Jake Whiddon guest hosts the podcast and interviews Ross about interactions in online classes with young learners. We discuss the interactions that commonly occur in online lessons, what stops experienced teachers from being more creative in online teaching and how teachers can spark better and more meaningful interactions in their online classes.
Meaningful Communication in Online Classes
Jake Whiddon: Hi, everybody. My name is Jake Whiddon and I'm here as the surrogate host of the "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." We've got a very, very exciting guest today that some of you will know from previous episodes. His name is Ross Thorburn.
Hi, Ross. Welcome to the podcast.
Ross Thorburn: [laughs] Thanks, Jake.
Jake: The reason we're interviewing Ross today is because he's just recently completed his dissertation research on online learning. As you all know, with the COVID‑19 school closures we've had students and teachers all around the world learning online ‑‑ probably one of the biggest changes in education in our lifetimes.
We've had over a billion students learning online, I think, were the UNESCO numbers. Some recent surveys I have done and National Geographic have done have showed that 95 percent of teachers have now started teaching online and about 80 percent of them had never taught online before. It's a huge change.
Welcome to the podcast, Ross.
Ross: Thanks, Jake.
Jake: Why would we be interviewing Ross about online learning is because Ross has actually ‑‑ some of you might not know ‑‑ has a background in teacher training but also in working with online teachers.
This led to you doing your dissertation research. Can you just give us a brief outline of what the research was on?
Ross: Basically, I picked four activities ‑‑ they were all communicative tasks ‑‑ observed 10 examples of each, transcribed what the interactions were between the teachers and the students for these 10 different activities and just looked at how much real, meaningful communication happened between the teachers and the students during these tasks.
The reason being that a lot of people would say that one of the primary things you need to acquire language is to have meaningful communication.
Jake: Just to get some perspective for the listeners, where are most of the students?
Ross: The students were all based in China, but the teachers were pretty much all over the world.
Jake: What would be the background for these teachers?
Ross: Well, it depended a lot. You had some teachers who used to be, for example, primary school teachers, a lot of them were former ESL teachers or EFL teachers in a public school or a private school, and I think some people had just never done anything like that before.
Jake: There's a range of experience and qualifications for the teachers.
Ross: A huge range. Interestingly, the people that you maybe would expect to be the best, like the people with a primary school teaching background, actually didn't necessarily end up being the best teachers. A lot of the time, people with next to no experience actually sometimes did as well or better than people with long careers as teachers.
Jake: Do you think there's a reason why teachers who had a lot of offline experience might not do as well as new...if I just started teaching and I started teaching online. My question was going to be, what did you notice were the biggest differences between offline and online teaching? It kind of relates there, right?
Teachers who had offline experience, what issues do they have when they're coming online?
Ross: You could almost think of this as a Venn Diagram. You've got a circle that represents all the things you can do offline and a circle that represents all the things you can do online.
If you've previously taught offline, it's very easy to focus on the overlapping parts of those two circles, the things you previously did offline that you can also do online, and very easy to complain about all of the things you used to be able to do offline that no longer work online.
Of course, there's this whole other part of the circle of great things that's possible to do online that you just never thought of before. A really, really quick example. A huge advantage of teaching online is the students, usually children, are in their own homes, so there's all these opportunities for personalization.
If you open a course book and there's a unit on food, often the food in the course book will be generic things like pizzas and hamburger and toast, things the student might not like or even have eaten before.
If you're online, there's this opportunity to say to the student, "Go to the kitchen, grab some of your favorite foods, bring them over, and we'll talk about what they are and you can practice describing them." That's something you could never do offline but it's really, really easy to do online.
Jake: Yeah. Let's find out what you found out. Now, I found the most interesting part of your research was actually looking at the dialogues that you transcribed and looking at good examples and examples that could be improved upon.
One of the dialogues that stood out for me as an example that could be improved on, was less effective, was the one about what students had to eat on certain days of the week. I'll just read this one.
