A Comparison Between
Online English Language Teaching and Classroom English Language Teaching
QDTC
A Comparison Between
Online English Language Teaching and Classroom English Language Teaching
Guo Fang
Shangdong Foreign Economic Relations and Trade Vocational College
The present paper is based on the writer’s own teaching experience as both a classroom English teacher and an online English teacher. There are lots of differences between online English language teaching and classroom English language teaching such as teacher’s roles, application of teaching and learning resources, organization of teaching and learning activities, teacher’s supervision of learning process, learner’s needs and psychology and so on. All of the aspects concerning the differences between online English teaching and classroom English teaching are discussed. Some possible ways to combine the advantages in both teaching patterns are also suggested in the paper.
Key Words: Online English Language Teaching Classroom English Language
Teaching
In present schools in China, English language teaching pattern can be generalized as textbook-centered and classroom-based. The textbook is the only resource for both teachers and students. In a most common English class a teacher usually starts with explaining the new words and phrases of a new text, and then the content in the text. While explaining each paragraph, he may add new language points or point out some important grammatical knowledge. To make students acquainted with the language points and grammatical knowledge, he may organize them to do some relative practice or drills and check answers. After explaining the text, the teacher may give some assignments (usually from the exercise part following the text) to students and finally correct their homework. That’s how teachers organize the class using a textbook in a classroom. What students need to do is listen to the teacher’s explanation and take notes and review the old text and preview a new one. In this teaching pattern, the classroom is the basic place for students to learn knowledge from the teacher and the textbook. Student’s previewing and reviewing and some extracurricular learning activities are supplementary to classroom learning, so not compulsory. If a student makes good preparation before a class, he may have some questions and general ideas about the text in mind. While he listens to his teacher’s explanation he can get more than those who have no ideas at all. If he reviews what he learns in the class regularly and repeatedly, he will surely obtain a good result from this helpful learning process. On the contrary, if a student doesn’t form such a learning habit and greatly relies on teacher’s instructions, he may possibly get less from the classroom teaching. So it is a common phenomenon that students sitting in the same classroom have quite different results in learning. The key to the problem doesn’t lie in the teacher’s work but lies in the students’ initiation and learning habits. Students don’t bother to set up their own goals or make up their study plan or arrange their own daily learning activities, or may be weekly activities or monthly activities, for what they should learn and how to learn are absolutely under their teacher’s control. In the classroom teaching pattern, there is no way to distinguish teaching from learning in the sense of time because students’ learning activities are involved in teacher’s teaching activities. In a broader sense, that is, if the forty-five minutes in a class can be extended to the preparation stage, teacher’s teaching activities are ahead of students’ learning activities. A great problem arising from this kind of English language teaching pattern is that students are used to waiting passively at the receiver’s end instead of actively producing new things.
It is reported that network-based technology has brought an exploding increase in the number of innovations in foreign language teaching throughout the world. Chinese universities have witnessed a dramatic development in the networked facilities and benefited a lot from the WWW, the largest database in the world, and E-mail and BBS and MOO. Some key universities have attempted online teaching and made great achievements such as BeiwaiOnline, which has developed quickly within several years. Online education has a quite distinctive teaching pattern. Take a tutorial class in BA course from BeiwaiOnline as an example. At the beginning of the class, the tutor (teachers are called tutors in BeiwaiOnline) asks students to hand in their learning progress record cards and assignments which they should have finished in the previous two weeks’ autonomous study. Then, the tutor leads students to review the two units already studied by students with the aid of slides. This kind of review only concentrates on the main points. It is a comprehensive activity centering on a definite topic including listening, reading, speaking and writing tasks which encourage students to be voluntarily involved in discussions and work with their group members. Students have learnt the textbooks according to their study plans, and thus with the tutor’s help they can organize the input information in their mind into a meaningful and connective “network” or “knowledge tree”. Under the tutor’s directions, they draw on what is stored in their mind to work out a similar or better discourse on certain topic than that in the textbook and thus finish output stage in learning. In the whole class, the focus is not on the tutor but on the learners. This fact is embodied in the distribution of time to the tutor and the learners. According to the tutor’s teaching plan, the four classes in one tutorial usually have a half or three quarters of time given to learners’ oral or writing activities. Tutor’s part in the class thus gives way to learners. That tutors lose their dominant positions in the class doesn’t mean tutors have become idle. Instead they are much busier than the dominant teachers in a traditional class because they should supervise, instruct and assess every learner’s individual work in the class. Tutors should have every learner’s progress at their fingertips, so they have more work to do. In the sense of time, learners’ learning activities start before the class and may parallel with teachers’ preparation. Teaching activities are based on learners’ autonomous study and hence aimed at learners’ greatest needs. In this teaching pattern every learner must make preparatory work in advance so that they can participate in the pair work or group work in class. Learners are prompted to study automatically, spontaneously and independently. If this learning process is strengthened and prolonged, learners’ comprehensive abilities can be trained.
