Teaching Languages Online - Part Two.
Bringing the communicative approach to online language teaching.
In my post yesterday I mentioned how hard it is to teach languages. I quoted Victoria Russell and Kathryn Murphy-Judy who in their book Teaching Language Online make the case that some fields have it easier in the online context, and I’d like to quote them more fully on this point: “With many other disciplines, only reading and writing are necessary to learn the course content online. However, with language learning, listening and speaking are also critical components of the course that are necessary for students to build their proficiency in the target language; moreover, all four skills are also needed for students to develop their knowledge and understandings of cultural practices and products and the perspectives that underpin them” (p. 132).
Helping students learn all that is a tall order. What instructors are being charged with is nothing less than helping students acquire “communicative competence.” And that means learning a lot more than just saying hello. Communicative competence has a number of facets:
grammatical competence — the ability to work with the rules and forms of the language;
socio-linguistic competence — being able “to use the language in ways that are socially and culturally appropriate, and knowledge of the discourse structures of language, such as knowing how to form cohesive and coherent sentences or utterances in the target language” (p. 136);
strategic competence — developing skills and strategies to compensate for gaps (e.g. using circumlocutions to express an idea when you don’t know the exact vocabulary required).
CLT, or the Communicative Language Teaching approach, attempts to operationalize communicative competence by emphasizing realistic situations (known as notions) where people employ appropriate language tools (known as functions) to communicate in those situations. To accomplish that is to move very far away from older approaches based on drills focusing on patterns or grammatical structures devoid of meaning. Russell and Murphy-Judy provide a set of guidelines to help instructors teach communicatively:
From Teaching Language Online by Victoria Russell and Kathryn Murphy-Judy (Routledge, 2021), p. 143. (Click to enlarge.)
Now, if you’re a language instructor, the guidelines will be familiar to you, even if you don’t follow all of them. But if you’re not a language instructor, take a moment and ponder just how difficult it must be to set up and instruct courses that incorporate or strive to meet these guidelines.
Now, imagine doing that online.
Luckily, online education can actually be very supportive of a such an agenda. Technology and apps exist allowing students to bridge the gap of distance that has been forced upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic. Russell and Murphy-Judy supply numerous examples of how this can be done, and the guidelines themselves can help instructors make wise decisions incorporating technology into their instruction. The authors also make the point that “technologies are always changing and evolving. Therefore, it is not the tool or application that makes online communicative language teaching happen; rather, it is the instructor’s knowledge of online language pedagogy, which is knowledge of the pedagogy and technology for teaching language online” (p. 175). That’s a bit of a tortured mouthful, but what I think they’re trying to say is that even though online education can be heavily dependent on technology, it’s the pedagogy that will rule the day. And if you’re going to teach something as intricate as language, you need an approach like CLT that recognizes its complexity and helps students recognize it, too.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 47/60.
