Abstract
The pandemic of 2019 exposed considerable weaknesses in how teachers were present and communities were built in asynchronous, international, online ESOL composition classrooms. Although teachers put more time into their courses, students still felt disconnected from their educational experience. This study, through student surveys and teacher reflections, followed two teachers who devised innovative solutions to actively do “being present” as teachers and to thereby more compellingly draw students into the community-building process despite the limitations of the online space amidst an international crisis. Included are recommendations about specific ways to challenge traditional online instructional methods, to allow and promote student agency through unstructured and semi-structured activities, to create connections via strategic vulnerability, and more. Also discussed are key concepts for future research and general conclusions about the need for such teacher adaptability and the lessons from it, both for during the pandemic and beyond it.
TopIntroduction
“Nobody want to take online class,” said one ESL student emphatically.
Years before online classes became the obligatory mode of instruction during the 2020 global pandemic, researchers in an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) college composition program at a large public U.S. university surveyed 164 students who had never taken an online course. They found that 69% had negative preconceived notions. Most could not imagine instruction that was not face-to-face; they expressed fear that it would be boring, isolating, or friendless. They were prescient in predicting difficulties specifically related to language learning:
“Online learning is not an effective instruction for improving English. Requires being in the environment;”
“Online won’t improve skills;”
“Students cannot access the surrounding to improve their English;”
“Listening and speaking skills are not addressed.”
The students seemed quite aware of the role of interaction in language development and could not imagine how it could be accomplished in an online environment. Then came the biggest change in the history of education, with a reported 1.38 billion students worldwide attending school online due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Li & Lalani, 2020). This dramatic shift brought online teaching and learning into sharp relief, as teachers struggled to deliver effective lessons through the often unfamiliar medium. This resulted in a flurry of research and advice for online course design, delivery, assessment, and student-teacher connectedness.
By now, best practices for online teaching have become plentiful, with most focusing on interaction, which many consider to be the key to learning (Darby & Lang, 2019). While this seems agreeable, what constitutes effective interaction can be vast and relies on many contextual factors, as well as teachers’ effort and intention. Active community building and teacher presence have emerged as not only critical to learning but to student motivation and satisfaction as well. Ladyshewski (2013) advised “frequent and supportive instructor engagement” (p. 18). Darby and Lang (2019) offered suggestions such as having online discussions, arranging small group interaction, having students post an introduction at the beginning of the course (text or video), sharing the goals and expectations for activities with students, and posting frequent announcements, including personal anecdotes and reflections in order to connect with students.
Teachers in the aforementioned ESOL composition program took all of these suggestions; they added to their courses video posting, peer projects, small group assignments, discussion boards, instructional videos, conferences with individual students, weekly online office hours, and personalized feedback. They also added some voluntary synchronous fun activities on Zoom: online game nights and weekly drop-in conversation sessions, called “tea time”, where students could informally converse with the teacher and classmates. They gave students autonomy in choosing topics and materials. Nevertheless, they discovered that many of these “best practices” were not as successful as they anticipated, and they sought to know why.
Since it began in the 1960s, the ESOL Composition Program involved in this study has kept pace with the theoretical and pedagogical changes in the L2 writing field. The program’s early structural approach focused on lexico-grammatical skills and error analysis to address a language assimilation objective. The 1980s and 1990s brought a more rhetorical approach, with a focus on discipline-specific genres and academic literacies. At that time, the institutional attitude toward this level of learning fell into the remedial models of L1 writing program; the objective was to fix student problems. Since the early 2000s, the program has been markedly influenced by socio-cultural theories, with syllabi that embrace critical thinking, student agency, and multimodal forms of communication. Currently, linguistic diversity is regarded as a resource rather than a problem to fix. Teachers encourage meaningful dialogue, and peer collaboration to highlight writing is a meaning-making endeavor (Macbeth, 2021).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST): A metatheory promoted by Diane Larsen-Freeman that regards language development and learning outcomes as non-deterministic, varying from learner to learner, and affected by myriad factors as an open system.
Structured Activities: Class activities which require students to participate, and have specific requirements about how they participate, e.g., students do not have full agency over what they say, do, or write. These activities may be assigned a grade for quality of student work.
Semi-Structured Activities: Class activities which require students to participate, but do not limit how they participate, e.g., students have agency over what they say, do, or write. These activities may be assigned a grade solely for participation.
Unstructured Activities: Class activities which do not require students to participate, and do not limit how they participate, e.g., students have agency over their involvement and what they say, do, or write. These activities may not be assigned a grade other than the possibility of extra credit. AU46: Reference appears to be out of alphabetical order. Please check
Student Agency: The ability of students to assert their willingness to engage in activities or tasks according to motivation rather than obligation.
Functional Community: A community bound by professional or academic expectations of shared responsibilities and the confines of the professional or academic setting.
Strategic Vulnerability: A strategy of genuinely presenting one’s challenging experiences and being open to others’ ideas and opinions so as to form a closer social connection with others.