I watched an online class carried out through the use of Google Hangouts focused on a grammar lesson. The lesson is about the present continuous as presented by one teacher to about eight students. Because of the online class format, students sign-in and leave the hangout during the class, accounting for the approximate student count. The class lasts about fifty-eight minutes and mostly follows a formulaic initiation, response, and evaluation (IRE) pattern. The teacher asks a student, by name, to provide an example demonstrating their understanding of the sentence pattern, the student will answer, and the teacher will provide some sort of evaluation about their response and then ask another student to provide an example. The teacher is in control for most of the lesson, determining who will speak and about what. Towards the end of the lesson, I think once the students have developed more of a relationship with one another and the teacher, the students take a more active role in answering each others’ questions and clarifying things when the teacher can’t hear due to microphone issues with one of the students.
The teacher’s evaluation always comes in some combination of saying “good”, “very good”, or “perfect”. Towards the end of the lesson at minute 49:12, a student provides an answer to a question and before the teacher can respond, another student, Danny, says “perfect, perfect”, mimicking the teacher. Because rapport among the students and teacher has already been established, the teacher and the other students laugh at this exchange. Danny continues to enact the role of teacher by correcting other students’ mistakes and using the same lexical items the teacher used throughout the lesson. Danny rises in the hierarchy of powerful contributors to this discourse and often provides opportunities for the other students to use English outside of the IRE formula. This process of students taking more control of the class allowed them to have more natural interactions instead of sticking to the teacher directed IRE formula.
Danny also takes on the identity of “teacher” when he initiates and repairs other students’ mistakes. At minute 52, Orlando starts to give an example sentence but pauses. Danny offers words of encouragement and coaches Orlando by suggesting one word at a time to help him complete his sentence. After Orlando completes his turn, Danny says, “That’s good” and Orlando responds to him saying, “Thank you, thank you, Danny”. Danny laughs and responds by saying “You’re welcome”.
I have become increasingly interested in CMC and CALL classes. I’m taking Netta’s CALL workshop next semester and wanted to have a better understanding of what online classes look like. That is what motivated me to watch this lesson. I think it is important for a teacher to have a clear understanding of what role he or she wants to play in a classroom discourse whether it is face-to-face or online. It is not always necessary for a teacher to be in control of the power and to determine which student should participate or that their responses need to match a specific sentence structure. The first half of the lesson, when the teacher was at the center of the discourse, was repetitive and dull. The students provided variations of the same answer but were not using the target structure in context. The students even looked bored. When the students took more control and directed the conversations towards the end, the students were participating more and producing more varied sentences. From this, I have learned that, while repeated linguistic markers allow students to know what will come next in the conversation, it becomes static and deters the students from participating communicatively. I think the teacher created a space where the students felt comfortable and that is why they started to speak more which is another important take-away from this lesson. I also became more aware of the many technical issues a teacher must account for in an online class. It limits the type of interactions students and teachers have but can still be a successful medium to use allowing geographically diverse students to interact with one another.
-Catherine
I am struck, having watched this online lesson, how readily you can reach the inference about how “the students looked bored” because we get to see them continuously and in enough detail to confirm this judgment and then apply the insight to the first part of the lesson (“dull and repetitive” – indeed!) as compared with the second. Lively interaction and the appropriate measure of learner autonomy are difficult enough to achieve in a conventional classroom, even harder online. It seems that sometimes a certain kind of student (extrovert, confident) can show us the way. One insight I especially valued: that the students’ language use was much more varied when they took more control. There was also, I thought, some measure of negotiation of meaning – which is also important in the SLA process.