my kitchen cupboard, you might think that I needed to clean my house. I promise you, though, that everything is as it should be! What I have been creating is a sourdough starter! Don’t know what that is? Well, let me tell you all about it. Basically, it consists of some flour and some water, which we mix in equal proportions and leave to ferment. Yes, that means to bubble! After 24 hrs we need to feed the starter with more flour. This process can go on for as long as you keep feeding it – years, even!

A. A starter bubbling away

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B. A rather messy situation as I am transferring and feeding starters. Ú

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‘But what can I use a sourdough starter for?’ I hear you ask. Well, we can use it as the active ingredient for making bread and we can also use it to make delicious savoury pancakes that have a very different taste from regular ones. So, if you’re looking for a cheap and easy new hobby, why not start up your own sourdough starter? C. A savoury sourdough pancake

As we worked through the text, I mixed in some photographs of my starter when it was just done together with a photo of the starter as it currently was, so they could see the bubbles inside the jar. I also had some photos of some pancakes I had cooked the night before and a video clip on how to make sourdough pancakes. The combination of media, such as before-and-after photos combined with the end product or product-up-to-now provides a sense of progression that is more conveniently conveyed online/from home, depending upon the project. The range of activities is limitless. You may wish to talk about baking your own bread, making pizzas, growing a kefir culture, setting jelly for a children’s party, making jam, dry-ageing a steak, salt-marinating a piece of salmon, refurbishing a living room, retiling a bathroom, painting a playroom or baby’s bedroom for a new addition to the family, digging a vegetable plot, growing a window herb garden, cleaning out a fish tank, painting a watercolour, doing a piece of crochet, working on a patchwork blanket, doing up an old motorcycle, giving someone a make-over, doing a face-paint look for Halloween, icing a cake, mastering a difficult yoga posture, polishing a pair of shoes, restringing a ukulele or slow-cooking a casserole.

YouTube streamer review In Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom (2018), I talk about asking learners to review facets of their school lives, and helping them do so by providing a set of criteria to use for evaluation. A downloadable resource for

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that book includes prompts for writing a critical review of a school rule, a maths problem, a PE lesson and a school textbook. For the present volume, I suggest we step into the world of online gaming and ask learners to critique their favourite streamers.

Background to streamers

As a UK tween in the mid-80s, I belonged to possibly one of the first generations of youngsters where the majority of children in any given class had access to some sort of computer game at home. I had a Sinclair ZX 48k Spectrum and played games like Jetpack, Manic Miner and adaptations from coin-operated arcade machines like Bomb Jack and Arkanoid (walkthroughs to all these can be found on YouTube for the curious). There were magazines such as Sinclair User and Crash with game reviews, tips on how to play and competitions – so there was a community of gameplayers, of sorts. The biggest difference between young gamers now and then, and indeed the biggest difference between your learners’ use of multimedia and what I imagine your own use of it to be, is probably the number of hours they spend viewing online YouTube personalities and especially YouTube game streamers. These are people who stream themselves live via platforms such as Twitch, or pre-record themselves playing a game and provide a spoken commentary as they play or later on. Some streamers have been hugely successful. For example, Richard Tyler Blevins, a 29-year-old American who streams as Ninja, currently has over 24 million subscribers to his YouTube channel (just typing ‘Ninja’ into YouTube will take you there to see for yourself) and has an estimated net worth of approximately $15 million. Rubén Doblas Gundersen, known as ‘El Rubius’, who streams in Spanish, has over 39 million subscribers (see elrubiusOMG on YouTube) and is worth approximately $7 million. Many streamers branch out and create clips about other things. For example, you might see a clip of Canadian gamer Imane Anys, alias Pokimane, with over 6 million subscribers, frying herself eggs, or Felix Kjellberg, a Swedish gamer also known as PewDiePie, perhaps the most successful streamer, with over 108 million subscribers, reviewing gym fails. If you are not into computer games, as I am not, and as I imagine many of the readers of this English language methodology book might not be, you may find the idea of sitting watching somebody else play one and talk about it unappealing. You may also find the style of delivery of some streamers a little bit ‘shouty’ or otherwise exaggerated. Samuel de Luque, as Vegetta777, another of my learners’ favourite streamers with over 31 million subscribers, 102

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delivers portions of his Minecraft walkthrough commentaries in a highpitched voice, for example. Nonetheless, Samuel and all of the other streamers mentioned here are talented and often charismatic presenters who have mastered their medium and their audiences, building up a following through regular and extensive broadcasting schedules over years.

Task set-up and review criteria

Part of my research for this activity and set-up for the task included a lessonlong chat with one of my most game-orientated groups, all of whom play some sort of online or offline game. I also gave them the option to think about nongamer YouTube personalities, but they all chose gamers, so that is what I have decided to include here. To begin with, I asked them to work in pairs or groups and to come up with their criteria for deciding how good a YouTube gamer personality is. We then opened up the conversation to the whole group, with me querying and clarifying some of the points they made. Finally, I have added some of my own criteria and designed the template that you see in in Figure 6.11 on page 104 (also available as a slide in Downloadable resource 5: Streamer review criteria). Rather than start off with the template provided here, you may wish to put your learners in groups and ask them to come up with their own criteria, using those as the basis for a whole-class discussion before switching to the template for the writing task. If your learners come up with any criteria not included in Figure 6.11, you might want to add those in. In a similar way, you could ask your learners to work out a set of review criteria for non-streamer celebrity YouTubers. As this may be a new area to some readers, I shall briefly pick up on what for me are some of the more interesting nuances that came out of talking to my learners about the criteria.

The importance of being hard-working This was the most common quality extolled by my learners and made me realise that they appreciate what I would term an honest work ethic in their streamers. ‘They have to edit their content,’ said one learner. ‘What do you mean by that?’ He went on to explain that as a viewer, he does not want to sit watching footage of a streamer who is in turn sitting waiting for other players to join a game (unless it is live and there is no option).

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Figure 6.11: Streamer review criteria

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Other stipulations were that the streamer needs to create new content, not just edit previous footage, and that they should actually ensure that they have enough time to dedicate to playing the game or games that they cover, as many viewers will look for fresh daily or weekly content.

Being involved in collaborations ‘They have to know other gamers,’ said one of my learners. Gaming has become a social thing, and it seems that teenagers find the sense of community created by streamers reaching out to one another reassuring. Many streamers form teams or collectives and involve each other in their clips, which creates a backstory and a common narrative. One learner mentioned that he liked it when more famous streamers collaborate with up-and-coming ones. He ‘discovered’ one of his favourite but less well-known streamers through a collaboration with a bigger name.

Loyalty and being genuine Most streamers gain their audiences by initially being linked to one or two games in particular. Ninja started playing battle games like Halo, and more recently Fortnite Battle Royale, while Vegetta777 is linked to Minecraft, for example. One learner said that he liked it when streamers remembered the game that made them famous. He also liked it when they remembered the channel or platform that made them famous, rather than making exclusive deals with big companies and/or switching platforms. When watching a stream, you will often see the player achieve objectives, win, lose – or die, if it is an action game. My group pointed out that it is important that a streamer’s reactions to these events is genuine but not overly exaggerated. They used the example of one streamer who apparently broke his table in half when he lost at a FIFA football game. I did not manage to find that clip but I did find another who smashed a television when he threw a chair across the room in triumph after managing to secure Cristiano Ronaldo as a player for his team.