The teacher, students, and learning materials are the three main factors in the whole process of English language teaching. Classroom English Language Teaching and Online English Language Teaching greatly differ from each other in these three aspects.
1.
Teacher’s roles
Harmer (1991) says, “ The teacher plays multiple roles in communicative activities-as controller, as assessor, as organizer, as prompter, as participant and as resource.” A teacher is a decisive factor in second language acquisition because the purpose of language teaching is not to pass on special knowledge to students but to train students to apply knowledge of language in communication. Only through a great number of practical activities both in and out of classroom can this kind of abilities be developed among students. So one of the most important embodiments of a teacher’s competence should be whether he can bring students’ interest and initiative into play in the class and moreover, train them to learn by themselves. Unfortunately, most college teachers haven’t realized and understood this educational concept.
An interview was made to more than 900 university English teachers in 48 universities and colleges in early 2002 by the Chinese Foreign Language Teaching and Research Center. The result showed that more than 60% of the interviewed college English teachers chose pair work or group work as the rarest activities in their classroom teaching but they chose explaining the text and doing exercises in the textbook as the most frequent ones. 84.5% of the interviewed teachers thought it was a waste of time letting students participate in oral activities in class and only 3% of them asked students to practice oral English after class. Students’ homework usually includes previewing the new text and doing exercises. The result indicates that college English teachers still follow the traditional classroom teaching pattern---teacher-centered class. The teacher is a controller and unquestionable authority who instructs and guides students in learning the text and dominates the class from the beginning to the end. Because of little time on exercises and practice and almost no time on communication in English, the teaching is centered on linguistic competence rather than communicative competence. Under the influence of this teaching pattern, the evaluation of a teacher has depended on the amount of knowledge he or she can cram into students’ mind in the class and teachers themselves also adopt this standard to measure their work. Most teachers think the success of their teaching lies in their good command of English language. .
The multiple roles of a teacher can’t be fully performed by those following the traditional classroom teaching pattern. However, in an online English class, a teacher may act as organizer, assessor, prompter, participant and resource, for using the network in language teaching requires changes in teachers’ roles, approaches and attitudes toward teaching. The online English class is learner-centered because teaching with computer-assisted language learning tools brings with it an underlying assumption that the more students do for themselves, the more learning takes place (Hiltz,1990;Berge&Collins,1995). So teachers must be willing to put aside their own egos and transfer the learning focus from themselves to their students (Frizler,1995). They should not only be competent English teachers, but also be capable computer users. They should also be enthusiastic teachers, willing to face the endless problems and enormous amount of letter management work. In addition, they must be good cooperators. Teachers should exert their effort to become “a resource of information” rather than “the source of information” (Linder, 2000). So the teacher should design class activities and set tasks for students as an organizer, give instructions as a director and controller, offer useful information and transmit knowledge as a resource when students feel confused and need assistance, and finally, evaluate students’ work and give some advice and encouragement as an assessor and prompt them to improve their communicative ability and gain competence. In Beiwaionline class, tutors have performed most part of the multiple roles so that the learners can have a lot of chances to engage in meaningful and motivated communicative activity using English.
The biggest disadvantage for Chinese learners in studying English is lack of native environment. To make up for it, linguists and educators have tried their best to improve textbooks because textbooks have almost been the only resources for both teachers and students for quite a long time. Textbooks usually have teachers’ book and students’ book. Teachers’ book has some part of information which students can’t share in their books, for example, the answer key to the exercise part and summary of the text. In the past it was almost impossible for students to get teachers’ book because the publishing houses were not allowed to sell teachers’ book in public. That was a way to protect the limited teaching resources. Another way to prevent students from obtaining the same resources as their teachers in school libraries was to open certain reference books only to teachers. Resulting from this kind of protectionism students greatly depended on teachers in classroom. Whatever teachers said was beyond their reach. To rely on the traditional textbook as the sole resource can not satisfy learners’ need because they can not find the useful learning resources freely even though they are the main part of learning activities.