"And the teacher says, 'What will you eat tomorrow? Tomorrow is Sunday. What will you eat?' The student says, 'Mushroom.' The teacher says, 'Mushrooms, good. And what will you eat on Tuesday? Tell me what you ate.' 'Pizza.' 'Oh, yum.'" It sounds so strange when you say it out loud.
I've done a workshop with teachers using your research, Ross, and it seems so obvious. If a student just said, "Mushroom," would you then say, "Oh, you're just having mushroom for lunch?" or "Mushrooms and?" Has this child really understood or they're just saying one word to me because they know they have to say a food?
There are so many things that happened in that one interaction.
Ross: One of the issues there is, with that example, the students in China and the teachers in America or the UK or something, even if the student could describe the food that they were having, would the teacher even know what it was?
I think food is something that changes so much with culture and country and what geographic region you're in. It's very difficult to be able to help students better express themselves if you don't have the cultural background to actually know what it is they're talking about.
There's another one, hemp ball. "I had hemp ball yesterday." I mean, what's a hemp ball, right? The teacher goes, "Hemp ball, OK. Was it nice?" and then moves on rather than saying, "Was it sweet or was it salty? What color is it? Was it a dessert? Was it a main course?"
Jake: Then there would be some really nice, meaningful interaction, learning about that child's food that they eat in their country and vice versa.
Really interesting is, some recent research we've been conducting where I work is showing that the big shift used to be teachers who were teaching online were teaching the kids from another country. Now teachers are teaching the kids in their own country.
That really stood out at me when I read your research on cultural relevance, that suddenly there's all this new cultural relevance now that I might be teaching kids who are just down the road but online.
I can actually talk about the street and the building in my city and there will be some shared connection which will only add to the meaningful interactions between kids and teachers.
Ross: Another really interesting thing that happened was another activity, that was actually the most effective one, was this nice collaborative activity. There was a blank plan of a shopping center on the screen, and the teacher had control of the pen, and the student just had to say to the teacher what shops they wanted the teacher to put in their shopping center.
Generally, this prompted quite a lot of interesting and meaningful communication, but there was one example of one teacher and student. The student would say, "I want a pet shop on the third floor," and the teacher would say, "OK, great. What do you want your pet shop to be called?" The student would say, "I can buy dogs, cats, and birds."
This happened again and again. The student almost seemed to have been brainwashed by previous questions of, "What can you buy in a pet shop? What can you buy in a food shop?" These very fake questions that no one in real life would ever end up asking, ended up tricking them into answering a wrong and really meaningless question in actually quite a communicative activity.
Jake: Ross, can you give us another good example, another exemplar example?
Ross: Sure. There was one of a student who basically didn't speak at all. I think she was the quietest student that I observed in any of these classes. This task was about filling in an invitation to a birthday party. The teacher says to the student, "When's your birthday?" because you have to write down the date of the birthday party. The student shrugs and says, "I don't know."
The teacher says, "OK, well, just write down the 10th of October." The students goes, "No!" The teacher says, "OK, so when is your birthday? January? February? March?" and goes through all the months, and eventually gets to December and the student says, "Yes." She goes, "OK, we'll put December 1st." "No!" Then goes through all the days.
It was brilliant because I think there's this assumption that communication really is always something that happens from the student for it to be meaningful. This was a great example of the student really listening very intensely to what the teacher was saying to try to come to this outcome of getting her birthday on this form.
Even though she only said no and yes, there was a lot of meaning communicated there.
Jake: What I love about that story is that it's a perfect example of learning‑centered teaching, as opposed to teacher‑centered or student‑centered. It's learning‑centered, not learner‑centered. The learning is at the center. It doesn't matter about all this stuff about student talk time, teacher talk time. No. If there's learning about to happen, let it happen. I think that's a great example.
Ross, your research, I thought it was really nice how it came up with your top five findings. Do you want to give us an overview of your top five findings from your research?