Use of memes Streamers often punctuate their own footage by cutting to other snippets of clips or images that have gone viral. Sometimes they will superimpose these onto their own recording, typically to highlight moments of surprise, failure or bafflement as a reaction to weirdness. While this can be fun in moderation, my learners explained that too many such memes can result in a kind of sensory overload – and given the already noisily narrated and split screen nature of streams (often you have the streamer’s screen and an insert of them playing

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or an insert of the person/people that they are talking to if there is no play in progress), this is quite understandable.

Example answers

To give you an idea of what you might expect from learners, here are parts of two reviews I received. Writing about his favourite streamer, El Rubius, Jaime Romero says: An interesting fact about this influencer is that his mother is Norwegian, and that’s the reason why he has Norwegian nationality, besides the Spanish one. Rubius is thirty years old and 190 centimeters tall. This Spanish-spoken streamer, who lives in Madrid, has been streaming and posting videos for over nine years. He goes on to give details about channels and content: First of all, on the one hand, he posts videos in YouTube, where he owns two channels: his principal and oldest one, where he posts hilarious videos, which brought him to fame, ElRubiusOMG; and his gaming-focused one, where he uploads his gaming content, called Rubius Z. On the other hand, he streams on Twitch, a platform where he plays several trending games or just talks and makes us laugh. But he also acknowledges that the material is not suitable for all: Despite creating funny content and being such a celebrity, he sometimes uses swear words, so his content isn’t supposed to be heard by little children, who could start using these words because of him. Nevertheless, he is a nice person who’s able to keep you entertained on the most boring days. Jaime is a B2-level learner, and you can see how his use of connectors and relative clauses makes for smooth reading. It was originally a very brief exchange between Jaime and one of his classmates via the chat box about who the best streamer was that gave me the initial idea for the review prompts you see in Figure 6.11. Writing about AuronPlay, NaranjaGamer (one of my current B1 learners) says: His real name is Raúl Álvarez. He named his channel this way because his favourite character of a videogame is called Auron. He is 32 years old. Auronplay was born in Barcelona and he still lives there. He streams in Spanish always. I think he could upload more videos because he uploads a video once or twice a month. And his type of videos is very simple. He doesn’t edit the videos a lot, maybe a cut but not much effort. And normally his videos are improvised.

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I think he enjoys making videos and playing games. He is always laughing and laughing, and every game that he plays, he finishes it. My favourite posts about him are videos commenting on video clips or commenting on other types of videos of other people. He acknowledges: Definitely he is not a good example for young people, he is always shouting insults and talking about things that are not appropriate for children like fighting or death. I don’t know if he is good at the games that he plays because when he gets serious he’s very good at the game but when he is trying to make people laugh he’s very bad. In both cases here, you can see that the streamer being reviewed is not one that broadcasts in English but that this makes no difference whatsoever to the review.

Final note on this activity The aim here is not to try to appear ‘cool’ in front of your learners, to surprise them or score points by knowing certain streamers. It is certainly not to try to know more than they do about gaming. It is not about publicly approving of or disapproving of the streamer genre either. It is about tapping into something your learners like and letting them tell you about it. Your knowledge of methodology could be excellent, but if you cannot find a way to get your learners talking, then your lessons will only ever be lukewarm. Talking about streamers and games may be one way to do this.

Exploiting the fact that your learners are already at home In a face-to-face classroom situation, when a teacher asks learners to speak or write about their home or their family, there is an inherent act of recall required (even though it is a recall of something very familiar) to bridge the gap between the home setting and the classroom they are currently in. While this gap is seldom serious enough to impede the task completely, it often dulls the detail and results in a more generalised and generic conversation or piece of writing. The following activities involve learners thinking about their home setting while in situ.

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Room description

In class, if you ask a learner about the colour of the walls of their bedroom or of other rooms in their house, they can often take some time to remember. This activity works on the principle that it is so much easier to write about a room when you are actually in it. The instructions for this assignment are as follows: Step 1: Choose a room in your house. Step 2: Go into it with a notebook and sit down. Step 3: Write 15 things about the room: the furniture in it, its shape, other details, how you feel about the room or about the time you spend in there. Step 4: Use an online translator or dictionary to help you if necessary. Step 5: Only two of your sentences can start with There is … and only two can start with There are ... . For the rest, you will need to be creative, starting with a preposition (In ... , On ... , Between ... , Next to ... , Above ... , etc., but you cannot use the same preposition more than twice) or a pronoun (I ... , We ... , My sister ... , My parents ... , etc.) or something else (The reason why I like this room is ... , This room is warm/cool ... , etc). Step 6: You can also connect your sentences to each other by starting them with In addition ... , As well as ... , For this reason ... . This will help you to write a text that reads smoothly and does not consist of individual sentences that have nothing to do with each other. Step 7: Type your sentences up as a text. Step 8: Send your text to the teacher. You will see in Steps 5 and 6 that the aim is to guide the learners’ writing by pushing them to expand the range of language they use. This activity can be run during class, in which case you will need to set time limits – for example, giving them 10–15 minutes away from their computers to go to the room they wish to describe, and another 10–20 minutes back at their computers composing the text. This will give you a little break as well. Alternatively, the task can be given as a homework assignment. You may wish to tweak the various steps, the number of sentences and the language specifications to suit your group’s level.

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View from a window

This is another in-situ activity. During recent confinement and lockdown periods, many people found themselves spending more time either looking out of the window or standing on apartment terraces or balconies than before. Here we exploit these viewpoints for language production. Step 1: Go to a window in your house or apartment. (If you live in a house with more than one floor, you can choose an upstairs or a downstairs window. If you live in a flat with a balcony, you can stand on that – obviously, be careful! If you live in a house with a garden, you can go to the end of the driveway or stand at the garden gate.) Step 2: Stand at the window (or alternative location) for about five minutes. Step 3: Write down what you can see from where you are. Include: a) natural features such as trees, bushes, rivers or parks b) buildings c) other features such as roads, bus stops, lamp posts d) the sky, the weather and what kind of light there is e) a description of people or things passing by, such as cars or walkers f) anything you see happening outside (for example, a delivery to a shop, a lorry that has broken down or people doing roadworks) g) what is always the same when you look out of the window h) what things change i) whether you can see anyone else looking out of their window Step 4: Remember that whenever you are looking at people and then writing things down, you need to be subtle and not too obvious. If anyone asks you what you are doing, explain to them about the assignment. Step 5: Come back to your computer and write about 15 sentences. Only two of your sentences can start with I can see …. Two can start with There is … and two can start with There are …. Step 6: For the rest, you will need to be creative, starting with a preposition (Down below …, Opposite …, Further down the street …, Next to …, Above …, etc.), or a pronoun (She …, They … etc.), a noun (The family …, The van …, etc.). Step 7: Type your sentences up as a text and send that to the teacher.

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Do you know me?

This activity began when I saw a Facebook post by a friend. She had shared a fun survey which involved you, the user, going to your significant other and asking them to answer questions, not about themselves, but about you. The fun element lay in seeing if your partner was able to correctly guess your tastes, habits and details. With further searches, I have found that there are a number of variations on these surveys on social media. Often, they include adult questions such as ‘What’s my favourite alcoholic drink?’ or ‘Could you live with me forever?’ Obviously, these would be less appropriate for our use but, inspired by the general idea, I designed the following survey, which is more suitable for teenage learners to ask a family member:

Do you know me? 1.

What is something I hate doing?

2.

When was the last time I was really happy?

3.

Can you think of a word or expression that I use a lot?

4.

Who is my favourite teacher at school?

5.

What would my dream menu in a restaurant be?

6.

What food do I like the least?

7.

Have I ever told you about a dream I had? If so, what happened in it?

8.

What is the best thing about me?

9.

In what ways are we the same?

10.

If I could go anywhere for a two-week holiday, where would I go?

11.