Today things have changed a lot in consequence of the impact of Internet. The WWW, the largest database in the world can provide plenty of target-language materials to teachers and students. “An estimated 85% of the electronically stored information in the world is in the English language.”(Crystal 1997, cited by Shetzer & Warschauer). E-mail makes it possible for students to communicate with their far-off native-speaking friends within minutes. This easy and fast one-to-one or one-to-many communication conveniently brings to the language learners meaningful and motivated communication, and therefore, may provide a beneficial environment to improve the students’ competence. Warschauer has pointed out recently that a language learner’s engagement in meaningful, motivated communicative activity using the target language is considered the best route to becoming both literate and fluent in that language task. The greatest contribution made by the network-based technology is that people can share the information resources and communicate with one another no matter when and where they are. The free and huge amount of English information resource is the prerequisite to the online English language learning. The learners in Beiwaionline can get multimedia learning materials containing textbooks, tapes, VCD, CD-ROM and online courseware. To assist their autonomous study, Beiwaionline and tutorial centers use network to offer free learning materials and organize lectures and other learning activities. Every kind of learning resources is open and easy to approach for learners to satisfy their needs.
Organization of teaching and learning activities is a way to achieve the goals that the teacher intends. The goal of traditional classroom English teaching has been to help students read and appreciate the selected written passages in the textbook and the most popular way to achieve it has been to explain to the students the necessary vocabulary, grammatical structures, difficult sentences and exercise part. The traditional procedure in teaching vocabulary is that the teacher explains in detail about the usages of the words and expressions with some examples as well as the comparison of synonyms and antonyms. While explaining the words, he may ask some students to translate several sentences either from English to Chinese or from Chinese to English so as to check their understanding. In teaching a text, the teacher may start with reading paragraphs and then choose language points such as difficult phrases and structures to explain. He may sometimes raise some questions concerning the content of the text for students to think and discuss. Now and then an introduction of background information is needed and usually conducted by the teacher in a monologue form without students’ involvement. Students are often busy following their teacher’s instructions and writing down everything new to them, either the examples of the new words or new grammatical structures. Communication between teachers and students is restricted to questions and answers. Especially, there is very little communication among students except dialogue exercise because most teachers think oral practice will occupy too much time in classroom teaching but they have many things to do within the limited forty-five minutes. Therefore, they prefer students to practice speaking after class, as revealed by the survey among college and university English teachers. The greatest disadvantage of this traditional teaching pattern is that not all students can have a chance to apply the target language in communication. The less chances they can get, the less they want to speak. This vicious cycle leads to what is so called “mute English”.
However, a research conducted by Lui Xue Huei in 1989 indicated that what students most liked to be able to do in a foreign language study was to be capable of speaking it. Speaking seemed to be central to students’ concerns. But the problem for the learners is that in order to learn he or she has to speak in public, which causes stress and anxiety. Lui administered a questionnaire to 512 students based on the Horwitz’ Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz, 1986). The interviewed students agree that they find it embarrassing to raise their hands to answer questions in class; that they are very nervous when the teacher asks them a question which they have not prepared for; that they are afraid of making mistakes; that they feel very uneasy when they cannot express themselves; that their English is not as good as their fellow classmates; that they will repeat the answer to themselves before offering it themselves.(Lui, 1989) Such anxiety is not only confined to the young learner, but also to adult learners. The anxiety appears to come from three sources suggested by Duncan Sidwell (2001): first, the individual ‘s fear of performance in public where he or she is likely to make mistakes and is “infantilized”. Second, the feeling of being overloaded –there is simply too much to think about. Third, the type of learning activity does not always match with what the learners want to do; they therefore feel inadequate. Having spent effort on things that do not bring them to their goal, they tend to blame themselves. From the analysis of these sources, we can see that teachers’ way to organize the learning activity may help to diminish anxiety in students. It is possible for teachers to reduce the volume of language so that learners are not overburdened, and it is also possible to adjust activities to learners’ aims and wishes.