Ross: Sure. The most important one, maybe also the most simple one, is that the way lessons are usually structured is your communicative activities usually go at the end of a lesson. I've also noticed this interesting thing where...I have a Kindle, and I notice when I read a book on my Kindle, I tend to read it in order.
But if I read a book ‑‑ especially sort of a reference book type thing ‑‑ a paper copy, I'll tend to flip back and forward through the book. I noticed teachers doing the same thing with online class materials, where they would go through the materials in order.
That meant that most of the teachers most of the time would not get to the communicative tasks at the end of the lesson because they run out of time, because it's not so easy to skip activities. I think the top tip is just to put the task at the beginning of the lesson.
Jake: A lot of online classes are following a linear progression. They have one PPT that goes from left to right and you click through. A really big tip from me is, if you're teaching online and you want to keep things meaningful, have a folder with a bunch of activities available. Don't have everything on one PPT. Maybe have three PPTs.
You know, "OK, I've come in, and I'm meant to go this PPT first, but they're really good, so let me grab the community of tasks right now and whack it in." Or, "I've got a bunch of songs available and a bunch of photos." Sometimes you don't need anything. Just a photo on a screen is enough.
Don't be so linear about your online classes. I think that people have the assumption that you should be linear because it's on a computer like it's a presentation, and that's not how it has to be, necessarily.
Your other four points, Ross?
Ross: Sure, so one of them was not putting sentence stems on the same page as a task. I found that if you had those, then what would happen would be the teachers would really tend to focus on accuracy a lot more than actual communication. It would really end up being something more like a drill in disguise than any use of meaningful communication.
If you had something that was really much more like a task, like the thing I mentioned before, where we're going to make a shopping mall together. I'm going to draw it, you tell me what you want. The focus is much more on getting this task done and, therefore, the communication becomes the heart of it.
That was also something ‑‑ and this is another point ‑‑ that really motivated the students to communicate.
Without going into too much detail, a really common pattern of interactions in classes is this thing called IRS. The "I" part, the teacher initiates something, the student responds, and the teacher says, "Good," or something like that, "High five."
When you had something different, where there was a tangible, meaningful task outcome, you get things like students interrupting the teacher, the teacher making suggestions to the students. For this make your shopping mall together, "Oh, why don't we add a cinema?" and the student saying, "No, I don't want a cinema, I want this other thing instead."
Or the teacher saying, "Let's call your mall this." "No, I don't want that." These classroom interactions which you wouldn't normally get. Now, why is that really, really important? Because of the power dynamics of a classroom, the teacher is the person in control, so it's really unusual for students to challenge a teacher in class, because the teacher is the boss.
But when you had this kind of activity, students were motivated to do that. Those are important things you need to learn to be able to do in any language.
Jake: Yeah, I love that. With your point there about the sentence stems, I saw a teacher doing this with a group of eight students, they were all about ten. They just got them to write down the sentence stems and then said, "Stick them up on the other side of your bedroom."
They were now doing the activity. If the kids wanted to use it as a nonverbal cue, they could look over. You know what the teacher noticed then? They knew where the child was looking. Then they could tell, this kid is using that as a cue. That's fine. It was almost like a personal scaffolding device.
They would keep looking and eventually they would stop looking and get them focused on what the task was on the screen. While the child's online, they're in a room. There's so much you can be doing with that. They can be writing things down. They can be putting up cues around the classroom. Just remember to use all the space around as well.
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Jake: Ross, that was absolutely fascinating, and I really enjoyed reading your research and listening to these stories about the research. What I found was that a lot of your research related to offline teaching anyway is shifting some of my thinking about how I would teach in offline classes as well.
Ross: There are so many principles that are really exactly the same between teaching online and teaching offline but just how you achieve them might end up being a little bit different.
Jake: I'm sure all of you out there are now teaching online and you've all had experience with this. It was excellent to have such an experienced and well‑known guest on the podcast today. Looking forward to seeing you next time. Have a great day.
Transcription by CastingWords