How do I annoy you?

12.

What is my favorite Netflix, HBO or TV series?

13.

You get a phone call from the police to tell you that I’ve got into trouble with a friend. Which friend do you think it would be?

14.

What’s my favourite place in this village/town/city?

15.

What three adjectives would you use to describe me?

It is a good idea to tell them to check that their chosen family member is not busy, so they are not perceived as pestering anybody. Once your learners have surveyed the family member, they can post the answers back to you, stating whether the answers they received were accurate or not.

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One of my learners told me that her mum said she used the phrase ‘en plan,’ which translates to ‘like’, ‘kinda’ or ‘sorta,’ a lot. She accepted that. Her mum also said that if she got into trouble, it would probably be with her cousin, to which she annotated a ‘maybe’. Her mum also thought she liked pasta the most out of all foods, to which she added that she also liked fried potatoes and eggs. Another learner said that he annoyed his mum most when he did not remember to close doors after leaving a room and a third learner said that while her mum also thought her favourite meal was pasta, it was actually soba – Japanese buckwheat noodles (I had to look that up myself). This is a lighter activity that does not necessarily result in a gradable piece. However, you could ask your learners to reformulate their findings, giving their family member’s answers using reported speech and adding their own answers using contrastive linkers such as whereas, while and but in actual fact. With this activity, though, I feel the value is in the actual doing. We are raising the profile of English in our respective learners’ households by getting their family members to join in. It may be that nobody else in the house speaks English, in which case not only do our learners need to act as interviewer, but also translator.

Observational description

The last activity in this chapter involves learners doing a little observational description. First, ask them to find a member of their family who is happy to be described. Then ask learners to sit in the same room as the person and to write a kind of ‘portrait in words’. They can use as a starting point the following questions: a) What is this person’s relationship to you? b) What are they doing as you describe them? c) Are they wearing ‘going-out’ clothes, work clothes or casual clothes? d) Are they dressed for warm weather or cold weather? e) What sort of expression(s) can you see on their face? f) How do you think they are feeling? g) Do they have lots more to do today or are they relaxing? h) How do they feel about you describing them? Learners can then work their observations into a short paragraph and send those to you for correcting.

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Professional development Things to think about ■ In this chapter, I have suggested sharing some of your own biographical details through photos and realia, with your learners. Some teachers are happy for their learners to know about their own lives while other teachers like to maintain more distance and privacy. Where do you fall on this spectrum and would you be able to comfortably share enough to serve as initial input and/or model for their responses? ■ We have looked at online games and streamers in this chapter, and even mentioned a few. How aware of this genre and these online celebrities are you? Would half an hour on YouTube checking out a few of the names mentioned inform you a little more? ■ In this chapter, you have seen various activities laid out in the step-by-step instruction format recommended in Explaining things and getting a response (pages 55–81). Have another look over these and think about where you would need to alter the steps for your own groups, for instance, grading the language, adjusting timing, etc.

Things to try ■ Before trying out the ‘information grab’ activity in class, do a little pre-run. Take the next text that you are going to study with your learners and identify three to five key words. Then see what you get from them when you search Wikipedia. Would the information help your learners to grasp the overall context of the text? ■ Write a room description or describing the view from a window in your own house. This will not only serve as a possible model for your learners when you run the task yourself but it will also help you understand what the experience will be like for your learners when they do it. ■ Explore other ways of using the activities in this chapter. For example, photographs could be used as a basis for writing tasks entitled ‘A holiday I enjoyed’, ‘A landscape I liked’, ‘My favourite photo with water in it’ or ‘Somebody I don’t know who appears in one of my photos’. (The last one might involve, as target structures, modals and other language for speculation.) Then explore other ways of capitalising on the fact that your learners are already in their homes. For example, learners could interview a neighbour or, instead of writing about what they see from a window, they could write about what they can hear, smell and feel from an open window.

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7. Using clips, video and other digital effects In this chapter, rather than provide an exhaustive or even comprehensive list of YouTube clips, I will show you a few hand-picked ones that I have worked with, using each one to highlight a particular teaching technique. I hope that the footage I mention is still available when you read this. In case it is not, I provide a description of the clip so that you can see how the technique works – Its transferability is the most important factor and the one that will unlock the successful use of hundreds of other clips. We then move on to consider briefly how to integrate some digital ‘frills’ into lessons and look at what I feel may be a very useful future direction: homemade/teacher-produced prerecorded clips for class use.

Techniques for using clips A few preliminaries

Incorporating a clip into an online lesson is very similar to doing so in a faceto-face setting. There are just four additional things to make sure of before you hit the ‘play’ button. First, at least on the various platforms I have worked with, it is best if all your learners have muted their microphones so that only the audio from the clip will be heard, with no additional echoes looping back from learners’ speakers. Secondly, once you have given your final instructions, it is important that you, the teacher, also mute your own mic. On some platforms, you may need to check a box which allows you to share the audio of the clip as well. Thirdly, you need to make sure that every learner is crystal clear on what they have to do before you hit ‘play’. Having to pause the clip, re-enable your mic and explain once again can get tedious. Finally, you will often find that there is one learner who, for some reason or other, is unable to view the clip you are sharing. Some possible reasons for this could be (1) they are using an incompatible browser, (2) they have settings which are impeding reproduction or (3) they are on some sort of mobile or tablet. In any case, this can be worked around if you provide a link to the clip via the chat box just before you start the clip yourself. Then, if any learner finds themselves unable to view it, they simply copy the link and open it up in another window, coming back to the main classroom when the clip is over. 113

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Teacher primes the write-up

Heather Dorniden was an American athlete who fell in a track event. She was one of the favourites to win her heat and was getting to the front when she tripped and ended up flat on her face. Once she got up, she was in last place but through sheer determination, and perhaps the additional adrenaline surge from hitting the ground, she managed not only to catch up with the pack, but to finish in first place. I confess, I love the clip. There are currently a number of versions on YouTube. The best one can be found by searching for Heather Dorniden wins the race. What I enjoy about this clip is the fairly tight set of sports-related vocabulary that the commentary contains and the way that, with a short teacherproduced primer, we can funnel learners’ follow-up writing to practise that target language. Before playing the clip, I paste into the chat box the following exercise: Match the words with their definitions. a) track b) be in the lead c) trip over d) catch up with someone e) sprint f ) lap g) qualifying heat h) overtake 1. to go past someone 2. to get to the same place as another person 3. once round a circuit or course 4. to be winning 5. to run at full speed 6. the red circuit where athletics happens 7. a preliminary race to see who goes into the finals 8. to fall

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This is a simple matching exercise of the type you will often see in coursebooks. The items in a) to h) are all key words actually heard in the clip as the commentators describe the action. They are the target language. The items in 1 to 8 are short dictionary-style definitions. An exercise like this is very easily pasted into the chat box. Once learners have completed it, they can watch the clip. After watching, ask them to write a short paragraph describing what happens at the beginning, the middle and the end of the clip. When writing their paragraphs, learners will nearly always default to the language items you gave them in the exercise. It is very rare that they do not use at least three or four of them. So they are getting to see new words, hear them in context and use them, all in rapid succession. This double act of focusing learners on target language, letting them hear it in the context of a clip, then steering them back onto that language as they write a short summary works all the better when the clips are short and clear, and contain a family of related words.