The activity of group work and pair work in Beiwaionline English teaching offers a helpful attempt in which students are quite willing to exchange their ideas in English and cooperate with each other to work out the same task. In the traditional classroom, students compete against each other, which often leads to silence in class. On the contrary, students often feel secure and at ease when they work in small groups. “Learners can offer each other genuine communicative practice, including negotiating meaning that may aid second language acquisition.” (Porter, 1986) Two-way tasks like group work “ produce more topic and language recycling, more feedback, more feedback incorporation, more rephrasing and more precision” than students would otherwise obtain. (Long, 1989) Ellis has studied group work and concludes that group work “ increases language practice opportunities, it improves the quality of student talk; it helps to individualize instruction; it promotes a positive affective climate and it motivates learners to learn.” The tasks for group work are closely related to learners’ real life –family, holidays, sports, pastimes and so on. This approach not only persuades learners of the relevance of his language learning, but also provides them with immediate motivation. “ Given motivation, anyone can learn a language”. (Skehan,1989) . When a foreign language can be used to deal with topics from elsewhere, then learners are likely to be aware of its practical usefulness and relevance as a means of communication and will exert effort to it.
Teacher’s supervision of students’ learning process is an essential part in teaching. It is an interactive activity. In classroom English teaching pattern, teachers usually examine whether students are attentive to class and to what extent they have grasped the language points by asking them questions. Students are competitive in answering questions, so most of them are afraid of making errors before others. This kind of fear has caused silence in class with everyone is waiting for a correct answer coming from someone else. In her examination of teacher talk in secondary schools in Hong Kong, Amy Tsui found a case in which a teacher repeated a question eight times without a response. (Tsui, 1985) Students’ silence in face of teachers’ question inevitably hinders the teachers’ plan and also influences teachers’ check of students’ learning effect in class. More importantly, silence discourages teachers’ zeal and makes them doubt about the value of those questions and as a result of this disappointment, teachers often adopt a negative attitude towards it. They either tell students the answers after several minutes’ silence or leave the questions to students as individual assignments. The traditional method of questioning needs improvements from both teachers’ side and students’ side for it fails to supervise the learning progress of students effectively and it can not offer a true reflection of every student’s performance when some good students are helping the worse ones in answering the questions.
In online English class, there are more methods to supervise students’ learning progress. The learning progress record card provides teachers with the information concerning students’ achievement in every stage. The hot line gives students a chance to contact teachers now and then when they meet some difficulty. The network is an especially convenient way to shorten the distance between teachers and students in time and space. E-mail is my favorite way to keep in touch with my students in BeiwaiOnline BA class. Owing to network and E-mail, even though some students can not attend my tutorial, I still know how well they have done in their online study; while in classroom teaching I have no ideas about an absent student learning progress except for him or her automatically reporting to me. Frankly speaking, my students in 2002 autumn class also keep silent frequently in the tutorials but they are active in responding to me by E-mail and hot line, which indicates that students want teachers’ instruction and supervision but they prefer a more individual and private practice.
The success of all teaching activities depends on learners’ response. If learners can obtain what they want from teachers’ efforts, the teaching activities will be highly evaluated. So learner’s needs and requirements should be taken heed of no matter which teaching pattern is adopted. In traditional classroom English teaching pattern, students’ needs and requirements are often neglected because systematic arrangement of the whole class is all from teachers’ side and also because lack of communication exists between teachers and students. Since teachers have little information about what their students want to know, they reasonably think it is all right to fulfill the tasks in the textbook, but in this information age, most students long for more knowledge beyond the textbook. In online English teaching, this case is more obvious because network provides students a chance to get in touch with a vast amount of information. Most students in the online English class are engaged in a certain job, which adds more needs to their learning. Take my BA class as an example. Some of them work in foreign trade companies or foreign companies. They need to use English every day. The enhancement in listening and speaking abilities naturally become prior to other needs in their study. But only one tutorial in every two weeks can not provide them enough face-to-face oral practice and after tutorial the learners may not continue practicing because of lack of interactive environment. As we know, interaction is essential to the successful learning process. The absence of necessary interaction leads to the feeling of loneliness and doubts about the correctness of their solution to problems. The learners in my BA class often ask me whether they are the only ones who have met certain problems in online study and if I say: “No, someone else also asked me the same question”, they are greatly relieved. This kind of loneliness and doubts don’t often exist in those studying full-time in school because they have lots of chances to communicate with teachers and classmates.