Rolling comprehension and guided listening

Here I will use one clip to demonstrate a number of techniques. The clip is: Gordon Ramsay Shows How To Make A Lamb Chop Dish At Home | Ramsay in 10. In it, the famous chef cooks a meal in his own kitchen, recorded by his daughters on their phones. The clip is a bit long, so I forward it to where Gordon actually starts cooking. Ideally, a cooking clip of about five or six minutes is best, and you could use any cooking demonstration. As this is the clip I have used most and have saved chat box records of, I will use it as an example. Before starting the clip, post the following generic questions in the chat box: 1. What is the dish? 2. What are the five main ingredients? 3. Does the dish look good to you? 4. Could you, or would you, cook it? 5. Is there anything you like or do not like about the clip? 6. Are there any other words or phrases you picked up from the clip?

The idea is that your learners then use the chat box to answer the questions as the clip is playing and as they discover the answers. This is what I mean by a rolling comprehension. The beauty of the chat box is that it allows full

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communication between teacher and learners without us having to pause the clip or speak over it. What then transpires is a mixture of learners answering the questions, learners making other comments about the clip and the teacher drawing their attention to certain words and phrases that are being repeated. I think this sort of guided listening is very useful for helping learners actually locate words and pick them out from the connected stream of speech they are hearing. This is much more effective than waiting until the end to see if they have understood what they heard. If necessary, you can repaste the questions into the chat box to refocus learners’ attention on them. In the exchange below, there are not as many direct answers to the questions coming in as usual, but I think it is useful to see how the stream of communication is more or less continuous and how we go off at quite a tangent, discussing the expression ‘pan down’. One learner pastes in all the answers as soon as he has collected them together. Towards the end of the exchange, you can see that we are all starting to go over the answers together. [15:21] [15:21] [15:21] [15:21] [15:22] [15:23] [15:23] [15:23] [15:23] [15:23] [15:24] [15:24] [15:24]

[15:25] [15:25] [15:25] [15:25] [15:25] [15:25]

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Pepe: 1. lamb with olive oil CHRIS ROLAND: Yes! Lamb. Dana: No oil in the pans CHRIS ROLAND: It’s the fat from the lamb that should render down. CHRIS ROLAND: What is the word he keeps telling Meg? Dana: Put the lamb on the grill pan Dana: crash garlic CHRIS ROLAND: crush, yes Sofia: 2. lamb, potatoes, peas, garlic and mushrooms CHRIS ROLAND: Rock and roll, Sofia! CHRIS ROLAND: So he keeps saying ‘pan down’. Dana: calm down please, calm down CHRIS ROLAND: Nearly Dana, it’s not connected to the pans on the cooker, it means ‘zoom in’ or something very similar. CHRIS ROLAND: Also, when film making, the camera can pan out. Sofia: like focus? Dana: yep CHRIS ROLAND: Yes... Dana: It is quite appetising Pepe: Nice colour

7. Using clips, video and other digital effects

[15:25] CHRIS ROLAND: Yes - I’m off to the supermarket after this – I might pick up lamb chops! [15:26] CHRIS ROLAND: and actually follow his recipe. [15:26] Dana: But you’ll need technique [15:26] CHRIS ROLAND: I’ve got technique! [15:27] Dana: And what about practice? [15:27] CHRIS ROLAND: I might have to watch the video again! [15:27] Alicia:  aren’t potatoes burning while doing the other thing? [15:27] Dana: No [15:27] CHRIS ROLAND: Yes – he says crispy, his daughters say burnt. [15:28] Dana: He’s nervous [15:28] Lucia: So nervous hahahaha [15:29] Thiago: He is hyperactive [15:29] CHRIS ROLAND: He is a little bit – I think he’s out of his comfort zone. [15:29] Alicia: they are his daughters, aren’t they? [15:29] Pepe: He is out of time. [15:29] CHRIS ROLAND: Yes. Can you hear the amount of stick they are giving him? [15:30] Thiago: F [15:31] Pablo:  1. Lamb with olive oil 2. Lamb, mushrooms, peas, small potatoes, onion. 3. Yes 4. Yes, I would like to. 5. He’s always really nervous. 6. F  rozen peas in! We have to get the lamb oiled. The salt is going to go over a little touch of vinegar. Take off the fire crispy/burnt Crush those pees [15:31] Sofia: 1- Lamb with olive oil [15:31] Maya: 1. lamb chops [15:31] Thiago: 1. Lamb with olive oil [15:32] Sofia: 2- lamb, mushrooms, peas, potatotes, garlic [15:32] Maya:  2. lamb, olive oil, seeds, potatoes, onion, mushrooms, peas, butter, cream fresh, garlic

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Learners find a similar clip and answer generic questions

The follow-up to the above activity can be a listening task. Learners find their own cookery demonstration clip. It could be a Gordon Ramsay clip or any other chef. They watch the clip, then answer the same six questions. You will notice that the questions are generic and designed to prompt learners to pay attention and react to the clips. This is not a writing task, though. Their answers might be very short. The aim here is to get them listening and listening carefully. The group who watched the clip above chose a selection of different recipes: cheesecake, an English-speaking chef making Spanish torrijas, a ‘Quick ’n’ easy homemade pizza recipe’, sweet mochi (Japanese sticky rice cake) and chocolate crêpe cake. One learner chose a clip where Gordon Ramsay’s daughter Matilda makes a giant burger and another actually recorded himself cooking a seafood dish, in which he provided a running commentary of what he was doing in English.

Staggered summary writing for exploring longer footage

The next activity is one that I ran very recently with three groups of teens. The unit of the coursebook we are using dealt with recycling and plastics, and to complement this I chose a clip that dealt with the same theme but that was a little grittier than our regular material. We watched a 25-minute documentary about a Coptic Christian community called the Zabbaleen, who are responsible for manually collecting and recycling much of Cairo’s rubbish. The clip is called Zabbaleen: Trash Town. A whole community in Egypt that lives on rubbish. It is on the RT Documentary YouTube Channel, but there are numerous other clips about the same place. I explained to the class: I am going to play you five minutes of this documentary. During that time, you can make a few notes if you like – just the odd phrase or detail, such as a name or a number – but the main point is to be listening and watching instead of writing. After those five minutes, I will pause the documentary and you will have three minutes to write a five-sentence summary of what you have just seen. During this time, you can ask me for help, for example, to confirm details or help you with words and expressions. I will then ask two or three of you to read out what you have, and after that, we will start the film again and watch another five minutes. After those five minutes I will hit pause again and you will write another five-sentence summary about the second section. And so on.

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So, in total we will watch the clip in five five-minute blocks with three minutes after each for your write-up of that part. By the end of the lesson, you should have a 25-sentence summary of the whole documentary, which you can then send to me. Even though this is a long activity, the stages are manageable and logical, and learners have a clear roadmap ahead of them. I have found this to be a very effective way to get a group to listen carefully to longer footage and to process its content. The writing is normally quite good as well, with learners sometimes opting to reproduce stretches of the narration and at other times summarise the content in their own words. This approach can be adopted for any documentary. I would recommend 25 minutes as the maximum with perhaps 15 or 20 minutes being ideal.

Two techniques for use with song clips

This activity involves asking learners to react to the visual content of the video clip that accompanies a song rather than to the lyrics of the song itself. My example clip is the official music video to It Ain’t My Fault by Brothers Osborne. In it, a gang of robbers hold up a pawn shop run by the Brothers, and are consequently chased around town. This goes on throughout the rest of the clip, with three of them getting away and their leader getting caught. It is not an overtly political song or clip, but the fun part of the clip is that the robbers wear rubber masks which have the faces of previous US presidents on them: Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton (with Hilary Clinton making a cameo appearance). After having made sure that everyone knows which face matches which president, paste the questions listed on page 120 into the chat box. Then play the clip: You will notice a second technique here. The target language in this exercise is embedded in the questions. The answers are going to be very short ones, either: the Brothers Osborne, Trump, Obama, Bush or Clinton. It is the passive structure with ‘get’ that is the language you are exposing the learners to. Obviously, not all music videos are so easily exploited as this one. This video serves as an excellent vehicle to show you the two principles under discussion – basing questions on the action, not the lyrics, and loading the questions with target language – but from time to time you will come across music videos like this that are almost small movies in themselves. It is then a case of working out if you can identify an obvious set of vocabulary from what appears or if you can use the video to familiarise your learners with language for describing movement, action sequences, or other events.

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Paste the following questions into the chat box. Then play the clip: Who … a) get held up at gunpoint? b) gets chased the most by the first police officer? c) gets followed by the helicopter? d) gets chased by a dog? e) gets screamed at by a little girl? f) gets shot at by a man in an armchair? g) gets slapped on the hand? h) gets run over by a truck? i) gets distracted by a pretty lady in sunglasses? j) gets helped over the wall second? k) gets pulled up over the wall? l) gets caught?

Using ‘information grab’ to prime learners for clips

In the last chapter (pages 83–112), we looked at priming learners for reading texts by sending them to Wikipedia to bring back information on key concepts. The same technique can be used to prime learners for material they might hear or see in the clips you play them. As an example, I had a group that had taken a shine to mixed martial artist (MMA) Jorge Masvidal, who has coined some celebrated catchphrases such as ‘super-necessary’ in his interviews. In one clip, which I knew my learners would enjoy, he is given a list of things and asked to say whether they are ‘super-necessary’ or ‘super-unnecessary’. These include things like family, coffee, dogs, New York City and then a number of other fighters and celebrities such as The Rock, Michael Bisping, Colby Covington and Nate Diaz. Sending the learners to Wikipedia to bring back a brief detail about each of these personalities gave them that extra bit of background so as not to be disorientated by the second half of the list. I am not recommending this clip especially, but it is a good example of how you can help prepare learners not just for written text but for footage too.

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Teacher-produced footage As well as using clips that you find on YouTube, you can generate your own footage by recording yourself speaking to the class via your webcam. Using pre-recorded footage of yourself has a number of advantages. When you are explaining something as part of a live demonstration to a class, not only do you have to think about grading your language and staging the content of what you say for maximum clarity, but you are also trying to make sure everyone is listening by using indicators such as webcam images and communications over the chat box and mic. However, when you have yourself as a pre-recorded clip, it is almost as if you have cloned yourself and are then freed up to use any of the techniques mentioned so far in this chapter to encourage your learners to listen to ‘the other you’. From the learners’ point of view, seeing their teacher on a pre-recorded clip signifies to them that this is an important stretch of teacher talk to listen to. Remember that they have you there in front of them talking away all the time. When it is not you, it is another teacher, and each teacher behaves as if everything they say is terribly important at every single moment. The fact that the teacher has recorded this bit now helps learners realise that the recorded section probably does warrant closer attention. In addition, it is a finite piece of limited duration, and it is easier for learners to concentrate when they know there is an end in sight. There is also the added bonus that if the teacher needs to replay the recording, the words and phrasing and even the tone, sentence stress and speed will all be the same, so a second playing really will help them understand better. From the teacher’s perspective, pre-recording presentations gives you the option of various takes, so you can get your presentation just right. On the other hand, you do not want to be rerecording over and over again, as this takes up time. I suggest the best of two or the best of three as a maximum. The other big advantage of pre-recording some of your lesson is that it shares your workload out over the day a little more and gives you some downtime during the actual lesson. As teachers, we are nearly always ‘on’. By this I mean we are normally the centre of attention and super-attentive. Having a section of your lesson pre-recorded allows you to take a back seat for a few moments and to take a breather.

Recording yourself giving task instructions

You have seen how many of the activities presented in the book can be broken down into staged instructions. By recording yourself reading through those instructions, you can add even more weight to the task set-up.

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Sharing your own projects

In the last chapter (pages 83–112), we considered the idea of using your own projects or interests to kickstart learners’ responses. For many years now, I have grown an annual crop of chilli peppers, often sharing these and the chilli-related condiments I make with both learners and teachers. With online teaching, such sharing is not possible. What I have done, though, is to involve my learners in the process by recording a number of vlog-type instalments. The initial recording was an ‘unboxing’ style clip, when my seeds reached me from Jukka Kilpinen at Fataliiseeds – my regular seed supplier.

Figures 7.1–7.3: The initial ‘unboxing of my chilli seeds

I showed the class the envelope with the stamp from Finland, where Jukka is based, and talked them through the various sachets of seeds I had ordered, complete with the accompanying literature and complimentary seeds.

Figure 7.4: Complimentary seeds – an added surprise!

In subsequent clips, I have shown the seedlings germinating and discussed how I needed to spray them with a cold chamomile solution to suppress fungus in the soil, which can kill off chilli seedlings.

Using your own footage as an audio exercise A transcript of part of the first video reads: … when I moved, I ended up giving away … mmm that’s one of my cats going mental … I ended up giving away most of my seeds and erm yeah I didn’t think 122

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I’d have time, well I didn’t have much time when I moved – or space. Anyway, I’ve moved and I do have time, I do have space so I decided to order some chillis. Now what I like about ordering from this chap is that he sends the seeds in these beautiful little erm packets with a tiny photograph of the actual chilli. There’s a lot of love there you know. And er so that’s an Aji Rojo. Apparently, they’re quite big … My corresponding comprehension questions to this part of the recording were: – What distracts me while I am speaking? – Why have I decided to start growing chillis again? – What do I like about ordering from Jukka? – What do you discover about the Aji Rojo? In total, there were 15 questions to my first five-minute clip – the rest of them corresponding to the transcript before and after the extract you have just read. My main point here is that the advantage of using listening material you have generated yourself to help your learners hear words and sentences in connected speech is that you know your own words very well. That is, you know exactly what you said and how you said it in terms of pronunciation. If learners have trouble locating an answer in your stream of speech (I am using Richard Cauldwell’s terminology here and recommend his book Phonology for Listening, 2013), you can go back and locate that part of the audio, as you would with any other, but you can also model it, just as you do on the audio. Furthermore, there will never be any controversy about what the speaker actually said because the speaker was you and you know what you said.

Structured presentations for content-based lessons

Teaching STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Maths) and CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Lessons) in both mainstream school classes and the private sector in Galicia, teacher trainer Ana Demitroff sees online lessons as a way of solving a number of problems. Her aim, with her early teenage learners, is to move away from a paper-based style of pedagogy to something that is more hands-on. She also makes the point that in the aftermath of the Covid crisis, hygiene will ensure everything is ‘hands-off’ in the classroom. An online context allows her to make more use of space in and around the camera, delivering textbook-free demonstrations using everyday items in a way that would be harder to do in a face-to-face setting. She delivers these presentations both in real time and as pre-recorded clips. In the sequence below she is explaining the Big Bang, catching the attention of the class in dramatic fashion at the start of the clip by popping a bag, then using a number of props as an analogy. Note also how, in terms of phrasing,

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she uses repeating patterns to underscore the primary conceptual points and core language, as well as dropping in questions towards the end of the snippet. I’m going to talk about something as small as the head of a pin. So the starting point is this, something as small as the head of a pin, and then I’m going to go to something the size of a football because the process is about expansion and also about things pulling together with gravity. It’s about something that’s very hot and then a process of cooling down, of becoming cooler. So a red pen for something that’s hot and a blue pen to represent something cooling down. We are talking about expansion, and so I’m going to use a balloon with stars on. We’re talking about things pulling together and I’ve got a hair brush to show you something in this process. What is this? This is my cat’s hair. Why have I got it? And I’m ending with something small – this marble. This is a marble, for playing. Why have I got a marble?’