Willis concludes from his research that the greatest need of the online language learners originating from the lack of necessary interaction is that they may not realize the importance of understanding the course requirements and the goals of learning during the process of their study, even though sometimes resources have already provided them with some kind of guidance at the beginning of the course. Without understanding the course requirements and the goals of learning, autonomous online language learners study will result in bad quality. (Willis: Guide #8) Hismanoglu also points out that online language learners may have problems in their study methods. Study methods are very important for language learning because they are tools for active, self-directed movement, which is essential for developing language competence in the autonomous online language learning and even can make the learners better language learners. Since the demand of processing language information is high on the autonomous language learners, it is absolutely necessary that learners should learn study methods in performing the tasks and processing the new input they face.
To strengthen the interaction among online learners and also provide a chance to share their experience in learning, the learners in 2002 BA autumn class in Qingdao TC have voluntarily set up an online English chat room. They communicate with each other in English about the problems they meet in learning or their work or news. The chat room made a great contribution to their study when tutorials were stopped because of SARS. They have also organized an English evening before the New Year’s Eve. When they learned the units concerning English wedding customs and educational systems, they invited the foreign teacher from Britain to give them a lecture. They have elected two monitors and one person to take charge of the class affairs and the three have worked devotedly. All of these efforts prove that in their mind the online learners really want the same organization as a class in a full-time school to reduce their sense of loneliness and add communication.
The classroom English language teaching pattern and the online English language pattern both have their advantages and disadvantages. The classroom English language teaching has a fixed place and adequate time and relatively stable attendance of students. These factors facilitate teachers’ organizing interactive learning activities and fully develop teachers’ imagination and creativity in designing class activities. But the resources for both teaching and learning only come from textbooks and related reference books which are rather limited resources compared with the vast online information. Moreover, teachers’ dominant role in classroom teaching has greatly restrained students’ active interaction and communication. So classroom English teaching should re-direct its orientation from teacher-centered and textbook-based to learner-centered and multimedia-based. The teachers who are used to the pattern of “a textbook, a piece of chalk, and a teacher” ought to have realized the impact of network and computers on the development of modern education. They ought to learn computer skills and knowledge of network and become competent in computer and then shall integrate them into their teaching. Multi-media teaching aids including VCD, CD, Internet ect. ought to be introduced into classroom English teaching. More time in class ought to give way to students’ interactive oral practice such as discussion, debate, pair work and group work so that students are motivated to talk in English.
The online education has freed teachers and learners both in time and space and especially brought conveniences to those who wish to study while working. It also offers learners large amount of online language resources with the help of network. However, the freedom in time and space inevitably leads to uncertain factors in learners’ study. For instance, if learners have to leave for business trips how can we ensure their assignments and study plans will be completed on time as scheduled? Speaking skill needs quite a lot of interactive practice but some learners can not guarantee it. In my teaching experience I have found the listening exercise also regarded as a great difficulty by many learners. Regrettably, many learners have not done well in their assignments and final tests, which have frustrated their confidence in online study. There are three possible reasons for it: first, learners don’t have enough time to do listening exercise. Second, learners have not grasped a correct way to improve their poor listening skills and deal with the difficult assignments. Third, in BA tutorials there is not much emphasis on listening exercise so learners can not obtain help from tutors. As a tutor I really hope I can help my students with exercise in listening but time is relatively short especially when I taught the two courses English at Work and English in Current Affairs this semester. There are too many tasks to finish before students practice listening. So I wish on learners’ platform Beiwai headquarters can add some instructional exercises and lectures on listening skills to guide learners step by step. In addition to this, I hope that Beiwai headquarters can offer tutors some materials on listening on tutor’s platform so that we may give instructions to learners in tutorials. Another thing I want to suggest is that BA course tutorials need to be prolonged in time with the addition in difficulty. That is, the two courses in the second term should have more classes that those in the first term because the latter ones have more teaching tasks and are more difficult for learners.
In the end, I should like to say that online English teaching is a valuable experience to me which has given me a chance to expose to modern educational concepts and network-based technology, refreshed my approaches and attitudes towards English teaching and upgraded my teaching skills in classroom teaching. Online language education consists in the integrated efforts of learners, faculty, facilitators, tutors and administrators.(Willis) With our joint efforts, we are sure that Beiwaionline will be the best online language education center in China in the near future. As a member of Beiwaionline, I will try my best to make contributions for it.
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