Figures 7.5–7.8: Ana starts with a bang, then demonstrates different sizes and the idea of expansion

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Figures 7.9–7.12: She moves on to demonstrate the ideas of contraction, heat, cooling down and things pulling together

Other topics have included forces and micro-organisms, such as the action of yeast, as seen in Figures 7.14–7.15 on page 126.

Follow-up project work

Because they are at home, follow-up tasks and project work can involve Ana’s learners doing a wider range of more hands-on activities than in a face-toface class. These include model-making using recycled material from home, and even household chores like cooking or hanging and folding laundry. They can also conduct their own experiments. Some of the follow-up tasks for the Big Bang Theory theme included the model seen in Figure 7.13. A group of Ana’s learners prepared their own shared soliloquy in a breakout room: Iago: I am the Universe. I am 13.8 Figure 7.13: A model of the solar system made by one of Ana’s learners billion years old. I started as a little, little dot, dense and hot. Then, suddenly, in less than a second, boom! I turned into an object as big as a football! Then again, I was as big as a galaxy. Adrian: Then I turned into particles of energy and matter. Pieces came together. Then I turned into a thick soup. Irene: Then I turned into atoms. Then I turned into cloud clumps. Then I turned into stars.

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Sofía: Then I turned into galaxies, clusters and superclusters. Lucas: That’s the story of the Universe. What will happen in the future? Will it expand? Will it stop? Will it get small? Let’s see! The End! Another learner drew the universe as a very old and wise character with galaxies under his cape. As a follow-up to their work on micro-organisms, Ana’s learners created a simple experiment where the gas from yeast blew up a balloon. Others prepared then baked their own pizzas, allowing them to observe the microorganic activity of the yeast in the bases.

Figures 7.14–7.15: Follow-up tasks involving yeast as part of their micro-organisms project

With this approach, Ana points out that the role of parents is crucial, especially if learners are to undertake tasks in the kitchen. She explains how parents learned how to be present but not intrusive, and how, when it came to activities such as baking, their presence helped foster a sense of community.

Using online special effects There is a wide range of special effects available for use with online video communications platforms. For example, there are a number of backdrops that you can add so that it looks as if you are giving your lesson from a Hawaiian beach, or even from outer space. I recently downloaded an application called Snap Camera (from Snap.Inc) to my laptop, and have recorded a number of presentations using their novelty filters, which superimpose various effects, masks or faces over the user. At

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the time of writing, we are preparing for mid-course exams and so, to help my learners with their vocabulary revision, I have prepared a series of short clips where I dictate a dozen core vocabulary items in each. In fact, most of the time I describe the word without using the word itself, so I will say something like ‘Number one is an adjective that means you behave with warm and tender emotions towards the people you care for. It begins with ‘a’.’ The item that I am looking for from our vocabulary bank here is affectionate. The difference between this and any other presentation is that I am recording these with a variety of novelty faces superimposed over my own: there is one filter that turns me into a potato under the ground, another that gives me snake eyes, one that gives me the head of a cat, one that turns me into an aubergine, and another that turns me into a lizard woman with purple lips and horns. The important thing to remember here is that this is novelty. Novelty has its place but there are also times when it will work against you. There would be no point giving a serious presentation, for example, of the type we have looked at above with Ana – using a filter that gives you rabbit ears or clouds of butterflies swirling round your head. That is likely to be counterproductive. Similarly, seeing their teacher with a clown’s nose or a part-android face with blue lips and lashes might give some learners the giggles. And you cannot really blame them for that. It also might set teens off wanting to tell you (or each other) all about their filters. They might be so eager to do so that they start using L1. Again, to some extent, this would be understandable – the trick then would be in harnessing their enthusiasm to fuel further language production. Finally, if you are working in a setting where the teacher figure is needed to be perceived as serious, or in a setting where there are already ongoing behaviour issues with a group, once again, such effects may not be appropriate. We also need to make sure the filters are suitable for the class, so with tweens, I am careful to not use horror filters.

Figures 7.16–7.18: Some Snap Camera filter effects: Potato, Infiltrator (an alien) and Halfway (a vampire)

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In Figures 7.16–7.18 on page 127 you can see several filters I have used. These have been very popular with my upper-intermediate teens and have made the revision of vocabulary over the last few weeks a much more memorable event. I include the answers on each clip at the end so that by the time the clip has finished playing, my learners have not only been tested but also know how many they got correct. At the end of each recording I remind my learners which page they can go to in order to revise the language if they did not score very well on the dictation.

Novel use of voice recorders

There are a number of online voice modulators which you can use to record your voice and change it. My favourite such app is Voice Changer.io. My favourite voice effects on there are the Daleks from Doctor Who and Bane from the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises. Again, if you are creating a short audio, such as a pre-recorded dictation, make sure you choose a voice type that is actually audible. It is also important to appreciate that while some of your learners might find the novel sound effects fun, others might not recognise the character or be particularly impressed, so a short recording is generally better.

One final thought on using special effects

You will notice that with both the camera filters and the voice changer, my general approach is to use short, pre-recorded clips. Using these applications in real time during your lessons can be risky. For example, you might turn an effect on and not be able to turn it off, or, in turning it off, incapacitate your camera or mic. At the least this will constitute a distraction; at the most it could lose you a valuable portion of the lesson.

Professional development Things to think about ■ In this chapter you have read about a range of techniques for use with clips: priming and funneling, rolling comprehension, guided listening, generic questions and a staggered survey. Think about the clips that you regularly use or have used a lot in the past. In addition to how you have previously worked with those clips, would any of these techniques work well with them? ■ What is your usual modus operandi for using music videos? How do you feel about basing questions on visual content rather than lyrical content? Do any music videos where there is a strong visual story spring to mind?

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Would they be suitable for your classes and would you be able to embed target language into the questions that you write? ■ Have a look at the syllabus you are covering for the next couple of weeks ahead. Are there any tasks or projects that might be introduced via a prerecorded clip? What might the advantages and disadvantages of this be in your context?

Things to try ■ If you have never recorded yourself setting a task, try doing so – even if you never use the clip or delete it afterwards. Seeing how you come across on screen can be an odd but valuable experience. Watch the footage you create and see how clearly your instructions and language come through. ■ If you are used to recording yourself, play back some footage and be a little more critically analytical. Is there anywhere where you could use repeating patterns of language, as Ana does in her explanation of the Big Bang, to help fix new language items in the minds of your learners? ■ You may wish to download a camera lens app such as the one described and have a play with it. Again, you might decide not to use this in the end but you will have increased your options. ■ The example clips in this chapter served primarily as vehicles to illustrate the techniques under discussion. However, these specific clips have each proved popular and productive with my own groups, so you may want to try them, too. As you do so, make sure that the group you choose to run each clip with has the right level of language and maturity to deal with the material.

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8. Evaluation and feedback Our learners come to us to learn words and sentences in English, and we need to know if this is happening. That is the primary role of evaluation: to measure the uptake and retention of language we have been focusing on in lessons. The other purpose of evaluation is to consider performance-related factors, such as participation, attentiveness and effort, that might affect language progress. The role of feedback is to communicate these things to various stakeholders: the learners, their parents and our institution. This chapter is not meant as a comprehensive debate on the pros and cons of formal testing. Rather, it aims to highlight some of the ways in which our approach to testing online may need to differ from that in traditional face-toface settings.

Evaluation and exams Many schools’ recent experiences with online teaching began with an emergency response to the Covid pandemic. As teachers rapidly switched delivery modes, many systems and procedures were mapped across with minimal changes, for the sake of both manageability and in order to maintain a sense of the familiar for both teachers and learners. However, I do believe that we are likely to run into issues whenever we treat online teaching as a straight substitute for what we were doing in face-to-face lessons, and this is no different with exams. When you give your learners exams in a face-to-face setting, you are working along the same lines as a quiz show. The questions in those exams are designed to prompt learners to produce, and to demonstrate their knowledge of, certain target items – in other words, the answers to the questions. This approach works in a face-to-face setting as we can control all other conditions. We get to see what the learner knows in that given moment without any further assistance from external sources such as other learners, dictionaries or translation apps. It is an approach which relies on controlled conditions. The moment we take away those controls, this sort of exam, as a measure of knowledge, is rendered next to meaningless. If we send out existing exams, which are designed for use in controlled conditions, as downloadable files for learners to complete either in class time or between classes, we are preserving merely a symbolic event with none of the test efficacy. The whole thing becomes a formality. We might declare that we 131

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trust our learners not to ‘cheat’, but I would argue that they should simply not be put in that situation to begin with. It is so much easier for a strong learner to honour that trust and drop a few marks rather than use online support than it is for a struggling learner to resist the temptation to check some answers with their friends. It is exactly the individuals who stand to lose out most, in terms of poor grades, that the heaviest burden of what we are calling ‘trust’ falls upon. When presented with such a scenario, learners realise this, albeit on an instinctive level, very quickly: Student: But teacher, how will you know if someone has cheated or not? Teacher: Well, you’re going to have to do the exam next to a window with the blinds up or the curtains back. Student: Really? Teacher: Yes, and just as you start the exam, you will notice a drone hovering outside your window with a camera on it. We will be watching you. Student: Seriously though, teacher. And what about the listening tests? If you send them as audio files, we could listen to them many times. Teacher:  No, the listening tests will be done differently. You will see a large white van pull up on your street or into the car park beneath your apartment block and the audio for the listening exam will be pumped out by a high-power megaphone sound system. Student: But then everyone in the building will hear it. Teacher: Yes, in fact everyone in your neighbourhood will hear it but they won’t know it’s for you specifically. And you don’t have to tell them. This may have been a humorous exchange, but all the same it underlines the problem that any material designed for use under controlled test conditions will automatically be compromised in a remote-learning context.

Alternative forms of evaluation The solution, I believe, is to shift towards a more task-related evaluation, and here I will offer a number of suggestions on how to do this. Unlike the other ideas in this volume, these are concepts and models that I have yet to road-test or am in the process of road-testing.

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Vocabulary-specific presentations

A live or even pre-recorded presentation by the learner on a specified topic area will demonstrate quite clearly if they have assimilated vocabulary on that topic. Presentations can be graded for the range and complexity of vocabulary used, level of fluency (indicating how much it has been practised) and specific emphasis laid on recall of keywords which will demonstrate the level of automaticity achieved. Additional points could be awarded depending on how appropriately key vocabulary pertaining to the topic is used. An additional area, pronunciation of key vocabulary, could also be evaluated in a way that would be impossible with a paper-based vocabulary test. Establishing a set of criteria will mean that the teacher still comes up with a numerical grade that can go on the learner’s report – which is something that learners, parents and institutions like to see. I would always recommend making learners aware of how the criteria work before they begin their preparation for the talks in the weeks leading up to them. A number of such presentations for each learner spread out over the term or academic year would be a very effective way of gauging progress with vocabulary, and each presentation could have a separate entry on the report card. Live presentations would also allow the teacher to interject with questions that clarify or probe a learner’s understanding of a lexical item they have just used. Similarly, if a talk has been pre-recorded, a two-minute follow-up conversation with the learner might also be a good inclusion and something to factor into evaluation criteria. Your criteria might look something like this: 5 marks for vocabulary (range, complexity, appropriate use) 3 marks for delivery and preparation (familiarity with material, talking for the correct length of time) 2 marks for pronunciation of key vocab (syllable stress and vowels/diphthongs) 10 marks total If you want to explore a topic area and use this as an entry point to evaluate the uptake of vocabulary, but at the same time wish to avoid a presentation scenario, you can opt for a more communicative, two-way interaction. Learners could be tasked with preparing interview questions on the topic, then conducting the interview with you, and finally sending you a typed-up summary of your responses. Their ability to formulate those questions and to conduct the interview will demonstrate their working knowledge of the target language better than multiple-choice questions would. Where learners seem to have ‘shared’ or copied questions from each other, you can always make your

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answers different, which will change the course of the conversation and also of the corresponding write-up.

Grammar structure presentations

The following screenshot is the instructions for a learner presentation on the first conditional: Prepare a two-minute presentation on the first conditional structure.

You should: l explain how the structure is formed; l explain when and why we use it; l give at least three examples of sentences with this structure; l make the examples personalised (about you, your life, your friends or family); l say when you first learned about this structure; l say how long you have known it; l say how easy you find it; l explain what is important to remember when making sentences with it; l give one or two examples of mistakes either you or other learners sometimes make when using it. The idea of a presentation about a grammar structure may initially not sit well with some teachers. However, I would argue that most grammar exams at best manage to access learners’ knowledge of structures indirectly by giving them prescribed but incomplete examples of that structure and asking them to complete the whole (as in gap fills or matching sentence halves). If you really want to know if a learner understands the first, second or third conditional, or the present perfect, or the passive voice, then why not just ask them to tell you about it? The addition of personalised examples and personal narrative (where the learner talks about their own experiences of the structure as in the fifth, sixth and seventh bullet points above) will help to avoid a situation where learners simply memorise the metalanguage in the corresponding grammar summary section at the back of their coursebook.

Grammar structure interview

The above grammar structure presentation could be pre-recorded by learners or delivered in real time. A set of criteria for grading could be worked out depending upon the age and level of the learners and the specific structure.

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Another option, rather than having learners prepare a talk based on the rubric given above, would be for the teacher to use those prompts as the starting point for a more informal chat about the structure in question. Depending on the context, and providing this was done with a certain sensitivity and gentleness, this might be less stressful for learners and may provide a deeper insight into what the learner actually knows.

Real-time testing

For this last suggestion, we return to a ‘quiz-show’ paradigm, perhaps embracing it, but remove the exam as material artefact. What we are left with is a kind of live ‘pop-up’ one-to-one test. The teacher spends 10 minutes with each learner, administering the test themselves and keeping a total score as they go. Instead of having one exam that has been written for everybody, the teacher has at their disposal an extensive bank of questions for each structure, function or language area to be tested. For instance, if the first area to be tested is modal verbs of speculation, the teacher might have a bank of questions, all of a similar difficulty level, from which they can select a pre-established number. This might be two, three or four questions to give to each learner. Each question can be pasted into the chat box and the learner given a time limit of 5 or 10 seconds to type in their reply, in order to avoid learners using online ‘help’ as Tara did in my introduction to this book. The teacher records how many correct answers were given on this area then moves on to the next area to be evaluated. If all learners are given the same number of questions on each area, what you will have at the end of an hours’ session is half a dozen learners who have been fully tested on a range of areas with no additional marking needed on the part of the teacher. If the teacher has sufficient questions for each area, they will not need to repeat any, and in this way, each test will also have been unique.

Bugs and glitches

The four suggestions given above might all throw up teething problems and initial challenges for teachers administering them but then so does conventional face-to-face testing. My point here is that they may be more suitable for the online teaching medium as they do not involve the teacher having to try to maintain the strict test conditions of a traditional paperbased exam.

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8. Evaluation and feedback

Feedback: some fundamental questions When it comes to communicating evaluations of a learner’s language progress and their overall performance in your online lessons, we need to ask a number of questions. Firstly: To whom is your feedback directed? and secondly: What is your aim in feeding back? As far as the first question goes, traditionally, report cards are written to a teenage learner’s parents. I would argue, though, that the final destination of the report is the learner themselves. It is, after all, the learner who should receive the praise you have for them and feel proud of their achievements on the one hand, or who has to realise that they need to do more and to make the necessary changes on the other. In the report templates below, I have therefore decided to drop the use of the third person and, rather than talk about teenage learners, talk directly to them. With regards to the second question, the nature of the report card is reconciliatory in that it serves to reconcile the learner to your system and your expectations. Your aim is to point the way forward – whether that involves making improvements or simply keeping up the good work. This is your endgame. Underlying these two questions is a third: What does a good online language learner actually do? We will explore the answer to this question and how to encourage learners to do it in the following section.

Redesigning report cards I have already made the point that teachers are likely to experience difficulties whenever they use online teaching as a substitute for face-to-face classes without making adjustments in terms of logistics, dynamics and mechanics. The ‘… and if not, we’ll do it online’ paradigm that treats internet-mediated interaction as a last-ditch replacement for our original intentions will always result in the online event leaving us with a sense of being second best. If you are teaching online, you need report cards that are designed, or at least partly redesigned, to reflect the online classes they describe. To make sure you

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give your learners the information that they need to be more successful, return to the question posed above and expand on it a little: What does a good online language learner actually do in addition to that which we value in a face-to-face setting? That is what you need to include on your redesigned report cards. I believe the key things we need from our learners in an online setting are: responsible use of the communication channels at their disposal (webcam, chat box, mic), a willingness to participate, attentiveness, and above all responsiveness. If they fulfil these requisites, as well as fulfilling requisites common to face-to-face classes, such as regular attendance, reviewing material out of class and completing homework assignments, then learning will follow. To this end, below are a number of features you might add to your existing report card templates. The first thing I would suggest is an overarching statement that reflects how well a learner has adapted to the online medium. After all, beyond the statistical information on a report card, the first question a learner wants to know is How do you think I’m doing? This is also the first thing their parents or the school director will ask as well. Therefore, somewhere near the top of the slip, card or form, you might have a tick box or drop-down menu where the teacher can select one of the following statements: o You have adapted well to the online medium and are learning very well. o You have adapted to the online medium and are learning well. o You still need to get used to some aspects of the online medium, but are doing okay. o You are struggling with the online medium and your learning is suffering. You might want to soften the above statements with I feel …. Also, if the online medium has been in place for some time, you could replace ‘adapted’ with ‘are making the most of’. The next element of my revised report card would be the teacher’s evaluation of a learner’s performance. This would be a chance to address the abovementioned issues, such as responsible use of microphone, chat box and webcam as well as the learner’s level of responsiveness and readiness.

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Never

Sometimes

Usually

Always

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You have had your camera activated. You have participated responsibly via microphone. You have participated responsibly via chat box. You have been ready and responsive to my prompts. Difficulties with connectivity and/or technology

Again, you can see that I have opted for check boxes to reduce overall reportwriting time. My principle here is that it is better to free up a teacher for actual teaching, preparation or indeed time spent resting and recuperating rather than bogging them down in unnecessary paperwork. There is also a space in which to flag up any technology issues that have occurred for that learner. The remainder of the report card will need to include whatever forms of evaluation an institution is carrying over from previous online or face-to-face teaching as well as any new forms of evaluation, such as those suggested in this chapter. There will normally need to be numbers or grades on a report card too. These provide something quantifiable for learners and parents to ‘get hold of’ and are generally expected. They also serve, for the teacher themselves or their school, as a reference when plotting a learner’s trajectory and/or deciding where to place them in future groups. Again, a comments section picking up on language strengths and weaknesses, homework and recommendations moving forward would be normal, as well as an overall assessment from the teacher.

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Professional development Things to think about ■ Have you ever given your online learners evaluation materials meant for use in a controlled test situation? If so, what was your experience of their effectiveness? ■ In the chapter, I mention four possible alternative ways to evaluate learners. Do any of those sound viable to you? Would you add any activities to those four? ■ In your own experience of online teaching, what makes a successful teenage learner in online lessons? Are these qualities represented on my suggested additions to report card templates? If not, what kind of statements would effectively convey achievement in these areas?

Things to try ■ Compile a list of elements that make or break your online activities and lessons. At the end of the term or year, look for the most common or repeating elements in this list and think about how to represent these on your report cards. ■ Identify a learner in each of your classes who has adapted well to the medium or is simply a successful online learner. During the lesson, note down what it is that they do differently. Without singling them out or necessarily naming them, try to promote their best practices and learning strategies in future conversations with your classes. ■ Three or four weeks before your report cards need writing, choose three or four learners in each class and write down what they are doing well or what they need to improve on. If you do this for three or four different learners per lesson, by the time it comes to report-writing time, you will have a useful bank of observations to draw on. This tip comes from original advice from a colleague, Nadia Slienger, featured in Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom (Roland, 2018:253). ■ If you or your institution do decide to make alterations to your report templates in a similar vein to the recommendations in this chapter, show the templates to your learners. The mere knowledge that things like chat box use and time taken to respond to a question constitute evaluation criteria may well be enough to improve performance.

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9. Final thoughts In writing about online language lessons with groups of teens, I am writing about a technical craft that comes into play and takes shape through the management of a myriad of small moves over the course of a collective internet exchange. At its best this exchange will be squarely focused on language, maximising the potential of the chat box, and fueled by a commitment to the profession, a generosity of spirit and a high level of human empathy on the part of the teacher. This will be reciprocated by students working with you, and each other, and demonstrating real language advancement. At its worst, this exchange will be a painfully one-sided slog with students you can not see and from whom you are receiving neither audio nor textual responses, perhaps confounded by the appearance of technical issues, and culminating in you questioning some of your life choices at the end of the lesson. Often it will be a mixture of both. I hope that this little book helps shift your internet-based classes, in some way, from the latter to the former, or to make the mixture more palatable. I would like you to remember, when things get difficult, when technology fails, when external events or conditions impinge on your lessons or when one or two individuals make things painful for the rest that the strain is shared and your students will be feeling some of what you are feeling too. Finally, along the way, I would like you to remember to cherish the comical moments and those unexpected instances when people shine through. The most I heard Miguel, one of my thirteen-year-old students, ever laugh, was when I was flailing around trying in vain to swat a mosquito that had been frustrating me with menacing fly-bys past my screen for an hour of class. I could hear him absolutely howling with laughter at the other end of our internet connection. You can not plan that sort of stuff but you can be there, notice it and choose to enjoy it. Good luck with your online teaching.

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Bibliography Cauldwell, R. (2013). Phonology for Listening. Birmingham: Speech in Action. Crace, A. & Acklam, R. (2011). New Total English Upper Intermediate Student’s Book. London: Pearson Longman. Harmer, J. (2007). How to Teach English. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Holme, R. (1991). Talking Texts: Innovative Recipes for Intensive Reading. London: Longman Publishing Group. Hume, D. (1739). A Treatise of Human Nature. (Reprinted 1990). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hyland, K. (1990). ‘Providing productive feedback’. ELT Journal 44 (4:279– 285). Oxford: Oxford Academic. Keddie, J. (2009). Images. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roland, C. (2018). Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom. Shorehamby-Sea: Pavilion Publishing. Roland, C. (2020). Structuring Fun for Young Language Learners Online. Shoreham-by-Sea: Pavilion Publishing.

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